Taglines: Everyone knows a woman is fragile and helpless. Everyone’s wrong.
Remember My Name movie storyline. The happy married life of Neil Curry and Barbara (Anthony Perkins and Berry Berenson), a California husband and his second wife, is nearly ripped apart by the unwanted intrusion of Emily (Geraldine Chaplin), his criminally insane first wife who has just been released from an institution. She has come to his home in hopes of somehow winning her ex-husband back. Unfortunately for her, he is not impressed when she begins stalking and terrorizing his second wife with a butcher knife.
Remember My Name is a 1978 American thriller film written and directed by Alan Rudolph and produced by Robert Altman. Geraldine Chaplin stars as a deranged woman, determined to get back her husband, Anthony Perkins. Rudolph explained what he wanted to achieve: “an update of the classic woman’s melodramas of the Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford era”. It had a successful run in Paris before opening in New York City.
Soundtrack
The soundtrack for the film was made up of songs written for the film and original recordings of songs by the singer and composer Alberta Hunter. Alberta Hunter was a veteran of the 1920s – 1930s nightclub scene and Broadway, appearing in the musicals Shuffle Along and Showboat with the London cast. Hunter, who was 82 at the time, was in the midst of a musical reemergence when the film was released having left show business for twenty years, after the death of her mother, to become a nurse.[6] The Robust Artistry of Alberta Hunter
Tracklisting
Film Review for Remember My Name
Alan Rudolph is just talented enough to be maddening. In his first film, “Welcome to L.A.” — and now in “Remember My Name,” which opens today at the Cinema Studio—Mr. Rudolph has devised sketchy, insufferably pretentious material and then mounted it with an elegance that is undeniable. Mr. Rudolph is the kind of screenwriter whose best lines are the ones he leaves unfinished. But his characters remain curiously watchable even when they spout gibberish, and spout it very slowly and knowingly at that.
Both his films are furiously contemplative, yet neither offers any indication that the director knows the difference between catatonia and anomie.But as thematically barren as Mr. Rudolph’s work may be—and his ideas about the spiritual poverty of modern life in Los Angeles seem pretty threadbare, to the extent that they’re intelligible at all — they have a cool physical beauty that very nearly outweighs the foolishness.
“Remember My Name” doesn’t aspire to the self-congratulatory glamour of “Welcome to L.A.,” but the cinematography this time (by Tak Fujimoto) is crisply handsome, and more helpful for being less showy.And Mr. Rudolph has once again attracted actors who are intrinsically interesting even when their material is not, notably Geraldine Chaplin, Anthony Perkins, Jeff Goldblum, Moses Gunn and Alfre Woodard. Also, Mr. Rudolph’s recruiting of the blues singer Alberta Hunter, expertly recorded by John Hammond, to write and perform the score amounts to a marvelous coup.
The story is very simple, although Mr. Rudolph goes to great pains to make it seem otherwise. Miss Chaplin plays a woman who has just completed a 12-year prison term for killing her husband’s lover. When she is released, she tracks down her husband, played by Mr. Perkins, and his new wife, played by Berry Berenson.The first hour of the film is devoted to her efforts to annoy these happy newlyweds, who apparently aren’t so happy, by tearing up their marigolds and throwing rocks through their windows. Miss Berenson, whose expressionlessness deadens this angle of the story, doesn’t register much shock or surprise at these antics.
Mr. Perkins looks puzzled and later explains that he didn’t recognize his ex-wife because she used to be a blonde.Miss Chaplin’s plans for revenge also involve her getting a job as a cashier at a five-and-ten, because, as one character explains it, “the best way to learn about anything is to learn how much it costs.” Mr. Rudolph is at his most implausible in trying to deal with this kind of workaday locale; indeed, he seemed far more at home with the privileged “Welcome to L.A.” characters.
When he casts Mr. Perkins as a blue-collar construction worker, it’s just a matter of poor judgment. But Moses Gunn’s role, as a sad black security guard whom Miss Chaplin manages somehow to enslave and turn into her own personal handyman, is markedly unpleasant in its implications.In addition to calling attention to the film’s class condescension, Mr. Gunn’s character also pinpoints a big problem with Miss Chaplin’s performance: As a woman whose sexuality is meant to seem all-consuming and irresistible, she’s simply too chilly most of the time.
During the final half hour, when her plans for Mr. Perkins take shape, Mr. Rudolph shoots her in reddish light and lets the two actors loosen up considerably, achieving his desired effect. Until then, though, Miss Chaplin’s walking-wounded manner is too remote to allow the story much momentum.Like the other players, she has been too cooperative with a screenplay that feels incomplete.
Throughout “Remember My Name,” the actors work hard to fulfill the surface requirements of scenes that have no dramatic foundation, and the results are often skittish and baffling.There is also a running thread of commentary on various television news broadcasts in the background, about an earthquake in Budapest, that should have been unraveled. When a movie has to rely on television reports, newspaper headlines, billboards, floods or thunderstorms to make its points about the human condition, it might as well drop the message in the mail.
Remember My Name (1978)
Directed by: Alan Rudolph
Starring: Geraldine Chaplin, Anthony Perkins, Moses Gunn, Berry Berenson, Jeff Goldblum, Dennis Franz, Alfre Woodard, Marilyn Coleman, Dennis Franz, Belita Moreno, Jette Seear
Screenplay by: Alan Rudolph
Production Design by:
Cinematography by: Tak Fujimoto
Film Editing by: William A. Sawyer, Tom Walls
Makeup Department: Jerry Turnage, Monty Westmore
Music by: Alberta Hunter
MPAA Rating:
Distributed by: Columbia Pictures
Release Date: October 1, 1978
Views: 346