The Fortune (1975)
Casting about for a next project after the critical drubbing of The Day of the Dolphin’s sober melodrama, his partnership with screenwriter Buck Henry at a cordial end, his three-film deal with Joseph Levine and AVCO-Embassy satisfied, Mike Nichols found himself reading a 325-page screenplay1 by Carole Eastman, writing as Adrien Joyce, writer of Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970), which earned her an Oscar nomination. Jack Nicholson, star of Rafelson’s film and a familiar face to Nichols from Carnal Knowledge, handed him the script. Whether Nichols’ films to that point were best categorized as comedy or drama may have been a point of contention; what few questioned was the essential gravity of purpose. Nichols was a serious filmmaker—seriously funny, as bespoke his roots in stand-up and Broadway comedy—but with art-house intentions. And on his lap landed a strangely massive yet slight, slapstick farce “without an ending, which I had to carve like a block of ice.”2 “According to Nichols,” writes Peter Biskind, “he read half the script, given to him by Nicholson, on the first leg of a flight to Poland, and the second half sitting on his suitcase in the Warsaw airport waiting to get through customs. In those circumstances, the phone book would have been entertaining.”3 Not only was Nicholson interested, but so was another Hollywood A-list actor, Warren Beatty. While Nicholson was still a film away from his stratospheric performance as Randall P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, 1975), he certainly had box-office bona fides; Beatty was well into his second decade as one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, and Nichols, although none of his post-Graduate films had approached that film’s phenomenal success, remained a Hollywood prestige director. (Hollywood was about to change, however—was changing, given the dawn of the blockbuster era, with two Godfather films already in the bank and Jaws set to launch a month after The Fortune would be released.) Hollywood wisdom suggested that the star power and Nichols’ first film purely in his element (of comedy) gave The Fortune can’t-miss credentials. And yet it did miss—and it served as Nichols’ last word in Hollywood until he returned eight years later with Meryl Streep in Silkwood.
As if to make up for the slightness of the story, Nichols allows the three principals—Nicholson, Beatty, and a fresh-faced Stockard Channing in her film debut—to camp and vamp for the camera: shrill voices, disheveled hair and costumes, lots of fighting and throwing things. Nicholson actually licks his lips to show his libidinous desire. Set in the 1920s with the sexual revolution’s nostalgic smirk at the Mann Act era, the film seems a naked overture to audiences that had swooned over costumed between-the-wars nostalgia in Paper Moon (Peter Bogdanovich, 1973) and The Sting (George Roy Hill, 1973), both of which were comic offspring of Beatty’s own New Hollywood harbinger, Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), released in the same year as The Graduate and similarly a favorite of the counter-culture. As an allusion to Beatty’s fame as the notorious hick-bankrobber-folk-hero, The Fortune is playful, and there are breathtaking moments, as when Channing’s character Freddie emerges in flesh-colored satin lounging pajamas from a shipping trunk at the edge of the ocean: the image suggests a farcical reinvention of the Birth of Venus as imagined by a silent comedienne. Indeed, the film’s nostalgia is less about the era itself than about the films produced in Hollywood during that era when silents were giving way to sound. When Beatty and Nicholson perform the near-impossible unloading and reloading of the aforementioned trunk atop a vertiginously steep bus in the middle of the night, the stunt is filmed in its entirety as trunk descends into Beatty’s waiting arms; if Buster Keaton had accepted the trunk, he’d have wound up under or in it, to comic effect, but Beatty, gamely doing his own stunt, manages to look fragile and determined as the trunk descends. He just isn’t terribly funny (his frenetic anxiety plays to much better comic effect in a contemporary film like Shampoo (Hal Ashby, 1975), released three months earlier. The inanities of the Adrien Joyce script are largely without clever subtext; the actors’ broad gestures and frantic motion, the infectiously expressive ragtime soundtrack adapted by David Shire, and the sight gags and lyric tableaus would have rewarded a modified silent film (music but no dialogue) more than this film, where people talk a lot. The next year, Mel Brooks would release his Silent Movie parody, also keyed to the nostalgia wave. The next year would also be the first of Nichols’ eight years of literal silence.
