Actors Succeeding (or Failing) in High Camp Performances

From Sontag:

55. Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation - not judgment. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy. It only seems like malice, cynicism. (Or, if it is cynicism, it's not a ruthless but a sweet cynicism.) Camp taste doesn't propose that it is in bad taste to be serious; it doesn't sneer at someone who succeeds in being seriously dramatic. What it does is to find the success in certain passionate failures.

I want to see this show. Are there English subtitles on the DVD?

How many episodes does it cover the DVD?

I prefer movies in color and from what i saw, 'Dark Shadows' is in black and white for a year.

Tell me about this product.

HOW MANY EPISODES THE DVD COVERS?

R3 I'm guessing English isn't his first language which is why he wants English subtitles, to follow along.

OP, I don't think camp works if the actor is too conscious of it and plays to that. Joan Collins played Alexis seriously, even when the script was ridiculous, and it worked.

Later in the run of Falcon Crest the show tried to adopt a self-consciously campy style and it didn't work at all.

Sontag? Sontag is gone.

r2 - There are over 1,200 episodes. I think the b/w ones are the best. Some of them are actually quite creepy. It switches to color at #295 and goes batshit crazy in a good way shortly thereafter.

As far as I know, there is no captioning on the dvd set. That would be a major undertaking. I imagine there must be some DS fanatic who would be up to the task, though.

r4 - Camp created with campiness in mind always fails for me. I do think Joan Collins went wayover the top on numerous occasions, but I never minded. She played Alexis like a super-human, above ordinary mortals.

Technically, isn't ALL the old-time soap opera a camp genre?

An honest question: is camp always centered around female characters, or at least stories that prominently feature female character (such as romance, sacrificial mothers, etc., the classic soap opera stuff)? Can it not be male-oriented as well, trafficking in traditionally masculine concepts? Essentially, can Top Gun or Transformers be considered camp?

Dorothy Malone in Written on the Wind: wildly over-the-top, yet thoroughly earnest at the same time. It's a fine line, and she straddles it brilliantly, totally deserving that Oscar.

Dynasty also got progressively sillier - and strained in its exertion towards camp.

Each Krystle/Alexis battle became increasingly silly. This one even has them throwing sequins at each other. "Take that! And that!"

Please note yet another instance of a detached mannequin arm. (2:15)

This is true camp IMO: Kimberlin Brown understood that and played Sheila totally straight and earnest. No flamboyance or moustache twirl mugging here, and it works brilliantly.

An interesting question, R8. I think men can do camp. Using the Dynasty/The Colbys example, Forsythe played Blake like Washington Crossing the Delaware and Heston thought he was still Ben Hur. They were pretty campy but the women in camp are more memorable.

R10 That is from the terrible reunion movie. It was a real disappointment, especially the final season of Dynasty, season 9, was one of the best.

"There are some people in this world you just don't pressure, Mike."

8, the original Batman series from the sixties is considered campy and that's definitely a masculine action type show.

r8 - I think Top Gun fits your bill better than a Transformers movie.

There just isn't enough humanness in Transformers to qualify.

I think the connection between camp and homosexuality has been quite strong, or at least it was at the time Sontag wrote Notes (though even she said camp went beyond gayness), and therefore we see it primarily in performances and scripts that play to the old gay guard. (The Alexis/Krystle fight from r10 really slides into drag queen territory.)

Probably most of what I think of as masculine-oriented camp has a strong flavor of homo-appeal, as if something sexually off-kilter exists on the screen. It shouldn't be there, but there it is.

Flash Gordon from 1980 plays as largely (and consciously) as comedy, but it has a sexual charge - both hetero and homo - as well as a crazy mash-up of deft European and flat American acting styles. I'm never disappointed going back to it, though I'm never exactly sure what to make of it either.

r7, Search for Tomorrow EXPANDS to a half hour??? Were there soaps that ran in quarter hours in the sixties?

Also, Donna Mills Alert at 0:11.

r9's Dorothy Malone in Written on the Wind is fucking gold standard.

