Review: The Grasshopper

Review: The Grasshopper

Jacqueline Bisset stars as a 19 year-old Canadian (despite Bisset looking every one of her 25 years and maybe more than that) who is bored and unfulfilled, and ventures to LA for supposed stardom and to join her boyfriend (Tim O’Kelly). Through circumstances not worth bothering about, she ends up in Vegas with comedian Corbett Monica. She eventually meets up with O’Kelly in L.A. but has by now been bitten by the Vegas bug, and decides to head out once more to become a near-topless Vegas dancer (sharing the stage with actresses with less problems with nudity than Ms. Bisset must’ve had at the time). Soon she hooks up with an African-American former footballer (real-life Cleveland Browns legend Jim Brown) who is now employed by a hotel to greet people. They eventually marry, but things go awry when mob-connected sleazebag businessman Ramon Bieri gets rough with her and Brown exacts a fistful of revenge. After this, she becomes involved with kindly, elderly millionaire Joseph Cotten, before getting in league with druggie rock star hustler Christopher Stone (in his debut). Yeah, that’s just like a woman, leave financial security and a decent bloke for a druggie loser who’s in a band. Guess how that one turns out for her?

Based on a Mark McShane novel, adapted by Garry Marshall (creator of “Happy Days” and brother of Penny, who has a cameo) and Jerry Belson (“Fun With Dick and Jane”, “Always”), this clichéd 1970 Jerry Paris (“Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment”, “Police Academy 3: Back in Training”) film starts out like a typical 60s/70s bit of fluff, to the point where I kept expecting appearances by Raquel Welch and Edy Williams as go-go dancers, and David Janssen doing a bad Frank Sinatra impersonation or something. As Jacqueline Bisset plays a small-town girl swept up in big-time dreams and glamour, it was kinda reminding me of a lot of other 60s films about Vegas or Hollywood/L.A like “Valley of the Dolls” or “Where It’s At” (The best of which was of course, Russ Meyer’s satirical, schizo titty flick “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls”). But it’s not really about bright lights and the glitz and glamour. No, what Marshall, Belson, and director Paris have in mind is using these trappings as a way to tell a ‘self-discovery’ tale. That is, Bisset’s character spends the entire film trying to find herself...her purpose, whatever it is that’s going to make her famous. Films like this shit me to no end. I haven’t always known what I wanted out of life, but you don’t need to find yourself, you moron, you’re right there and you’re wasting your entire life on a completely self-absorbed journey into pointless moaning, whining, and dissatisfaction. If Ms. Bisset had only come to the perfectly acceptable discovery that she’s entirely mediocre, she’d be able to find some bland stability in her life and eventual modest happiness. Instead she tries to shoot for the moon on modest talents (to be charitable), leeching on to whichever man she thinks can help her get famous, and in the process hurts most (if not all) of these men in some way or another, only to never really find happiness or success anyway. I just wanted to scream at her. What do you want to do with your life? What are you doing to these poor men? Why don’t you pick something and stick at it? It made me so angry, as these sorts of douchy, self-absorbed characters always do (I had massive problems with the main character in the more recent “Into the Wild”).

I got absolutely no enjoyment out of this film whatsoever, not helped in anyway by the blank and miscast (but pretty) Bisset. Seeing this already uninteresting and unlikeable character become depressed, abused, and corrupted is bad enough without a vacant actress acting it all out to the complete disengagement of the audience. Jim Brown is pretty good in a laidback supporting role not too far from reality (and it’s nice that interracial romance is seen as relatively ‘normal’), and there’s some pretty scary work by Ramon Bieri as a complete sleaze. Other than that, this is completely tedious, and the finale is juvenile and stupid beyond belief. Awful soundtrack of folky hippy-dippy songs too, especially the insufferable opening tune.

Unless you’re a die-hard Jacqui Bisset fan, I’d skip the hell outta this one. You’ve seen it before and better (Then again, with “Valley of the Dolls” and the later “Showgirls”, you’ve seen worse too). If you do watch, please explain the title to me. I mean, the novel goes under a different (and even worse) title, “The Passing of Evil”.

Rating: D