A bittersweet story of first love between two misfit, mismatched college students, The Sterile Cuckoo (1969) was Liza Minnelli's second film, earned her the first of two Oscar® nominations, and made her a star. Minnelli plays Pookie Adams, whose mother died giving birth to her, and whose father rarely sees her. To cover her vulnerability, Pookie has adopted a brash, wisecracking manner and refers to most people as "weirdos." On the bus taking her to college in upstate New York, Pookie latches on to Jerry (Wendell Burton), a shy geek headed for a nearby college. Their romance plays out during the course of their freshman year.

Minnelli, the daughter of superstar Judy Garland and director Vincente Minnelli, made her stage debut at the age of 17 in an off-Broadway revival of the musical Best Foot Forward (1963), and became the youngest person to win a musical Tony Award for Best Actress when she starred in Flora, the Red Menace two years later. Minnelli's only previous film appearance before The Sterile Cuckoo was in a small role in Charlie Bubbles (1967). Around the same time, director Alan J. Pakula had contacted her about playing Pookie, but she hadn't heard back from him. Meanwhile Burt Bacharach and Hal David offered Minnelli the lead in their Broadway show, Promises, Promises (1968), a musical version of the 1960 film The Apartment. At first she agreed, but as she told Tom Burke in a 1969 New York Times interview, she ultimately backed out. "I think I still had Pookie very much on my mind." When Pakula did contact Minnelli again and offered her the role in The Sterile Cuckoo, she was available.

To play Jerry, Pakula chose Wendell Burton, whom he had seen playing the title role in the San Francisco production of the musical You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. That had been Burton's stage debut, and The Sterile Cuckoo would be his film debut. Burton followed The Sterile Cuckoo with a grim prison drama, Fortune and Men's Eyes (1971), and he had a fairly successful career in television before giving up acting in the late 1980s and devoting himself to the Christian religion.

Although he had been a successful producer for more than a decade, Pakula had never directed before. In 1962, he had formed an independent production company with Robert Mulligan, who directed the films that Pakula produced such as To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and Love with the Proper Stranger (1963). With The Sterile Cuckoo, Pakula, who had directed plays in college and always wanted to direct films, showed excellent instincts his first time out.

In the same New York Times interview, Minnelli noted that Pakula scheduled several weeks of intensive rehearsals before they went on location at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. Most of that time was spent improvising, so that the actors could really explore their characters. Once on location, Pakula put Minnelli together with a group of actual college girls who were going to play her dorm-mates, and Pakula asked them to get to know each other by talking about their backgrounds and families. When her turn came, Minnelli, who had planned to talk about her showbiz upbringing, instead talked about Pookie's family because she had completely inhabited the character by that point. However, the scenes with the other girls never made it into the film. As Pakula recalled in a 1972 Sight and Sound interview, "I wanted to suggest...that Pookie Adams was a girl who belongs nowhere. In the script originally, there was a whole sequence on her campus, but now you never see her college. You see her in boarding-houses, in buses, in his college, always coming and going." But the improvisations helped the actors make their characters true and touching. Over the years, such attention to characterization earned Pakula a reputation as an actor's director, and he has guided eight actors to Oscar® nominations, including winners Jane Fonda for Klute (1971), Jason Robards, Jr. for All the President's Men (1976), and Meryl Streep for Sophie's Choice (1982).

Many critics disliked The Sterile Cuckoo's then de-rigueur "falling in love" montages of the lovers frolicking in golden-hued light, to the strains of a syrupy song, Come Saturday Morning. ("I suppose they are Lelouchy," Pakula admitted in the Sight and Sound interview, referring to Claude Lelouch, the director of the film that started the trend, 1966's A Man and a Woman.). But Come Saturday Morning earned an Oscar® nomination, and Fred Karlin's score was nominated for a Grammy.

Some critics also complained about the shifts in tone, from romantic comedy to poignant drama. Roger Ebert called Pakula's work "a schizo directing job. Pakula has a good story, and tells it, and then gums it up with the unnecessary scenes he probably felt obligated to include.... But parts of it are awfully good, and Miss Minnelli is one hell of an actress." On the latter there was general agreement. There were raves for both Minnelli's and Burton's performances, and the critical consensus was that Pakula had made an auspicious debut as a director.

Both Pakula and Minnelli would go on to greater glory. Pakula's next film was the superb Klute, and he earned Oscar® nominations for directing All the President's Men and for his adapted screenplay for Sophie's Choice. Minnelli won her Oscar® for Cabaret (1972), and while her film career has not lived up to her early promise, she has become a legendary stage performer. Pakula later recalled working on The Sterile Cuckoo as "One of the happiest times of my life....mostly because of Liza. I've never seen anybody get more joy out of working, and it's contagious."

Director: Alan J. Pakula
Producer: Alan J. Pakula
Screenplay: Alvin Sargent
Cinematography: Milton R. Krasner
Editor: Sam O'Steen, John W. Wheeler
Costume Design: Jennifer Parsons, John A. Anderson
Art Direction: Roland Anderson
Music: Fred Karlin
Principal Cast: Liza Minnelli (Pookie), Wendell Burton (Jerry), Tim McIntire (Charlie Schumacher), Elizabeth Harrower (Landlady), Austin Green (Pookie's Father), Sandy Faison (Nancy Putnam) Chris Bugbee (Roe), Jawn McKinley (Helen Upshaw).
C-107m. Letterboxed.

by Margarita Landazuri