R16: Yes, there were 15-minute soaps going back to the days of radio.

anything with Bette, Joan, Judy, Liz Taylor, Anne Baxter, Susan Hayward is Camp 101

Gina Gershon, always a smart actess, figured out when she signed on to so Showgirls that she wasn't doing serious drama here, and [italic]consciously[/italic] delivered a deliciously camp performance. Poor Elizabeth Berkley, on the other hand, so desperate to be the next Sharon stone, delivers an [italic]unconciously [/italic] laughably bad camp performance.

I agree with those who say "camp on purpose" never works, and that is why Ryan Murphy is one of the worst writers in Hollywood.

Camp can be male, R8. "Strictly Ballroom" and "Giant" I think qualify, as do the other examples mentioned.

I'd say "The Boys in the Band" and "La Cage aux Folles" are some good examples, though with them you're getting both camp and gay sensibilities, and therefore you get the accompanying arguments as to whether you can ever truly separate camp from gay.

R4 and we guess you are an ill-mannered, irrelevant, ugly queen.

R18 reminds me of "Where Love Has Gone," also a solid gold piece of camp filmmaking. Bette looks fantastic in the movie, too.

More Queens of Camp: Faye Dunaway, Stanwyck, Streisand, Bea Arthur, Liza, Raquel, Eartha Kitt, Bacall, Marilyn Monroe, Roz Russell, Jayne Mansfield, Joan Colins, Divine, Betty Grable, Alice Faye, Carmen Miranda, Lupe Velez, Mamie Van Doren, Doris Day, Ann Miller, Carol Channing, Mitzi Gaynor

As for individual performances: Eleanor Parker in Caged

Lucille Ball in Mame

Jane Fonda in Barbarella

Diana Ross in Mahogany

Nancy Kelly, Patty McCormick, and Eileen Heckart in The Bad Seed

Olivia Newton-John in Xanadu

Kathryn Grayson in So This Is Love (with her leading man.... Merv Griffin!)

Rita Hayworth in The Bastard (a rarely seen 1968 film, TCM aired it a while ago and she's drunk throughout her scenes)

I think the idea of true camp being played totally straight is so much more interesting and provocative than the hackneyed cartoonish stereotypes offered by the Bette, Joan, Judy queens.

Erika Slezak as Victoria on One Life to Live (or Viki Sleestack as she's known here) did not play her split personalities storyline for laughs and if you watch some of the 80s episodes, she is actually hilarious in her over-earnestness that it becomes camp, case in point, this absurd scene with Andrea Evans as Tina -whether that makes her performance here a success or a failure is up to you:

Campy catfight featuring Vivica A Fox with her old face

r27, "All the money in the world won't clean you up!"... she should have said "All the money in the world won't make you white!"

Actresses who've succeeded in high camp roles:

Piper Laurie in Carrie

Karen Black in Day of the Locust

Shelley Duvall in The Shining

Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct

Michelle Pffiefer in Batman Returns

Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest (I know this one is contentious)

Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Vivien Leigh in GWTW

Oooooooh, hello!

Karen Black in anything.

Patty Duke= Valley of the Dolls

Regarding male figures and camp, I suggest Chuck Norris, though perhaps he is more unaware self-parody than camp.

OP, you're projecting way too much into the Joan Bennett clip.

I believe it is naiive camp, not intended by Bennett or the writers and directors of Dark Shadows to be funny one bit.

It looks like they intended to show a serious nightmare clip to invoke serious horror. They probably excused the mannequin-fake arm with the belief that it was a surreal dream anyway.

Dark Shadows on TV was not a comedy and nothing was being mocked. It was somewhat silly by accident.

The 2012 movie version with Johnny Depp, however, is conscious camp.

If you want to lay claim to what Joan Bennett is thinking, you need to provide proof. But you're just projecting.

"I was rooting for you, we were ALL rooting for you: how DARE YOU? Learn something from THIS! When my mother yells at me it's because she LOVES ME!!!"

Anything with Lucci from the 80's.

I give you Julie Goodyear as Bet Lynch:

Successful straight guy camp : Spinal Tap

....as well as the other stuff they’re associated with... including this guy:

Alan Bennett’s Talking heads (particularly ones featuring Hyacinth Bucket ora teary Thora Hird)

*or a

Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce

Debbie Reynolds in The Singing Nun

Katharine Hepburn and Liz Taylor in Suddenly Last Summer

Debbie Reynolds, Shelley Winters and Agnes Moorehead in What's the Matter with Helen

Olivia de Havilland in Lady in a Cage

Jennifer Jones in Duel in the Sun

Male/hetero camp: Oliver Stone does a lot of it.