The Fortune is very much of its own times, referencing the Hollywood nostalgia boomlet of the 1970s. Beatty again plays a handsome, down-on-his-heels grifter with a movie-star jaw and a willingness to kill to get ahead in a world without even breaks. Bonnie and Clyde had briefly and powerfully meditated on the emptiness of the gang’s pursuit of cash. Just after Bonnie has her brief, ominous meeting with her mother, treated by Penn with a surreal finality that suggests they’re already in the afterlife, Bonnie (Faye Dunaway) asks Clyde, “What would you do if some miracle happened and we could get out of here tomorrow morning and start all over again, clean? No record, and nobody after us.” Clyde meditates upon that a moment, then concludes, “Well, I guess I’d do it all different. First off, I wouldn’t live in the same state where we pull our jobs …” Clyde can imagine no other way to live his life; the Depression-era setting suggests none of them has the economic freedom to live as they choose. The film was contextualized by the counter-culture in the 1960s as a dramatization of American class struggle, and some of its more extreme fringe element saw in the Barrow gang’s armed assertion of autonomy a manifesto for violent revolution. In casting Beatty in a return to a role as a dim sharpie of yesteryear, The Fortune is self-conscious in its projection of the dead end of scheming to circumvent entrenched systems of materialist greed. Nick is an even less likely candidate for nefarious success than Clyde Barrow.
The Fortune is the only one of Mike Nichols’ 20 feature films not available on DVD. Is it fair that The Fortune should languish inaccessibly while, for instance, What Planet Are You From? remains available? Each signals the end of a phase of Nichols’ career, which he would follow with a galvanizing reinvention of himself. Nichols told Mel Gussow that The Fortune was “‘less black, less socially oriented’ than his other comedies.”4 The Fortune nevertheless has themes consistent with Nichols’ earlier, more serious films. The rogues played by Nicholson and Beatty commodify Channing’s Freddie as part sex-toy, part golden-goose, with a trust fund worth marrying and later killing for. There is also a gender studies subtext of performed heterosexuality and repressed homoeroticism that is most overt when Channing dons some of Beatty’s clothes and inflames Nicholson to seduction. The film’s narrative logic, with its screwball lampooning of the noir inheritance caper, dooms the three of them to a life as an entrapped trio, though the film’s light tone suggests that neither they nor we should get too worked up about their fate. Vincent Canby in the New York Times returned to his default position of admiration for Nichols’ work, but the Times also published John Simon’s savage dismissal. The film would mark Nichols’ third box-office failure in the four films after the blockbuster success of The Graduate. Neither as bad as its initial failure would suggest nor as good as any of Nichols’ previous films or its strong cast would promise, The Fortune is a meringue that draws to a close the decade-long banquet of Nichols’ first phase as a filmmaker.
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The plot of The Fortune is one of the simplest of Nichols’ career; only Wit, a stage play adapted for HBO in 2001, may be simpler (though it is prodigiously more complex in its themes, language, and characterization). Frederica Quintessa Biggard, or Freddie (Stockard Channing), a Hudson Valley heiress, elopes with her boyfriend Nick (Warren Beatty), though because he has not yet extricated himself from his marriage to a woman we never meet, named Beatrice (who is apparently better-looking than Freddie), Nick has enlisted a friend in mutual need, Oscar (Jack Nicholson), to marry Freddie. Oscar is running from an incident as an embezzling bank teller. The necessity of marriage seems at first the exigency of love, then of criminal evasion (the Mann Act, as well as Oscar’s thievery), and finally of a confidence game: to bilk Freddie of her fortune.
The three flee across the country by car, train, and plane to California, thence to settle as husband, wife, and curiously affectionate brother in a rented bungalow. Oscar becomes increasingly vocal about feeling unattended, a “fifth wheel.” A prurient busybody, Mrs. Gould (Florence Stanley), serves as landlord and audience to their various role-plays. Nick quickly gets a job as a car salesman; Oscar and Freddie are each happy to laze about the bungalow all day, Oscar because he’s a grifter conning the conman, and Freddie because she’s never known a day in her life when she wasn’t attended to, her whims swiftly, satisfyingly addressed. Oscar uses the gift of a baby chick and some sweet talk to seduce Freddie one lonely day, and when Nick threatens to throw him out, counters by reminding them he’s the husband and, via the recent consummation of the marriage, has left “no loopholes.” Freddie accuses them both of desiring only her money and vows to “give it all away,” banishing them both from her bedroom.
The two men, sitting at a closed filling station in the middle of the night, idly daydream, and Oscar self-dramatically begins to speak of suicide: “I’d like to get a gun and just—bang!—solve all my problems.” He has pointed the imaginary gun unambiguously at his own head, but Nick, in a moment of inspiration, twists the idea, pretending he has misunderstood: “You could do that to her?” And thus is hatched the idea of the film’s second half: a series of elaborate attempts at an “accidental” death for Freddie, with one stipulation: “Nothing ‘accidental’ could happen before the birthday,” when Freddie is old enough to inherit.
