On the surface, A Cold Wind in August was clearly promoted as an exploitation film and the film, a directorial debut for Alexander Singer, is a slightly sordid melodrama about a short, intense affair between a teenage boy and an older woman, who hides her professional occupation from him; she's a stripper but he thinks she's a model. Most of the film takes place in a low-rent apartment house in an economically depressed New York neighborhood where Vito (Scott Marlowe), the super's son, is the all-round handyman and Iris (Lola Albright) is a resident who needs someone to fix her broken air-conditioner. The sweltering heat of an August in New York City is visually conveyed through the sweating bodies, table fans, and underpopulated streets that are juxtaposed against the type of heat generated between Vito and his seductive neighbor once they meet. What starts out as a casual fling for Iris, however, turns into a passionate, all-consuming sexual awakening for the older woman who tries to resist her growing obsession over this receptive but naive young boy. While the lovers' various couplings are tame by today's standards and offer no nudity, there is a frank, raw quality to the dialogue and performances that captures the film's primary focus - carnal desire and how it can consume you.
One thing is fairly obvious; the movie would have been much less memorable without Lola Albright as the man-hungry Iris. In some ways, the film might be her finest showcase as a dramatic actress (as well as a rare leading role); she never became a major star and is not well known today except for those cinephiles who remember her vivid supporting turns in such movies as Champion (1949), Joy House (1964) and Lord Love a Duck (1966). Yet, her performance in A Cold Wind in August was singled out by many critics of its day and should have led to better roles and opportunities. It didn't, but this film is worth seeing for her alone.
The supporting cast of A Cold Wind in August is also better than you'd expect with Herschel Bernardi and Joe De Santis contributing vivid portrayals respectively as Iris's lonely, longtime suitor and Vito's father and moral conscience. Scott Marlowe as the object of Iris's obsession drew mixed reviews though some critics felt he was ideally cast; others found his Method Actor tics annoying and he seems much too old and experienced to be playing a seventeen-year-old.
Other factors that contribute to the film's slice-of-life realism is Floyd Crosby's crisp black and white cinematography and Gerald Fried's dramatic jazz score which accents the often tawdry atmosphere, particularly in a show-stopping sequence where Vito discovers Iris's true identity at a strip club with his pals.
While few would mistake A Cold Wind in August for a masterpiece, it certainly defied the expectations of the typical exploitation film upon its release as some of the following critical comments reveal. The N.Y. Herald Tribune said, "It is, in essence, gold, even raw, and may be dismissed by many as lurid trash. But there is much to commend this oddly compelling independent production, not the least of which is a striking performance by Lola Albright." Arthur Knight, in his review for Saturday Review, wrote, "Alexander Singer...has brought to A Cold Wind in August a great deal that money can't buy: perception, a feeling for character, and a taste for life." Variety also praised Singer's direction, saying, "He has endowed his picture with a blunt and powerful realism...There is a strip scene that rivals in sensuality any strip scene ever put on non-stage celluloid, not so much in what is revealed of the female anatomy but in how it is revealed - darting images of undulating sections of Miss Albright's partially exposed and admirable epidermis formation."
There were some negative responses as well such as The New York Times which said, "Granting the noble intentions of the producers, it seems a fairly safe guess that they have confused art with blatant sex, which may be good business but hardly a new cultural approach." Time magazine was equally unimpressed, stating "A Cold Wind in August is a nutty melodrama [that] does not merely invite cynicism, it drags cynicism in off the streets and loosens its tie."
Pauline Kael's review of A Cold Wind in August, however, is probably the most succinct assessment of this little film, warts and all: "When people who work in the movie industry get together, they often talk about the little offbeat pictures - the ones that encourage them to think that maybe something can be done now and then. One of the movies that almost inevitably comes up for discussion is the 1961 A Cold Wind in August. This low-budget, extremely "commercial" movie is a shrewdly conceived and well-acted piece of what might be called tawdry but frank eroticism...Unquestionably the movie was made as an exploitation film, as an American ersatz version of Radiguet's Devil in the Flesh and Colette's The Game of Love, but it does not pretend to be set on a high plane, and is saved by the honesty and clarity of its low intentions." Rarely screened today, A Cold Wind in August still enjoys a fervent following; among them are critic Danny Peary, author of Cult Movies and director John Waters, who ranks it as one of his favorite movies.
Producer: Phillip Hazelton
Director: Alexander Singer
Screenplay: Burton Wohl (screenplay); John Hayes (screen treatment); Burton Wohl (novel "A Cold Wind in August")
Cinematography: Floyd Crosby
Music: Gerald Fried
Film Editing: Jerry Young
Cast: Lola Albright (Iris Hartford), Scott Marlowe (Vito Perugino), Joe DeSantis (Papa Perugino), Clark Gordon (Harry), Janet Brandt (Shirley), Skip Young (Al), Ann Atmar (Carol), Jana Taylor (Alice), Dee Gee Green (Mary).
BW-80m.
by Jeff Stafford
SOURCES:
www.afi.com
Filmfacts
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
IMDB