Tom Cruise in "Born on the Fourth of July": "PENIS! PENIS! PENIIIISSSSSS!" All that's missing is a flock of startled birds flying away.

There's also a scene in "Wall Street" where Charlie Sheen, as the newly successful trader, walks out on his balcony overlooking all of New York, and says aloud, "Who AM I?"

This might be a bit of a sophisticated pick, but would you consider Sian Phillips' performance as Livia in I CLAVDIVS to be a work of camp?

Olivia DeHavilland in The Dark Mirror

Joan Crawford in Strait-Jacket

Constance Towers in The Naked Kiss

Beverly Michaels in Wicked Woman

Susan Hayward in I Want To Live!

"IS THERE ANYONE IN ROME WHO HAS *NOT* SLEPT WITH MY DAUGHTEEEEEER?! TAKE THEM AWAY!"

American Psycho (film) deserves to be at the top of any survey of camp classics...but you diva worshipping walking museum pieces...

"Which one of you bitches is my mother?"

This could have been fabulous with the right talented young actress. Phoebe Cates plays it like an audition for community theater. So it's high camp and an utterly failed performance.

Frank Langella's performance as Skeletor is sanctified in the camp annals. I can't get enough of this.

Laurence Olivier in Spartacus

Tony Randall in No Down Payment

r34 - I agree DS the series was indeed somewhat silly BY ACCIDENT, which pushes it right into instant camp territory.

The story and production have many unintended effects, though I believe the seasoned actors in the show had a very good idea how it would turn out. Joan Bennett had been in front of the cameras off and on for over thirty years. There is no way that she didn't know how outrageous her supposedly spooky dream would come off when she read the script, yet she forges ahead with it, even emitting a hilariously behind-the-beat scream at the end of the clip to top off the scene.

It's not camp on purpose; it's camp when the performer has no other way out and plays the part with sincerity.

r38 - I disagree. Spinal Tap is parody. Mr. Burns is satire. Neither is camp.

R51 and R38: John Waters explained camp when he was on [italic]The Simpsons[/italic]: "the ludicrously tragic, the tragically ludicrous."

I figured there would be some generational conflict over what constitutes camp and who best represents it.

I'll hold that some of the old films with the old movie queens that the old queens hold dear really own camp.

Case in point: the already cited Olivia de Havilland in Lady in a Cage.

Midler, Hawn & Keaton in First Wives Club. But Hawn especially.

HBO's Rome was a campfest for all to enjoy. Such a shame it only lasted 2 seasons.

A lot of these seem to speak to the distinction between campy and camp.

The three leads in First Wives Club were campy, but not not camp.

Campy vs. Camp.

Grayson Hall in Dark Shadows.

Jill fires her pervy masseur.

Broderick Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge cross into camp territory in the original version of ALL THE KING'S MEN, but their performances work, enough so that they won Academy Awards. When the movie was remade with Sean Penn and Patricia Clarkson, that version didn't work because the performance were too low-key, especially Clarkson's.

Don't forget about me.

McCambridge in Johnny Guitar is fantastic camp.

Male camp=Starship Troopers.

r59, I don't follow any soaps from the last four decades, but that Sven is one hyper-frosted, oranged-out gay.

Joan Crawford in Autumn Leaves and Johnny Guitar

Charles Laughton as Nero in The Sign of the Cross

Stephen Boyd as Messala in Ben Hur

I disagree about Stephen Boyd in Ben-Hur. I don't consider his performance camp at all. The oblivious Charlton Heston, on the other hand....

Stephanie Beacham as Sable Colby!

The actress who plays/played Sharon on Eastenders reminds me of the drag queen Divine.

Vincent Price in anything

Julie Harris in The Haunting

I own this thread.

Art is breaking rules. Even Sontag's signposts.

Madeline Kahn's Dietrich parody in Blazing Saddles: Was Kahn elevating her usual campy femininity, to camp (highlighting the charade between manipulator and manipulated in brothel sex games) - by borrowing Dietrich's butch in drag?