Nick poses as a fakir so they can buy a venomous rattlesnake up in the hills; they take it home and put it to the test with Freddie’s chicken, now full-grown. In the morning, inevitably, the takers find they have been taken: the chicken paces over the dead snake’s corpse. To the ever-interested Mrs. Gould, Nick confides a story of marital dissatisfaction between his “sister” and “brother-in-law”; they get Freddie drunk (an easy task, since a few sips always incapacitate her), and she passes out—but when they try to drown her in the court fountain (really no more than an elaborate birdbath), she merely turns face-up out of harm’s way and continues sleeping. Mrs. Gould finds her there, and the boys are back at square one.
The Fortune, an antic farce set in the Mann Act era, was Mike Nichols’ last film before an unplanned hiatus that stretched to nearly eight years (1975 to 1983). Nick (Warren Beatty, center) and Oscar (Jack Nicholson) plot for the inheritance of an airy heiress, Freddie (Stockard Channing). While at first their dim-witted plan is to get rich through marriage, they later turn to attempted murder—a strange conflation of tones that proved too much for audiences. Despite learning the truth about each other, the three default joylessly to their triangular arrangement, as if consigned by punitive sentence.
This initiates their climactic, most elaborate caper: not wanting to waste Freddie’s drunken stupor, they bundle her into a shipping trunk and escape to dump the trunk in deeper water and drown her. They blow a tire before they’re able to get out of the neighborhood, and so they lug the trunk across town to Nick’s car lot, where the only vehicle that will start is an enormous old bus. More slapstick ensues on a deserted old bridge; as they attempt to unload the trunk, first one car then another headed the opposite direction appear in the dead of night. Eventually a full-blown traffic jam has erupted. They reload the trunk, unsnarl the jam, and drive to the ocean. Startled by a car with lovers (Catlin Adams and a very young Christopher Guest) hoping for a quiet snuggle by the sea, Oscar gives the trunk a panicked shove, and the deed is done. They head home, but panic anew that Freddie’s drowning inside a trunk may not match the facts of the distraught wife’s suicide note they’ve typed out for her. They turn the bus around and head back to the coast.
Meanwhile, Freddie’s trunk washes up at Long Beach, and she emerges, dazed and understandably confused by where she has awakened. A passing car driven by an eager-looking John the Barber (Tom Newman) happily shelters the drenched Venus. Nick and Oscar find the empty trunk and return home, madly inventing their story for the police. Oscar appears to be the potential weak link, worried he can not keep their story straight. Freddie and John, in an amorous clinch at his place, negotiate the collection of her things from the bungalow; she, too, is trying to think up a story she can tell, though hers is for John, not the law.
The police, led by Chief Detective Sergeant Jack Power (Richard Shull) show up at the bungalow. Before they can state their business (an inquiry about the missing bus Nick could easily explain away), Oscar has blurted enough sinister (if incoherent) details to get them carted off to the station where, finally with a rapt audience, he confesses all. The police return with Nick and Oscar in handcuffs to the bungalow to collect evidence; Freddie and John, retrieving her belongings, narrowly escape out the back door, but she remembers her chicken and returns. Oscar and a policeman spot her and the entire assembly pursues. Having apprehended her, Detective Power relates Oscar’s confession to Freddie, and Freddie refuses to press charges: “I would never believe that in a million years.” John and the police are dismissed; Freddie returns with the two boys to the bungalow, and as the film ends, Mrs. Gould edges toward the house, hoping for another scandalous glimpse inside.
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Nichols’ love of the long take immediately reappears in the opening shot of The Fortune, in which a Hudson Valley mansion in the pre-dawn gloaming sits stolidly as a tiny figure capers down the manicured path to the gate. This is Freddie, the Quintessa feminine napkins heiress, who has fallen under the sway of an older man, Nick, who waits in his running car just beyond the gate to sweep her off to the justice of the peace. A title card has set the scene for this first shot: “During the 1920’s in the United States the law known as the Mann Act was much feared. It prohibited transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. Because of the Mann Act, a man who wanted to run off with a woman and was unwilling—or unable—to marry her, would sometimes go to unusual lengths.” The title card plays under a jaunty period orchestration of a 1927 pop song written by Al Dubin, Pat Flaherty, and Al Sherman, “I Must Be Dreaming.” The song continues as the lovers embrace and Nick offers a flask, from which she accepts a generous measure of courage before smothering him in kisses. The song, with its female vocalist, instantly adheres to Freddie: she is the dreamer, breaking with the staid, patrician future that awaits her behind those gates to elope with a handsome older man.
