A legendary adaptation with a screenplay co-written by the internet’s favorite essayist, Play It as It Lays has been at the top of a lot of watchlists for a while now. Despite a major distributor and a thrilling list of top-of-the-line talent—there’s Joan Didion, of course, along with stars Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins—the film has never been released on home video, screening only occasionally on 35mm. So it’s a big deal that Frank Perry’s 1972 existential crack-up is returning to theaters, beginning with a run at NYC’s Film Forum this month.
The key here is that Film Forum is playing a new 4K restoration of the film, opening the door for a theatrical expansion and an actual decent-looking Blu-ray. (Your best bet at the moment is a grainy, interlaced rip on the Internet Archive.) Why has Play It as It Lays remained so obscure? There are your typical red-tape reasons (I’m not sure about the details, so we’ll leave it at that), but I’d also posit that this piercingly intelligent and “criminally underrated” film is still a little dangerous more than 50 years after its release.
Didion’s script is razor-sharp, full of the “dagger-like sentences” DNM praises in their review, adding that “their understated cruelty functions as everyday poetry.” Perry, best known for directing Mommie Dearest, maintains the novel’s shattered quality with detached voiceover and a fractured timeline. The general vibe is sunny and suicidal, Lana Del Rey-style: “That burned out ’60s SoCal vibe that Tarantino was trying to recreate in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood permeates every frame here and it’s the real deal,” Sonny Jim writes. Perkins, himself a closeted queer person, gives a sensitive performance as a gay movie producer that Isaac, in his beautiful review, says, “speaks to me like nothing else.”
With Hollywood finally (kinda? maybe?) willing to talk about its male power structures and cruel dismissiveness of “older” women (Weld, who plays an actress discarded by the industry, was 29 when this film was released), maybe this film’s time has finally come.