Or was the campness of the Dietrich persona, simply made campy? Because her (serious) power keeps grinding to a (naive) whimper. Virility to venereal. And the mustachioed men bursting onstage to carry her off (to wartime whoring station?) are played somewhere between naive and serious machismo too (deadpan comic, Tintin era.)

It's hard to imagine now that anyone involved with Valley of the Dolls didn't understand what they were making but you have to remember it was a huge best-selling novel, being filmed by 20th Century-Fox.

Patty Duke was an Oscar winner as was Susan Hayward. When I saw this the first time on TV with my grandmother, she said seriously that Patty Duke should have been nominated for an Oscar based on her last scene in the alley.

I should point out that my grandmother loved Susan Hayward from I Want to Live and didn't distinguish that from hooty stuff like Back Street.

Joan Crawford was the queen of unconscious camp. Even in insane crap like "Strait Jacket" or "Torch Song", she thought she was being a serious, intense, dramatic actress who was doing her damndest to carry the fucking film with no help from her the slovenly bastards around her!

Every moment she was on camera she gave it everything she had, even if she was sipping vodka between each take. It what makes her so watchable, for good or ill.

Bad script + great performance - self-awareness = instant camp

Elizabeth Taylor in BUtterfield 8 Katharine Hepburn in Suddenly Last Summer

Least campy performance ever: Julie Andrews in Victor/Victoria. She was campier as Maria von Trapp.

[quote]Olivia de Havilland in Lady in a Cage

Lady in a cage was a good movie though...to achieve the HIGHEST level of unintentional camp the film has to be a piece of shit.

Olivia achieved that here:

R23 When someone mentioned Bette Davis and Susan Hayward in the same post, I thought of "Where Love Has Gone."

Hayward wasn't such a great actor IMO and Bette only took the role to pay for her cunt daughter B.D.'s wedding. Hayward tried to act well (but failed). Bette didn't care.

Hayward disliked the character she was depicting, an amoral slut, and both she and Bette wanted rewrites but were held by contract to the script they'd ageed to film.

Davis and Hayward absolutely despised each other and it showed on camera, to the benefit of the film--they were playing a mother and daughter who loathed each other. It was high camp made better by the actresses' mutual antipathy.

John Hurt is very camp in many roles - but as Caligula in I, Claudius, he's not only camp, he's chewing the scenery (in the very best way)

[quote]Least campy performance ever: Julie Andrews in Victor/Victoria. She was campier as Maria von Trapp.

She deserved Oscars for those more than the thing she actually "won" for.

Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS.

Thanks for replying R6.

Good one, R38. And speaking of Tap, I'd say "Better Call Saul" delves into camp, especially in Michael McKean's scenes. "Breaking Bad" did too, at times. Clean up the language and the violence and it was practically an Otto Preminger film.

If anything, the '60s TV Batman was the least camp of all. Campy, yes; but that was because they knew how ludicrous the central premise was. What's truly camp is all the post-Schumacher Batman films. The Nolan pictures are done with such a straight faced seriousness, coupled with the sincerity of its Realism Drag, that given - again - how utterly ludicrous the premise of a man dressed as a giant bat and fighting crime is in the first place, how can those films be seen as anything other than Camp? Except, I suppose, there's no real warmth or humanity or humor there, so...

r78 Hayward wasn't such a great actor IMO

I thought Hayward was a terrific actress. What constitutes a great actress in your opinion and don't say Bette Davis, or I'll throw up on this keyboard.

Angie Dickinson and Earl Holliman on Police woman

r84 - I believe Sontag named Batman the sixties series as anti-camp. It's campy in that it aspires to become camp.

Same for lots on this thread. I would say the 1980 Flash Gordon largely falls into this category, as do some of the Agatha Christie film adaptations. There's loads of wit and expert overplaying by experienced actors in exaggerated costume, but it's all calculated fun.

Camp is not calculated. It arises by accident, and though some of the participants must be aware of what's happening, they don't wink at the camera. They allow multiple interpretations, like r73's grandmother, who felt Patty Duke should have won the Oscar after seeing her alley screeching final scene in Valley of the Dolls. The unconscious creators of camp do not put themselves above their material or their intended audience. That is part of the appeal for me. Camp has to have some element of heart, even if, or especially because, it's completely phony.