The suggestion from the opening shot of the film that humans are dreamers is reminiscent of earlier Nichols conceits: the dawning day after the Walpurgisnacht nightmare of exorcised illusions in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the dulled awakening of Benjamin and Elaine to the enormity of the consequences of that post-wedding bus ride into the future, Yossarian’s fever-dream that comprises much of the associative narrative of Catch-22, the nubile ice-dancer gliding and twirling in and out of focus to the organ swirls of Jonathan’s alienated lust in Carnal Knowledge, and the illusory paradise of the Terrell Center and its Edenic harmony of the species in The Day of the Dolphin. “What is strongest, by far, in Mike Nichols’ movies,” Jacob Brackman concludes, “is his reconstruction of waking nightmares people sometimes find themselves lost in.”5 In every case, except perhaps for Catch-22, when the absurdity of dreams and illusions is more than matched by the absurdity of systemic madness (what passes for “reality”), dreams in these narratives are typically blinding illusions that captivate, in the most literal and malignant sense of the term. Read this way, the typical Nichols narrative during his first phase offers a drama of dreamers called to awakening. In The Graduate, Benjamin is literally awakened by Elaine in his room in Berkeley. His response, “What’s happening?” is far more existential than the more predictable “Who’s there?” It’s as if he’s been waiting for something to happen, which in fact he has. Yet this is the moment when Benjamin and Elaine, faced with an opportunity to reject the lives they’ve been handed and to choose lives of their own making, default instead to children’s games of playing “house,” where all talk begins and ends with the conventional narrative of adult conformity: marriage—the unhappy trap of their parents’ generation, and the one that, ironically, their fathers had conspired all summer to set into motion by conjuring a first date.
Endings are thus crucial for what they reveal about human responses to disillusionment. In Virginia Woolf, Catch-22, and Dolphin, awakening has hardly been a cause for celebration, and yet there are degrees of fragile hope (Brackman alludes to them as “reassurances”6) implied in their respective closing scenes: George and Martha tenderly bearing each other up into the light of day, Yossarian beating his small oar against the inexorable tides, Jake Terrell chastened and hunkering with Maggie in the shadows beyond the walls of his research center, his paradise lost. In all these films there is a rekindled awareness of what is real and how this differs from the dreams they’ve conjured against reality’s harsh light, though the palpable distance settling between Jake and Maggie looks less like the solace of George and Martha than like the alienation of Benjamin and Elaine on the back bench of the Santa Barbara bus headed who knows where. None of these awakenings is unambiguously positive: the typical Nichols character in his first phase as a filmmaker “is trapped by his past culture. He cannot break out; he can only achieve understanding.”7 The ending of Carnal Knowledge is the most unequivocally dark of all these narratives: Jonathan is now paying to sustain the always-threatened illusion of his potency, paying even for the illusion of companionship. He is at his most diminished in this deliberate pretense. The Fortune, while a farce and thus without the responsibility to realism’s gravitas, nonetheless presents a willed blindness that persists past many invitations to awaken. In a film where even attempted murder is played for slapstick laughs, the audience must do the work of tonal translation through much of the film, though the last shot, a mirror-reverse of the long opening take, with Freddie headed away from camera toward her new, much more modest residence, begins to suggest some of the melancholy of the choice she has made in remaining with Nick and Oscar. In the cartoon-like tone of The Fortune, we emerge from the film world saying these three deserve each other; we might have said something similar about George and Martha or Jake and Maggie in their subdued but unmistakable communion at the end of their respective films, but the statement would have had an entirely different meaning. Those couples have earned the privilege of communion’s solace; Freddie, Nick, and Oscar, so constant in their inconstancy, are consigned to it in perpetuity. The Fortune thus offers deliberate self-delusion as a tool of farce rather than its more familiar use as harbinger of tragic alienation.
