Thoughts on Walk on the Wild Side

On Criterion, I watched a movie from 1962 called Walk on the Wild Side, directed by Edward Dymtryk, this melodrama set in the Depression (but a lot of the young women look like 1960s fashion models) in which Laurence Harvey, an English actor doing a decent Texan accent, is trekking from Texas to New Orleans to find his lost love Capucine (who looked glamorous but was a bore to watch), who is working in a brothel under the eye of Barbara Stanwyck, the madam who holds an obsession with her and won’t let her go. It was nice seeing Stanwyck in a much later role, being all buttoned-up and stern, as well as her playing one of film’s early lesbian characters, even if it’s more subtext than text, as she just seems more possessive of Capucine than anything resembling love.

A young Jane Fonda was the real highlight of this movie, a young woman (who is later revealed to be an underage minor, but I didn’t believe it) who is a hustler and a thief and tags along with Harvey, later working at the brothel. She just shined with so much spunkiness and charisma and sexuality, and I wanted to see more of her than Capucine trying to be melodramatic in a Garbo way and just dragging the film down. Even the way she tries to flop onto a couch by tossing her hair as she falls, I thought “That was a choice.” Fonda was just cute and funny and had a lot of screen presence so early in her career in this campy drama.

Having Anne Baxter play a Mexican woman was a questionable choice, but I at least appreciated that she didn’t play her as a racist caricature, she really gave a heartfelt and great performance as an outsider just trying to run her cafe alone and getting pulled into other people’s messy drama.

So this was better than I expected, since I’m not usually into melodramas. I just liked the variety of actress performances, good and bad, and the fun unintentional anachronisms of a Depression-set story still having a 1960s fashion to it.