Eleanor Parker in Lizzie

Joan and Bette in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

The entire cast of Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte

Not a big soap opera person, but it's when I caught some scenes years ago it struck me as pretty campy. Especially some fat lady on "Bold and the Beautiful" I remember she had a doll that came to life or something. Again really didn't watch but it was on when my sisters watched it and even as a baby gay I thought -- take it down, Mary.

Anyone remember her name?

r89, are you sure you aren't thinking of Juliet Mills with her doll Timmy on Passions? He always talked about himself in the third person:

"Miguel's poison tea really burned Timmy's leg badly!"

Timmy does A LOT of shrieking here:

Oh dear -- I see I've mangled the two stories. That is creepy timmy

But anybody know who the fat lady was?

[quote]Angie Dickinson and Earl Holliman on Police woman

I've heard the rumors for years but can anyone with any certainty verify that Earl Holliman is indeed, gay?

Ever since I was a kid I've thought he was rather sexy and ruggedly handsome.

r93, according to datalounge lore he was in an LTR with actor Anthony George

I looked for more evidence of the Earl Holliman/Anthony George love match, but the only sources I can find are more DL and some Dark Shadows sites. (Anthony George was a regular in the late sixties.)

I believe Anthony George is a confirmed homo.

Not that it necessarily proves they were fucking, but it was Earl who notified the media when Anthony died (click on link and scroll down)

Also an Earl Holliman fan.

He's a little James Garner, a bit of Fred Ward, a hint of Chris Pratt, and maybe a touch of Daryl from The Walking Dead.

Coral Browne in Legend of Lylah Clare

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Conscious camp per Sontag's definition. Classic.

the entire cast of Cleopatra ('63)

Liz Taylor and Marlon Brando in Reflections in a Golden Eye

The entire cast of Myra Breckinridge

Travolta in Staying Alive

Sharon Stone in The Quick and the Dead

Faye Dunaway in Supergirl

Melanie Griffith in Shining Through

Fred MacMurray in "Follow Me, Boys" Clifton Webb in "Mister Scoutmaster" The whole cast of "Wet Hot American Summer"

R98, "The Legend of Lylah Clare" is a good one to bring into this thread. I would say Coral Browne was bringing the intentional camp, as many good actors do when they find themselves in a mess that they know will turn out ridiculous, but star Kim Novak is a sterling example of unintentional camp. She really did try to Act, as if her role were Oscar-worthy and the script wasn't a frightening mess.

I think I need to watch that film again, and think about how much camp is intentional, how much is unintentional, and whether it arises in acting, or in bad writing.

IMHO the reason that the later films of Joan Crawford always have an element of camp is that Joan never did what a real person would do in her character's place, she did what would command the most attention from the audience.

Partly that was because she didn't think that people wanted to pay to see real people up on the big screen, and partly because by that point she had no fucking idea how real people behaved, other than that they didn't bother to move the potted plants to make sure the floor underneath was clean, the filthy slovens.

No one on Fuller House

Now I may have to revisit the Christopher Nolan Batman films thanks to r84. But then again, maybe not. There is indeed no warmth to the films. I think one of the hallmarks of camp is humanity - even (or especially) when it's a failed representation of what humanity is, such as the oft-cited Joan Crawford, esp. in r103.)

r98's magnificent clip from The Legend of Lylah Clare might serve as a contrast between campiness (an aware Coral Browne) and camp (an unaware or seemingly less aware Kim Novak) in the same scene. Is the whole film this good?

I would definitely regard Christian Bale's performance in the Batman movies as amazing camp which FAILS. And his Patrick Bateman in American Psycho is amazing camp which succeeds. It's hilarious how Bale is now trying to blame Ledger for his failed Batman performance saying that he distracted him or some shit like that.

R11 I'm a proud Sheila hater. Things became so silly and evil with her and there was no end in sight. No matter how straight she played it her antics were out of this world.

R106 I never saw Bale doing camp in Batman. Keaton on the other hand was so dry he seemed like the lone sane man in a world of crazies. Though the original choice to play that version of Batman was ...Bill Murray!

And how does Bale explain his laughable Batman in the other two movies?

Is he trying to hold AnnE responsible as well?

He's always been very self-critical, R108. He didn't even like [italic]Newsies[/italic].

Re. Earl Holliman and Anthony George, Anthony appeared on Earl's shows The Wide Country and Police Woman. Nice of him to pull strings to get work for his bf!