All three principal characters are subject to self-delusion that is socially constructed. Freddie has convinced herself Nick is genuinely in love with her (and that Oscar’s protestations of love are also genuine), because she is as desirous of a “different” future than the one arranged by her parents as Benjamin Braddock is during his early talk with his father, while his graduation party thrums below them. However, in the very first shot of The Fortune, as she runs the length of the estate’s ceremonial promenade to where Nick is waiting with the car running, we are the only ones watching. As the camera pans down to find her emerging from the estate’s broad-gated entry to greet Nick, we see that he has been preoccupied with preening in the rearview mirror: this life-changing event of elopement means less to him than whether he has a strand or two of hair out of place. Before the credit sequence and its attendant song are ended, she also submits willingly to a more generalized pretense: Nick and Freddie pick up their “fifth wheel,” Oscar, and the three of them proceed to the Justice of the Peace, where the camera pans and then zooms in a window to the perfunctory marriage ceremony of Freddie … to Oscar. Comic tone is cemented by her bypassing the “groom” to give Nick, ostensibly a mere witness, a long soul-kiss. Avoiding Oscar’s opportunist attempts to steal a kiss as part of the show they are performing, she accepts a glass of cheap champagne, takes a sip, and, having mixed this alcohol with whatever was in Nick’s flask, collapses in a stupor as “I Must Be Dreaming” comes to its equally abrupt end. Freddie is a victim of her own imagination, quicker to invent fairy tales than even the grifters she’s fallen in with. Nick can’t marry her yet, because he’s still married; the marriage to Oscar is a legal fiction designed to outwit the Mann Act authorities, but in fact, like many a duped and deluded lover before her, Freddie has outwitted herself, accepting Nick’s promises that a divorce is coming and entangling herself in the ridiculous legalities of a marriage of convenience. The deeper delusion is not that Nick will keep his none-too-dependable word about leaving his wife; rather, it’s her assumption that, as a person, she commands the essential attraction that holds Nick, when in fact her needy, narcissistic, mercurial personality and, to Nick’s mind, her questionable pulchritude are no match for her trust fund.
On the train, Oscar gets his first good, daylight look at Freddie and observes in an aside to Nick that she’s “not as good-looking as your wife,” more indication that Nick’s motives may be less than pure. Oscar goes on and on about liking Freddie more from the front than from the side; given Freddie’s taste in clothes, which pursue the Flapper-era’s gender-bending unisex designs until they reach their logical extreme with her donning knickers and vest, the references to views of Freddie have a homoerotic subtext. Her young girl’s body is less obviously female viewed from the front than the side, where breasts less easily resolve against the chest’s plain. Oscar and Nick have a never-spoken attraction to each other, which even Freddie once, in exasperation, notes, as a provocative stab at regaining their primary attention, before filing it away to ignore again: “You’re several times more interested in each other than you are in me.” It’s only one of the culminating insights to which she gives voice during the cathartic melee in the bungalow at the film’s midpoint, and she ignores all insight for the rest of the film, up to and including when the police review her self-delusions with her before she opts to return with the boys to the bungalow in the film’s final shot.
Oscar’s coveting of Nick’s and Freddie’s attention is given overt expression on the plane ride to Los Angeles, when his attempts at polite conversation are trumped by engine noise and the essential disinterest of his targets. His subsequent “wing-walk” garners plenty of attention from all concerned (the rest of the passengers collect autographs upon landing) but merits only a scolding from Nick—and not for concern about Oscar’s safety: Nick reminds Oscar that they ought not to be calling undue attention to themselves. “All this whole trip you’ve been ignoring me,” whines Oscar, like a neglected wife. “You should pay some attention to the fact that I’m here, too.” Later, Oscar cultivates a pencil moustache like Nick’s, which Nick instantly pegs as a “monkey-do” effort to emulate and subsume, even consume, Nick. Freddie is collateral damage in a sub-conscious impulse to sustain their life together. When they talk about what will happen to the inheritance, they discuss it in mutual terms, without talking of parting ways. She becomes their surrogate for each other. Confessing to Nick her having consummated the marriage to Oscar, Freddie dismissively refers to their coupling as “some stupid thing, I don’t even know what—I was faced to the stupid wall”—a description of a non-traditional position that may have allowed Oscar the fantasy that he was actually with Nick, an interpretation further emphasized by her immediate observation that she feels herself to be depersonalized by their threesome in the men’s greater interest in each other. Having met but failed to cross this forbidden social frontier, Nick and Oscar have negotiated an unspoken, even unconscious sublimation of desire within the object of Freddie, who at first misunderstands their preoccupation with each other on the car ride to the picnic (“Love has turned to hate!”), but by the time of the bungalow melee at the film’s midpoint has recognized she, not Oscar, is the non-essential partner in their triangle.
