Film review – Angel Angel Down We Go (Cult of the Damned) (1969)

My notes on Angel Angel Down We Go (Cult of the Damned) (1969)

Among the poster taglines are ‘if you’re over 30 this is a horror story!’  After writing the hit Wild in the Streets, Robert Thom had enough clout to make a single film as director – based on an unproduced play he’d written for his then-wife Janice Rule some years earlier – but its failure under two titles (the reissue title a desperate attempt by AIP to tag onto the Manson publicity) scuppered his chances of making more auteur films, and he was back to writing weird scripts for Roger Corman (Bloody Mama, Death Race 2000).  He wrote Matt Cimber’s The Witch Who Came From the Sea for his second wife, Millie Perkins.  Angel Angel falls into an odd sub-category of late 1960s pictures in which screen legends are bothered by very peculiar versions of youth rebellion – Lady in a Cage, The Big Cube, The Happening, Skidoo, Eye of the Cat, Tam Lin.  Its theatrical origins suggest a Tennessee Williams influence, but it came out as such a snapshot of its times it became a relic before the film was back from the chemist’s.

It’s rather nasty, but mostly entertaining and has a dazzling look.  Our narrator is Tara Nicole Steele (singer Holly Near) – her ex cigarette girl (stag film star) mother Astrid (Jennifer Jones) opines that no one would be interested in the chubby teenager but her gay tycoon husband (Charles Aidman) reminds her Tara is worth half a billion dollars.  As it happens, Tara is spirited away from her coming-out party by Bogart Peter Struyvesant (Jordan Christopher), a Jim Morrison-ish shirtless pop star who is monied himself but is weird sex, anti-Establishment lecturing (‘why should I go to war and kill strangers, when the pickings are better in my own bedroom?’), sky-diving dangerously, and hanging out with his three-man krewe of not-exactly-spring-chickens familiars – pregnant flower child Anna Livia (Davey Davison), no-more-than-token black guy Joe (Lou Rawls) and pan-sexual Santoro (Roddy McDowall).  This lot read onscreen as more like the Monkees than the Manson Gang.

For reasons best known to himself, Bogart – who sounds and looks so much like Max Frost, the pop prezz of Wild in the Streets, you wonder whether Christopher Jones turned the part down – decides to mess with daughter and mother, seducing Tara (who has a ‘fat is beautiful’ dance number) and then starting some serious needling of Astrid (Stanleying her Blanche).  A lot of the film involves laying around in mansions – Bogart’s environment has counterculture collages but still looks like MGM art direction rather than the more sordid, believable, magic pop star home of Performance, while the Steeles live in a Beverly Hills Palace with swimming pool.  To shake up the staginess, we get flashed-in illustrated flashbacks, fantasies, shaky-cam performances of songs by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil (‘Mother Lover’ might have been recycled as the theme of Bloody Mama – nothing is as listenable as ‘The Shape of Things to Come’ from Wild in the Streets), to-camera monologues (McDowell talking about his character’s sexuality was near the knuckle for the time, and snippet scenes guaranteed to shock in 1969 (middle-aged Aidman in a shower or playing pool with naked pin-up guys, eight-year-old Tara being molested by the sons of a maitre d’ who’s taken her in overnight after her parents have had a row and left her stranded at a restaurant) which might even seem more shocking now since major movies wouldn’t go near this kind of material.

The ending is at once a doozy and a fudge – what I think we are supposed to think happens isn’t confirmed or denied on screen, as if Thom couldn’t make his mind up.  Bogart nags and browbeats Astrid into unbending, and we get glimpses of the author of The Witch Who Came From the Sea in a melancholy visit to Santa Monica pier where thirty-five-cent cotton candy is a shock to the grown-up who came here as a girl.  Then she’s persuaded to join a mass sky-dive to get back a million-dollar hunk of junk jewelry Bogart has snatched from her … the necklace is passed from hand to hand in freefall and Astrid finally gets it, only to cling so tightly to the prize that she forgets to pull the ripcord.  Thom cuts away before the big splat and the rest of the film (which includes Bogart whipping the masochist father) is so fragmentary we can’t tell whether this actually happened, or indeed whether any of this is going on outside Tara’s head.

Most of the discourse over the time is about how Oscar-winner Jennifer Jones got to be in this and the degree of her humiliation, but Jones had always been best in extreme ‘odd’ roles as saints (The Song of Bernadette), sinners (Duel in the Sun), wild ones (Gone to Earth) and ghosts (Portrait of Jennie).  She has great outfits, isn’t subjected to cruel close-ups which stress her age and Thom gets good work from her – though the writing is so misanthropic everyone in the cast is uncomfortably constrained by what they have to do.  I don’t know whether Janice Rule was going to play Tara or Astrid, but she was extraordinary enough to manage either (and showed up in Altman’s 3 Women, which has the daring to be weird this film doesn’t).  Near (Mrs Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse 5) is given a harder time as the daughter.  She bulked up for the role, but is hardly in the weight class of Mama Cass (Astrid suggests inviting Mama to the party to make Tara feel better about herself) let alone the girl in Piggy.  She’s closer in screen presence and physical heft to Lynne Redgrave in Georgy Girl – not model-thin, but not unappealing even when dressed and coiffured unflatteringly (see also Catherine Burns in Last Summer that year) – and wouldn’t have to be worth half a billion dollars to get a love interest.