Btw, Earl also guested on Anthony's show, Checkmate!!!

R105, it's worth a look. Almost brilliantly bad. And the ending is bizarre enough to make it all worthwhile

Trailer for Legend of Lylah Clare

OH MY GOD, you guys... HOW could we not mention Anthony Hopkins as Adolf Hitler in THE BUNKER?!!! A performance widely regarded as a failure, is surely a masterful turn of CAMP?

Anthony Hopkins looks shitfaced drunk throughout the movie.

R10 WINS. That was the absolute best. I guess that was the closest mainstream TV could get to showing two women fucking. I never watched Dynasty, but I've always had a very vague crush on Linda Evans, so that was really nice.

Thank you, r116. I always enjoyed Linda Evans on Dynasty. Her stiff reserve of calm and kindness was fun to watch crack open, and she was the perfect foil for Joan Collins.

Regarding Dynasty, I think it may have hit its zenith with Claudia at her craziest on the rooftop.

If we are dichotomizing camp into male and female, I guess this would land in the female (or slash gay male?) end of the spectrum, though I would argue this is actually too good at what it's doing to qualify. This scene mostly shows off successful histrionics for a genre that demands it.

As stated upthread, Christopher Nolan and the horde of brooding, dark superhero movies of the current millennium that present themselves with the utmost sobriety sit more on the straight male side, much like the macho revenge thriller genre exemplified by the Charles Bronson Death Wish films from a few decades ago.

William Shatner TJ Hooker

But R118, is Shatner really Camp, or merely ridiculous?

Come to think of it, are the bad moments of Star Trek TOS Camp, or just godawful? I mean, "Spock's Brain", for fuck's sake.

Ce monsieur est gay, R119.

Vincent Price in anything

Karen Black in Killer Fish

Karen Black in anything

Judy Davis in every Woody Allen movie.

Todd Haynes started his career with the barbie doll Karen Carpenter Story and most of his films have a solid helping of successful camp. "Carol" is very high camp and I think Cate Blanchett took it seriously and probably didn't think she delivering high camp. If she did know, it was brilliant. If she didn't, its still just perfectly camp.

R106 Yes - American Psycho is great camp. Love love love the opening sequence as well as the business card scene.

Featuring Jared Leto, no amateur when it comes to camp

This is the thing about Christian Bale - for somebody whose instincts for camp were so astute in American Psycho, what the FUCK was his Batman performance all about?

Its probably easier to play Bateman, a serial killer in a not all that important and mostly forgotten novel, than the mythic Batman.

That doesn't cut it r129.... even Michael Keaton's Batman had an eccentricity and self-mocking intelligence about it. Bale could easily have taken that kind of approach and you'd expect him to, after his work as Bateman.

Isn't Bale some kind of bi-polar mess? Maybe he just wasn't on his game when shooting that movie.

I have this suspicion that Chris Nolan's direction incapacitated Bale. Nolan strikes me as an Aspie who, although giving Ledger free reign in his performance (akin to Frank Perry & Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest) did not let Bale do the same thing and was very controlling about how he ought to be. One day this may all come out.

Vincent Price in Ten Commandments is another example of male camp

What about "Die Mommie Die!", "Psycho Beach Party", and "Girls Will Be Girls"?

Champagne....champagne...champagne

I would consider Anthony Hopkins' Hitler a camp fail and Bruno Ganz's in "Downfall" a deservedly celebrated win.

Fail: Tammy in "Interview with the Vampire"

Win: Tim Curry in "Rocky Horror"

According to Sontag's guidelines, law camp is when something is campy without intending to be, while high camp is something that's trying so hard to be camp that it had better work or it's going to be an epic fail. So Faye Dunaway's Joan Crawford would be a low camp win while Julie Andrews in "Star!" would be a high camp fail.

Psycho Beach Party is camp through and through, but it seems very consciously made. The opening is maybe what's truly campiest about it.

Maybe the 1960s movies Psycho Beach Party was modelled on were true camp.

I mean low camp. Law camp is for Lawyerlounge.

Julie Andrews only succeeds in camp when she does her lesbian act. Maria from Sound of Music, and maybe her various outings with Carol Burnett.