The melee in the bungalow is valuable for articulating the reified insights they all happily ignore thereafter. The melee opens with Nick gone to work, again expectant (against all good reason) that a ne’er-do-well like Oscar will seek a job to contribute to household maintenance. Oscar is as happy to be Nick’s kept man as Freddie is to be Nick’s kept woman. Alone with Oscar, Freddie cedes to him the ascendant traditional-female role Nick has abetted and dresses in Nick’s clothes as a knowing provocation to the latent homoerotic tastes of the boys, and as she reminisces about previous experiences in cross-dressing (“I did feel like a real individual”), inflames Oscar to their assignation with her facing the wall. Nichols further complicates the scenario by having the camera retreat outside during the consummation, there to huddle with Mrs. Gould on the side lawn between houses to listen vicariously. Mrs. Gould’s canned proscription against Hollywood-style debauchery when this suspiciously arranged threesome first inquires about the bungalow has thus been revealed as a disingenuous pretense, while her apparent naivety in permitting two older men to move in with a young female is actually a voyeur’s fond anticipation of vicarious trespass. When Nick comes home unexpectedly for lunch (while Mrs. Gould watches), Oscar pours himself out the bedroom window onto the turf at her feet, and she comments in satisfaction, “Are we practicing ‘The Bandito’ today?”—a comically prurient acknowledgment of performed sexplay. Soon she’s listening to Nick and Freddie, never batting an eye at what otherwise would have been a breaking of one of the most powerful of social taboos. Mrs. Gould assumes that nothing anyone tells her as a covering backstory is true, which only inflames her appetite for what carnality may be hidden beneath the social pretense.
Nick finds an unfamiliar condom carton in the bed, which sends him accusingly out to the kitchen in search of Oscar. As their argument escalates, they are joined by Freddie, whose attempts to intervene in the central mano-a-mano dance of desire are thwarted. Her forlorn “You’re several times more interested in each other than you are in me” is a calculated effort to refocus them on their ostensible heterosexual objective, but their preoccupation only intensifies. Oscar proudly confesses his sexual interest in Freddie that morning has been purely to preserve his claim to her fortune, and Nick’s deepening rage has less to do with sympathetic insult to Freddie than with having been outwitted. A second time, Freddie attempts a forlorn observation in hopes of eliciting protested assurances: “I’m getting the funny feeling that money is all anybody cares about in this room.” A second time she is correct, though as with her earlier gambit, her impure motive to manipulate with what she thinks are emotional incendiaries fails to have an effect on her intended targets or, indeed, on her own perspective. Freddie knows and speaks the truth, and it fails to set any of them free, because her intended audience is uninterested, and because she has only spoken the truth by accident, hoping to be coercive. She will never come closer to reified redemption than she does in these two utterances, and the boys never come close at all. Instead, they sublimate their desires in a kitchen-destroying series of violent clinches, their only socially sanctioned form of close contact.
Later, standing outside the locked bedroom where, within, Freddie lavishes fetishistic strokes upon the downy innocence of her cheeping chick, Nick and Oscar appear to be a pair of jilted lovers. They are exiled in the next shot to the darkness beyond the house, hanging out at the closed filling station, the composition a variation upon Edward Hopper paintings like Gas, in which a small outpost of civilized “order” appears to offer little security when seen against the massed volume of velvety darkness in the encroaching woods. Our social constructions are a tenuous hedge against the wildernesses beyond and within us, and the subsequent dialogue bears this out: the boys put Freddie in a conceptual strong box, grimly objectifying her as a means to the end of her fortune. Nick swiftly transforms Oscar’s moment of grandstanding self-negation into a solution to their unspoken problem: sharing Freddie’s money without Freddie, a happily ever after they could never articulate. “You wanna sleep on it?” ends the wee-hours daydream that has become, improbably, a plan, and with this verbal allusion to sleep, The Fortune cuts to a glittering curtain of beads encircling a ballroom dance floor where, in an intricate series of cuts reminiscent of the dancing triangle of Jonathan, Sandy, and Susan in Carnal Knowledge, Nick and Oscar take turns with Freddie dancing to a tango, an instrumental variation on the same song from the opening sequence, “I Must Be Dreaming.” It’s the birthday of Freddie’s majority, a cause for celebration for all their various dreams—Nick and Oscar’s dream of female-free riches; Freddie’s dream of the competing affections of not one but two ardent men with whom to play house (as in the scene soon after when she attempts to cook them a disastrously unappetizing breakfast). All three are more comfortable with dreaming than with the reality of identity, desire, and consequence.
