The Gypsy Moths (1969)
(On Cable TV, September 2019) Looking at director John Frankenheimer’s filmography and The Gypsy Moths’ production year, it’s hard to avoid thinking that it’s his attempt to come to grip with the New Hollywood that was beginning in earnest at the time. It takes a potentially white-knuckle topic (skydiving, at the time something so novel that you could charge admission for such shows) and ends up wrapping it in small-town existentialism, as the quiet lives of the locals are contrasted with the devil-may-care attitude of the nomadic protagonists. It’s not hard to see the clash of culture between the two Hollywoods here, especially when it features a pair of Classic Hollywood icons (Burt Lancaster as an aging daredevil, and Deborah Kerr in one of her last performances) playing off a pair of actors who would later become far better known (Gene Hackman, quite compelling; and Bonnie Bedelia whom most will recognize from performances twenty years later in Die Hard and Presumed Innocent). As an illustration of a pivotal time in American movies, it’s not uninteresting. As a straight-up drama, however, it does have problems: The skydiving sequences are compressed at the end of the film, the climactic sequence arguably comes twenty minutes before the end, the small-town drama takes forever to get to a point and can’t quite manage to become effective. Compared to other films of the period, it fails to engage fully with the social changes that were sweeping America, despite half-hearted nude sequences and adultery. Compared with three of the other four Lancaster/Frankenheimer collaborations, The Gypsy Moths feels limp and meandering for most of its duration, only becoming alive when shooting the skydiving sequences. Said sequences are still interesting, but they’ve been duplicated so often (in everything from Moonraker to both Point Break films) that they’ve lost their impact—not to mention the rise of skydiving as a recreational sport. The film’s most flawed aspect comes at the very end, when what should have been a climactic moment merely leads to an extended epilogue that doesn’t go anywhere that a better ending would have achieved in thirty seconds. Historical accounts of the film suggest that studio meddling may have been responsible for the film’s refusal to fully engage with its uncensored themes (and that’s probably true—not everyone knew what to make of the post-Hays-Code artistic freedom) but there’s a limit to the amount of interference in a project with a lopsided structure. The Gypsy Moths does amount to an interesting curio if you’re going for a complete Frankenheimer filmography (especially since he considered it one of his favourites) or an illustration of late-1960s changes in movie history, but overall, it’s a bit of a disappointment.
