Jacqueline Susann was American actress and writer, best known for critically panned but immensely popular best-selling novels with content based on thinly disguised real life personalities and events. Shortly after her death, she received that treatment herself when Harold Robbins wrote his novel The Lonely Lady, allegedly inspired by certain details from her biography. Like Susann’s novels, this one also became bestseller, so in 1983 came eponymous screen adaptation directed by Peter Sasdy, later known for its reputation of one of the worst films ever made.
Protagonist, played by Pia Zadora, is Jerilee Randall and the film begins when she arrives at prestigious awards ceremony after being nominated for best original screenplay. The plot switches back in time when Jerilee used to be teenage high school student in San Fernando Valley. She showed promising literary talent and won her first award. Soon afterwards she attends a party and meets boy whose father happens to be Walther Thornton (played by Lloyd Bochner), famous writer and one of Jerilee’s literary idols. She accepts his invitation to Thorntons’ home, but there she gets subjected to brutal sexual assault which is interrupted only with an arrival of Walther. He takes interest in her wellbeing and, later, after discovering that both share love of literature, becomes her friend, lover and, ultimately, husband. They both have their successful careers but their marriage comes apart when Jerilee rewrites one of Walther’s screenplays without his knowledge. Jerilee decides to pursue screenwriting career of her own, but this proves difficult due to lack of proper agents and all of actors, producers or other Hollywood personalities with “proper” connections seem to be more interested in sex than Jerilee’s literary talent.
The Lonely Lady quickly earned infamy after being unanimously panned by critics and earning six Razzies, including one “won” by Pia Zadora, only a year after getting Razzie for her performance in controversial drama Butterfly. Bad reputation of this film was maintained to this day and even Zadora publicly agreed that the film was disappointing. However, just like many “Oscar”-awarded films don’t look that good with passage of time, some bad films might look not so bad after few decades. Is this the case with The Lonely Lady?
The answer to this question is mostly “no”. Creative force behind the project was Meshulam Riklis, Isreali billionaire businessman and Pia Zadora’s husband who had spent hefty sum of money in ultimately futile attempt to turn his young wife into major Hollywood star. Despite high budget, The Lonely Lady looks very cheap, more like a glorified television film or B-production. Most reason for that is inept and uninspired direction by British film maker Peter Sasdy. Things aren’t helped by poor script by John Kershaw and Matt Cimber (under pen name “Shawn Randall”) which brings some dreadful pieces of dialogue and desperately tries to stuff complicated subplots and characters into hour and half of running time, making many scenes rushed and unconvincing. Zadora, who had dubious honour of beginning her career as child actress in Santa Claus Conquers Martians, another film considered among the worst ever made, here shows very limited acting range and her subsequent decision to switch her career to singing following this debacle seems quite justified. Music by Charles Callelo and extremely cheesy title song performed by Larry Graham is another justification for extremely negative critical appraisal of this film.
However, it would be unfair to claim that there aren’t any good things in The Lonely Lady. The most obvious one, at least if the average male audience is concerned, is Zadora’s willingness to compensate her lack of acting skills by often appearing naked, sometimes in sex scenes that were quite risqué even for otherwise permissive censorship standards of early 1980s Hollywood. Lack of subtlety in treatment of Hollywood sleaze, on the other hand, results in few unintentionally funny scenes and suggests that this would have worked better as satirical black comedy. Some of Zadora’s colleagues do unsurprisingly better acting jobs, most notably Bochner in sometimes very thankless role, as well as Anthony Holland as film director who happens to be Jerilee’s only true friend and the only sympathetic person in the film. At the very end, in the scene of Jerilee’s symbolic protest, the audience is reminded that The Lonely Lady very openly dealt with serious issues and depicted Hollywood in which persons like Harvey Weinstein were the mainstream instead of aberration. It is pity that such message wasn’t conveyed in much better film.
RATING: 3/10 (+)
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