If The Fortune is ultimately a far simpler story than any of the five films preceding it in Nichols’ first phase of his Hollywood career, this is because the hysterical key of the slapstick genre never allows the characters to explore nuance and dilemma that promote complexity. The plots and schemes that absorb the rest of the story reveal a variety of coping strategies for dissatisfaction with real experience. Nick is most tirelessly committed to pretense; though not especially bright or inventive (Beatty has invested half a career in playing characters whose furrowed brows hope, but fail, to conceal a lack of wits within), he struggles manfully toward the next improvised role he feels expected to play. Oscar is the exact opposite: wearied to enervation by keeping Nick’s increasingly inane stories straight, he gratefully confesses whatever he can to anyone who will listen, though this too is a pretense, motivated not by genuine contrition but by the pleasure of being on a stage, playing a part he, not Nick, controls. Freddie’s experiences in the film’s second half are the most passive of the three; indeed, she is insensate for a large portion of the time, her objectified status not as sexual commodity but purely financial property comically symbolized by her literal containment within a box, the storage trunk. In her emergence, Venus-like, from the box, she is afforded the cinematic possibility of rebirth—who else could have put her in this box and set her adrift but Nick and Oscar? Yet she quickly squanders this insight on the first leering passerby, an otherwise anonymous “John” with whom she uses her sexuality as a commodities exchange for John’s warm car and promise of genuine desire (he only commodifies her sexually, knowing nothing of her identity as the Quintessa heiress).
Planting the seeds of his latest ruse with Mrs. Gould, Nick is treated to this bit of homespun platitudinizing from his landlady and neighbor: “I don’t know why, in such a glorious world as we’ve been provided with—birds, sunshine, of beautiful trees and flowers—and the radio—why people don’t get on any better than they do.” The Fortune, like earlier Nichols films, posits an essential answer to this question: because no one takes such a question seriously, because no one asks such a question seriously. Mrs. Gould, with her elaborate ornamental birdbath and constant garden watering, is only interested in the glories of nature as a pretext for the voyeuristic glimpses into forbidden windows that her gardening affords. Whatever small insights her comment may contain, they are of no interest to her, and certainly of no interest to anyone in the adjacent bungalow. Like Freddie, who allows potential insights to be obscured by trivializing desire for self-gratification, Mrs. Gould wouldn’t know nature if she stumbled over it. In her paean to the natural world, her culminating example of the glories of nature is … “the radio.”
When Oscar and Nick return home empty-handed, having found the trunk but no Freddie, Nick determines that they will wait a while, to “see what happens.” After all the contrivances to premeditate an “accident,” they will finally allow nature to take its course. Rehearsing their story, the “natural” quality of the story becomes of the highest priority: “We show a natural concern as to her whereabouts?” “How does that sound, more natural?” “To me, it’s more natural.” Yet nature has long since been preempted by the contrived “accident” of Freddie’s disappearance, an assertion of control that itself has been lost in a pack of misbegotten accidents and bungling. One of the insights that emerges from the first phase of Nichols’ career is that prevarication and particularly denial are what constitute the “natural” in the human condition. Freddie is drawn back to the bungalow not by a desire to collect her things and start a new life but by an organic, instinctual awareness that any such rebirth is not what she really wants, and that no new life actually awaits her. In this sense, it’s no accident that in the clockwork mousetrap of The Fortune’s plot, she has returned yet again (after seemingly having evaded detection by the police or the boys in fetching her belongings), this time to retrieve her chicken, that once-fragile symbol of her innocence, now grown into a mature hen and stronger than a snake. John would merely have been another variation on Nick and Oscar. She may as well stay as go.
The police bring along a photographer (John Fiedler) in tow, to “document” the “reality” of their enforcement of laws that, as the plot’s end reveals, have yet to be broken, thus demonstrating their own complicity in performed “order.” The natural state of the world is slapstick, The Fortune argues. “Dear Nicky,” we hear Chief Detective Sergeant Jack Power read out from Freddie’s letter to the assembled cops and crooks in the bungalow’s living room, waiting for yet another photo to be snapped, “this is to inform you that things have changed.” This is the lifeblood of drama, the recognition and reversal documented by Aristotle in the Poetics. But among the dreamers in The Fortune, change is a mirage. Power offers Freddie a final chance to heed her own statement, to reject her objecthood and strike off in some new direction, in quest of the authentic. Nichols and his director of photography, John A. Alonzo, create a subjective tracking shot through the archway of the bungalow development from Nick and Oscar’s perspective: they move toward Freddie, who holds in her hands her chicken—and their fates. “We are not about to cause you harm,” the police promise her. They manage to seat her on the running board of their car; the chicken roams the street. “I must inform you of a series of somewhat bizarre events,” Power says, “attested to by a man who is apparently your husband.” By the time he’s completed this sentence and launched upon the “facts” of the case, the camera has tracked through the archway of the development where they’ve been living and has begun its inexorable centering on Freddie; the opening version of “I Must Be Dreaming” fades up into the soundtrack mix. As the camera’s gaze is close enough now to depict the nuances of Freddie’s expression, we believe we understand her body language to be rigid, dignified shock at all she’s being asked to absorb—a reconfirmation of all she’s known since, at least, the inflammatory insights she’d voiced during the kitchen melee.
