Desperate Characters (1971)

An upper middle class couple, an attorney (Kenneth Mars) and a book translator (Shirley MacLaine) live in Brooklyn. She gets bitten by a stray cat. She worries about rabies. Based on the book by Paula Fox and adapted for the screen and directed by Frank D. Gilroy (FROM NOON TILL THREE). Although he's directed a few films, Gilroy is mostly known as a playwright and won a Tony award and the Pulitzer prize for THE SUBJECT WAS ROSES. Outside of the tenuous cat bite incident, a plot is non existent. Henry David Thoreau said, "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" and that just about sums up the lives of the film's two privileged white protagonists and their crowd. They live in a paranoiac fear of everything from urban crime to the new generation (those hippies). Whether riding the subway or sitting in an emergency room, they act like they're in a third world country! While MacLaine brings a sense of quiet desperation to her part, Mars is just plain annoying. I'll chalk up why MacLaine hadn't left him years ago to her idle ennui. A very effective film that catches America at a certain point in time. With Carol Kane, Sada Thompson, Gerald S. O'Loughlin, Rose Gregorio and Jack Somack.