 Starring: Steve Guttenberg, Elizabeth McGovern, Isabelle Huppert, Carl Lumbly
Director: Curtis Hanson
Year Of Release: 1987
Plot: Terry Lambert is having an affair with the married Denise. While they’re together at his apartment, she hears a scream, hurries to the bedroom window and sees a woman being attacked. As she’s doesn’t want her husband to know what she’s been up to, Denise refuses to go to the police, but so that the attacker (who’s suspected of killing another woman) doesn’t get away with it, Terry steps in and says he was the witness. However when the case gets to court, Terry’s story crumbles on the stand, and the killer goes free, which leads Terry and the woman who was attacked to come up with a sting operation to catch the murderer. |
Poor old Steve Guttenberg. For a period in the 1980s, he was a big star who looked like he was going to be at the top of the movie biz for years to come. However it wasn’t to be, and after shining brightly but briefly between 1984 and 1900, he quickly sank back into relative obscurity.
I’ve often wondered why he never managed to segue his jovial on-screen presence into lasting fame. Well, actually that’s a lie, I don’t think about it much at all, but whenever Police Academy comes on the TV, I go ‘Oh look, there’s Steve Guttenberg, he used to exist. What happened to him?’.
However I think The Bedroom Window is a good example of why Guttenberg didn’t achieve lasting stardom. After first getting noticed in Diner in 1982, Guttenberg made a name for himself in the first four Police Academy films, Cocoon and Short Circuit. In all these he was the nice, relatively normal everyman character, who kept things grounded while strange events happened around him.
The problem is you can’t keep playing the same character for the rest of your life, but with Guttenberg, nothing else works. The Hitchcockian thriller, The Bedroom Window, was the first time following his rise to stardom that he really tried to do something a bit different, and which was outside his comedy comfort zone. The movie was released in 1987, the same year as his final Police Academy film, but unfortunately it just doesn’t work, and the reason for this is that it’s difficult to believe he’s anything but the nice, dopey guy he was in his earlier movies.
There’s a scene early on in the film, where Guttenberg is lying on his bed in only his boxer shorts, with his half-naked, married lover lying on top of him. It’s supposed to show their intimacy and the film’s erotic thriller edge, but to be honest, as an image it just seems wrong.
It’s not strange because of language, nudity or anything else, but because Guttenberg looks totally out of place. The reason for this, I’ve decided, is that Steve Guttenberg is asexual. That may come as a surprise to him, and for all I know he could be a sexual dynamo with queues of people lining up for a good time with the Gutten-meister, but on-screen it’s difficult to accept him as a sexual being. I know this is unfair, but it’s true.
As a man having an affair with a married woman, who then teams up with a different woman who was attacked by a serial killer, and gets involved a plan to bring the murderer to justice, it’s very difficult to take Guttenberg seriously. He simply doesn't come across as that kind of guy, and it undermines what is otherwise a pretty good thriller.
(There's also a shot in The Bedroom Window of Guttenberg walking out of his bedroom naked, but that image is so wrong that I've had to have therapy to wipe it from my memory.)
The problem is partly that the role doesn’t fit the image he built up and became popular for, but it’s more because he basically plays the same character he did in Police Academy, Cocoon and Short Circuit, but it doesn’t really work for a more edgy movie, or indeed anything else.
After Bedroom Window, Guttenberg tried other things, including Don’t Tell Her It’s Me (known as The Boyfriend School in the US), which seemed a very deliberate attempt to get over his nice guy image. In it he plays a pleasant but lonely cartoonist who’s just recovered from cancer and who is basically Guttenberg as he was in his previous movies. However, in order to get the love of his life, he transforms himself into a mysterious, New Zealand biker, with a hideous mullet.
Here the film falls down, because again it’s utterly impossible to take him seriously in this guise. He doesn’t seem edgy, exciting or the sort of guy women would line up for. He just look like ‘aw shucks’ nice guy Steve Guttenberg, but wearing a biker fancy dress costume (it’s basically like Tom Hanks was cast in a biopic of Dog The Bounty Hunter).
In fact he was so keen to show there was more to him that his nice-guy roles, that it’s believed Steve turned down Hanks' part in the hit movie Big, because he was so worried about typecasting.
Guttenberg’s final genuine success was 1990’s Three Men and a Baby sequel, Three Men and Little Lady, but again that worked because he was back in safe asexual mould. In fact it’s difficult to get more asexual than three straight men trying to raise a little girl when none of them are involved with the mother. It should also probably tell you something that Ted Danson plays the biological father, Tom Selleck is in love with the girl’s mother, while Guttenberg is the fifth wheel who’s barely allowed near a woman.
In fact the Three Men and a... films feature what is pretty much a casting call of 1980s actors who never managed to overcome a pretty narrow typecasting, with only Ted Danson succeeding in reinventing himself, and that’s only been in the last couple of years with Damages. Even the director, Leonard Nimoy, can be added to the list, as he never really managed to live down Spock.
It may be unfortunate for Steve Guttenberg that he’s asexual (on-screen at least) and therefore only suitable for a very narrow band of roles, but it certainly seems true. In case you’re wondering, he is still around, and while he’s rarely in anything anymore that many people have seen (other than perhaps a recurring role in Veronica Mars a couple of years ago), he’s still making movies. He even directed, starred in and adapted the play P.S. Your Cat Is Dead for the screen in 2002. Unfortunately it wasn’t very good, partly because Guttenberg didn’t seem to realise that playing a character who starts to wonder whether he’s gay, doesn’t mean he’ll suddenly become believable as a sexual being on screen.
Cinema is littered with people who became famous briefly, but had problems when they realised they needed to try something new, only to discover that nothing else seemed to work. A few, such as Tom Hanks, have escaped the nice guy ghetto, or at least found ways to shake it up enough to have a lasting career, but even he’s never managed to make a film where you were supposed to believe him as a sexual creature.
Nowadays Guttenberg seems to have embraced his nice guy persona, as he’s been talking recently about making another Police Academy movie (which he may also direct), as well as third Three Men and a... film, this time with the baby all grown up and about to get married. He’s even mentioned the possibility of a Cocoon remake or sequel (there’s also a remake of Short Circuit in the works, and even The Bedroom Window is due for a reboot, with Scream writer Kevin Williamson behind the camera).
Personally I’d quite like to see him back in higher profile movies, as long, that is, as he’s not trying to convince me he’s an edgy, sexual guy with a hint of danger, because I’m sorry, but I’m just not buying it.
TIM ISAAC
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