The 1966 Satire Lord Love a Duck is a Seriously Strange Motion Picture
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It’s common for actors to play teenagers deep into their twenties. The cast of Grease, for example, were residents in the same nursing home before they played teenagers in the iconic 1978 smash. But it’s rare for a movie to go as far as George Axelrod’s deranged 1966 comedy-drama Lord Love a Duck.
Roddy McDowall was thirty-six years old when he was cast as an enigmatic teenager in Lord Love a Duck. That means that he wasn’t just older than the character he was playing: he was twice as old as high schooler Alan "Mollymauk" Musgrave when he played one of the strangest and most unforgettable oddballs in the history of teen films.
Before Heathers, Lord Love a Duck proposed that the key to getting ahead in a brutal, Darwinian realm like high school lie in murder. It is a work of profound nihilism that finds nothing redeeming or worthwhile about contemporary American society.
In a grasping, opportunistic, sleazy, vulgar and sex-mad realm, where everyone is trying to feed their insatiable appetites and compulsions, Mollymauk is a secular monk who lives to serve not humanity but rather one breathtaking, hopelessly sad beauty in desperate need of help.
In a heartbreaking performance, Tuesday Weld plays Barbara Ann Green, a sad-eyed teenaged sex bomb who wants to be popular and famous and to escape the small, sad life she lives with her cocktail waitress single mother (Lola Albright).
As a veteran character actor approaching middle-age, McDowall is patently unconvincing as a teenager but that seems intentional. Lord Love a Duck occupies a hyped-up, overly caffeinated world of fantasy where everything is exaggerated for comic effect. It’s a world of hopped-up, mean-spirited caricatures of American grotesques, Southern California style.
Lord Love a Duck is deeply immersed, to its credit as well as its detriment, in what its anti-hero describes, with an unmistakable sense of disgust, as “the total vulgarity of our time.”
McDowall doesn’t seem like an eighteen year old but he also doesn’t seem quite human either. He’s not cursed with the same ugly needs and desires of everyone around him. He doesn’t care about money or power or sex.
McDowell’s effete genius is above such earthly considerations. He is instead a sort of trickster spirit, half guardian angel and half demon. It’s not entirely clear what he gets out of his relationship with Barbara Ann, in part because he is seemingly man in the movie who does not lust after her, including her own father and her principal.
Mollymauk, as he likes to call himself, seems to see acting as Barbara Ann’s dream-maker and fairy godfather as an intellectual challenge. He’s so brilliant that the world bores him to no end, so he has to cook up homicidal schemes just to keep himself occupied.
Barbra wants to be popular, which in her school means belonging to a club where the cost of membership involves owning a dozen cashmere sweaters. Barbra gets the sweaters from her otherwise absent father in a sequence so overflowing with sexual overtones that it feels more incestuous than actual pornography of fathers having sex with actresses playing their daughters.
With the very notable exception of Mollymauk, no one can resist Barbara’s coquettish charms. Barbara gets a job as a secretary for principal Weldon Emmett (Harvey Korman) despite zero qualifications besides being impossibly beautiful.
With Lord Love a Duck Axelrod set out to make an American version of Richard Lester’s New Wave comedies that satirized everyone and everything with a hipster disdain for conformity and propriety.
Axelrod sets his satirical sights on religion in the form of a drive-in church where the faithful receive the gospel in their automobiles and pop culture in T. Harrison Belmont (Martin Gabel) a teen movie titan who has cornered the haunted bikini market and is always on the lookout for new faces.
But the filmmakers reserve most of their vitriol for the institution of marriage. When Barbara tells Mollymauk that she wants Bob Bernard (Martin West), an avaricious hunk who does nothing to hide his lust for Barbara despite ostensibly being her chaperone, Mollymauk makes her dream a reality.
Lord Love a Duck is in an awful hurry to leave high school behind and thrust Barbara unhappily into an adult world of husbands and wives and disapproving mother in laws and tiresome obligations.
Barbara and Bob are married, much to the horror of Bob’s disapproving mother Stella (Ruth Gordon). When Barbara trades being a teen queen for unhappy domesticity Lord Love a Duck undergoes one of its regular wild, jarring tonal shifts and becomes a bleary psychodrama about the misery of conformity.
It’s as if Mollymauk is punishing Barbara for having such banal desires and the audience in the process. In Mollymauk’s mind nothing is more boring than being normal and wanting the same things that everybody else does.
Boorish Bob doesn’t want his new bride to do a screen test for T. Harrison Belmont so Mollymauk sets about murdering the hapless lug to pave the way for big screen stardom of the tackiest kind but the palooka proves borderline indestructible.
Lord Love a Duck, along with Arthur Penn’s Mickey One and Tony Richardson’s The Loved One formed the missing link between the American New Wave of the mid 1960s and the New Hollywood revolution kicked off by Bonnie & Clyde and Easy Rider.
Axelrod, whose resume includes the plays that inspiredThe Seven Year Itch and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter as well as the screenplays for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Paris When It Sizzles and The Manchurian Candidate, is filled with revulsion towards youth culture. But it’s not a principled revulsion so much as a full-bodied hatred of the totality of what passes for Western Civilization.
Lord Love a Duck has a unique, ultimately unsustainable tone of zany melancholy, goofball sadness. That Weld, Albright and McDowell manage to generate real emotion and aching sadness out of this kooky live-action cartoon is a testament to their extraordinarily talent.
Lord Love a Duck is an unholy mess but one chockablock with energy, anarchy and ideas. There’s nothing in the world quite like it, even in its writer-director’s filmography.
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