“Oh no,” she finally says to the detective, her face in close-up tear-streaked and mascara-stained, “I would never believe that in a million years.” There is barely contained outrage in Channing’s delivery, a wonderfully ambiguous rendering of the line that can as easily imply her outrage is directed at the detective for pricking her bubble, at the boys for having disappointed her so profoundly, at herself for being so endlessly predisposed to “dreaming,” or at a cosmos that only offers her a cavalcade of boy-men like Oscar, Nick, and John. Nichols has used this device of the recurrent non-diegetic song to propose, in formal terms, a confirmation of dramatic stasis: things have not changed. In The Graduate, Benjamin begins and ends the film in unmoving, passive conveyance toward an unknown future, while Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence” serves as a kind of folk-rock Greek chorus commenting upon his alienation. Despite all his potential opportunities for insight and transformation, Benjamin remains rudderless, “drifting” from beginning to end. In The Fortune, Freddie runs toward the camera in a long take that seems to portend her active pursuit of destiny, while the song that plays ironically undercuts her dreamy romanticism (or at least does so in retrospect, as we come to understand the bill of goods Nick has sold her, and she has sold herself). Now, at film’s end, she sits exhausted by her experience, allowing the camera (and Nick and Oscar) to advance upon her. The camera in close-up on Channing’s face, as she turns to look up at Nick and Oscar standing over her, awaiting her judgment, is at the same angle Nichols and Robert Surtees used in The Graduate to shoot Elaine just before she yells “Ben!” at the church. Yet Freddie’s outrage is more complete, and more debilitating, than Elaine’s: Elaine still thinks she has a way out when she yells for Ben—at least until reality intrudes as they settle in on the back seat of the Santa Barbara bus. Freddie is merely going back to the bungalow with the boys.
The reverse shot from Freddie’s subjective-camera perspective shows us Nick and Oscar, their awareness dawning that they are about to be uncuffed and set free, remanded to the custody of one another and of Freddie, and this is the point of the film’s long, complicated final shot, which returns us to Freddie’s upturned, stained, and bitterly resolved face, which we will not have an opportunity to see or read again. The camera pans 180 degrees, slowly enough to allow Nick and Oscar to collect her things from John’s car and for Freddie to collect her chicken, to watch John drive away and to take in the mute stares of the neighbors raptly consuming the spectacle, and finally—as the lyrics to the song begin by asking, “Who am I to think that you would care for me the way you do?”—to see Nick, Oscar, and Freddie returning resignedly to the bungalow, their refuge and their condemnation, and several steps down in class from the estate from which she escaped in the opening shot. They deserve each other, a comic inversion of the romantic formula that lovers are meant for each other, is the subtext of the decidedly non-triumphant resolving shot. The camera lingers long after the three have quietly disappeared together inside the bungalow and the cops have vacated the scene, until we see that Mrs. Gould has edged, hose at the ready as covering pretense, back into position to see whatever lurid developments may next ensue.
The anti-climax of the film’s ending matches the anti-climax of the film’s reception. Paul D. Zimmerman writes that the film is doomed by its attempt to hybridize a bleak vision of human nature with a hyperbolic comic form like farce, proclaiming The Fortune “a comic ‘Chinatown,’ a moral wasteland of mean motives and faithless acts in which comedy cannot flourish.”8 It is Nichols’ least known film, though enthusiasm for it emerges from powerful sources; the Coen Brothers, for instance, are long-time admirers.9 While arguably a trifle in comparison to the films Nichols made before it, The Fortune is a playful deconstruction of the cultural appetite for nostalgia at the expense of examining our real lives. Taking a retrospective view of Nichols’ career, Caryn James in the New York Times calls it Nichols’ “last risky comedy,” which “seems to cut close to our cultural dreams and failures.”10 Like Mrs. Gould, our culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s happily peered in at these sepia-toned vignettes from bygone eras (The Godfather saga, The Sting, American Graffiti, etc.) as ways of re-packaging a past that distracted us from the dizzying, revolutionary changes swirling in the present. Nichols retrenched after The Fortune, and, given the enormous achievement of Silkwood, the film with which he eventually returned eight years later, this seems to have been the right instinct at the right time. In Silkwood, Nichols juxtaposes the romanticized image of bygone America (the heartland imagery of the film’s opening shots) with the economic realities of contemporary life, when the agrarian past has collapsed into the dreaming of an exploitative technological future.