This week on TCM Underground: Some Call It Loving (aka Sleeping Beauty, 1973)![]() Spectators who like to keep their fairy tales innocent, their pornography sordid, their allegories obvious and their dreams intact,” wrote critic Jonathan Rosenbaum in the pages of Film Comment in 1975, “are bound to be disconcerted by James B. Harris’ haunting SOME CALL IT LOVING… which pursues the improbabilities of dream logic to clarify rather than mystify, and tough-mindedly concerns itself with the processes and consequences of dreaming.” At that point, Rosenbaum was championing a movie that had screened to considerable favor at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival and had received high marks from the French critics only to tank dismally upon the occasion of its American premiere. Buried by its distributor, SOME KIND OF LOVING nosedived into celluloid limbo, resurfacing eventually on VHS tape in a big box eyesore that seemed to occupy every dusty bottom shelf of every video store in the land; about the only attention paid to the film in retrospect came from Mr. Skin’s Skincyclopedia: The A to Z Guide to Finding Your Favorite Actresses Naked.
Principal photography got underway late in 1972 under the working title SLEEPING BEAUTY, until the threat of legal action from Walt Disney Productions prompted Harris to go with the interim title DREAM GIRL before settling on SOME CALL IT LOVING. Shot at various compass points along the Pacific Coast Highway by Italian cinematographer Mario Tosi (whose picaresque career runs the gamut from the softcore 1964 “nudie cutie” SINDERELLA AND THE GOLDEN BRA and American International Pictures’ 1972 revenge-of-nature thriller FROGS to Brian DePalma’s CARRIE [1976] and Richard Rush’s THE STUNT MAN [1977]), SOME CALL IT LOVING plays like an American spin on the erotic works of such cult impresarios as Jess Franco and Jean Rollin or the sensual excesses of Bronx expatriate Radley Metzger, albeit channeled through the unmistakable aesthetic of James B. Harris. Very much the wild card in the deck of Harris’ brief but impressive directing CV, SOME CALL IT LOVING nonetheless reflects Harris’ abiding interest in the power of fantasy to by turns empower and destroy the dreamer. Several of Harris’ subsequent projects would fall victim to executive caprice or studio regime changes; his only other credit through the 70s is as a producer of Don Siegel’s so-so 1977 Charles Bronson programmer TELEFON – interestingly, about Soviet “sleeper” agents embedded in American society. He returned to the public eye with FAST WALKING (1982), a flinty prison drama/crime caper starring James Woods. Harris and Woods would reteam for COP (1988) – the first feature film based on a book by James Ellroy – and Harris’ final directing credit to date is the French-financed BOILING POINT (1993), starring a post-comeback Dennis Hopper and a pre-stardom Viggo Mortensen. Despite the relative brevity of his directing résumé (and the barracking he received from man-and-wife movie critics Andrew Sarris and Molly Haskell over SOME CALL IT LOVING), Harris enjoys to this day remarkable critical currency. “Harris’ films are inglorious, pipe-dream-beleaguered gutterdives, with the cheap integrity of bygone pulp fiction,” wrote Michael Atkinson in 1999. “Harris has kept faith with the basic principles of genre without succumbing to neo-anything, homage, or pretension.” Sources: James B. Harris interview by Nick Pinkerton, FilmComment.com, 2015 Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him by David and Joe Henry (Algonquin Books, 2013) Ghosts in the Machine: Speculating on the Dark Heart of Pop Cinema by Michael Atkinson (Hal Leonard Corp., 1999) 8 Responses This week on TCM Underground: Some Call It Loving (aka Sleeping Beauty, 1973)
![]() This is ALL new to me. I know I say this a lot but wow – showing this kind of obscurity is exactly what I mean when I say, when asked, “Yes please show movies that I haven’t even heard of which have some level of psychotronic appeal. ” Well this AND the recent POSSESSION fit that category to a T. And the background in this blog is so helpful. To Steve Burrus: Bob Harris? Didnt he play the make-up man/hypnotist bad-guy in HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER? ![]() Ben all I knmow of Bob Harris, as I said, is that he digitally restored “My Fair Lady”, “Vertigo” and other movies. I don’t know what he did in HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER., a movie I have never seen myself. ![]() Just to straighten it out: The guy in HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER was Robert H. Harris, a short, bald, round character actor who was all over movies and TV from the ’50s through the early ’70s. HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER would be a prime candidate for use on TCM UNDERGROUND; see if you can find its trailer on YouTube or somewhere … ![]() NBut it WAS James Harris who did the spectacular restoration work on “Vertigo” and “My Fair Lady”? ![]() Nope, Robert A. Harris. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Harris Better than YouTube, the How to Make a Monster trailer can be found at Trailers From Hell with or without commentary by the great makeup genius Rick Baker: Leave a Reply |
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I kimnda get James Harris confused with Bob Harris who did the restoration of such movie cl assics as “My Fair Lady” and Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”.