Jayne Manfield went for serious in Single Room Furnished. It's a joyless film, almost as much so as the Christopher Nolan's Batman movies, but Jayne has her sights set on establishing herself as a legitimate dramatic actress, and she is so far off the mark, the film tumbles into absurdity.

Witness Jayne Mansfield looking pensive on the fire escape:

Strained existentialism in the mask of an aged go-go girl.

NB: I love Jayne Mansfield.

r136, what has always fascinated me about Dunaway's performance as Crawford is that she manages to take a classic camp figure and create a perfectly camp performance around it.

I actually think it's one of the great performances of the last four or five decades. She goes for broke in every fucking scene, just like Crawford used to do, but Dunaway achieves camp in her faithfulness to her subject, whereas Crawford was only ever faithful to herself.

Pauline Kael was awestruck:

Simon Farnaby for 2015's Best High Camp Performance by an Actor in a High Camp TV Series.

IMHO Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter is camp! He preens, he hogs the camera, he's so over the top he's entering orbit, etc. The performance totally works and he's vastly entertaining, but it's a Star Performance that borders on intentional camp, he's as much like a human being as 1950s Joan Crawford.

Now regarding Bale as Batman, IMHO it wasn't necessarily Nolan's fault, it's entirely possible that he just didn't have it in him to be a great Batman. He's not a great actor, he was terrific in "American Psycho" and maybe some other films, but many of his performances are plodding and humorless, like his Batman and the moron in "The Fighter" (for which he won an undeserved Oscar). Maybe he just had the one great performance in him.

Oh yeah, forgot to link this.

Look at this and tell me that Hannibal Lecter isn't at least a little camp.

The Silence of Lambs is a camp film on every level. The heightened emotional tone, the gothic horror elements, the POV shots, and Jodie Foster's breathless Clarice are all pure camp. Hopkins's Lecter fits right in with the rest, but he does take it to another even more sublime level. I watched a bit of Red Dragon the other week and his performance falls flat in that one because the rest of the film around him is so colorless and dull and ordinary.

Basic Instinct is camp, too. Black Widow with Debra Winger and Theresa Russell... camp classic!

That Huntsman movie with Theron, Blunt and Chastain coming out next month looks super campy with all the agony and screaming in the trailers.

It doesn't look campy r147, it looks kitsch. Look up the proper definitions before you throw these labels around:

R150, I've never heard of that movie before, but that Jayne in that clip is hilariously bad. She over emotes the coy young girl bit as if she's playing a child rather than an adult. Perhaps that was the last time she was ever coy. Also, I guess she's supposed to be living in a low rent tenement, yet her impeccable glamour girl makeup, accompanied with soft focus lens, betrays her character's situation.

^ that was meant for R140.

Marcia Cross as Kimberly on Melrose Place: high camp extraordinaire. Legendary!

Marcia Cross' Kimberly is the only reason I watched MP, that and CTS's Allison's continual alcoholic relapse sequences. Both wonderfully campy!

r149 - I think she saw this as her moment to join the ranks of serious thespians. She may have been thinking of Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits, but she's so far removed from any semblance of what she's reaching for that what we get instead of a character is Jayne Mansfield's naked ambition and a failure at such a level that she almost defies camp and sinks into something sadder.

She's so much better in her sixties Eurotrash and softcore porn. Not everyone could be a success in that, and I wish she had appreciated more where her true talents stood.

Susan Sontag was a traitor and an idiot and "notes on camp" comes off as more than a little homophobic in 2016.

R148, Please, I was not confused. I was referring to the performances in which the three ladies are using weird accents while high and low talking. I haven't even gotten to the exaggerated facial expressions. Have you seen the trailers?

Joan Bennett wearing her transparent raincoat as the femme fatale in Scarlet Street.

Classic but definitely not camp.

However, Dark Shadows - camp. There is an endearing earnestness in the show that has made it a deserved classic. It's hokey, amateurish, and cheap, but what saves it from simple schlock and elevates it to spectacular camp is the enthusiasm and effort of nearly everyone involved, from old hands like Joan Bennett to old queens like Louis Edmonds to the writers and the directors.

There is warm humanness and a respect for the viewer that conscious camp misses almost by definition. The creators of genuine camp do not condescend, neither to their material nor to their audience.

Heather Locklear in Melrose Place

Angelina Jolie in Alexander: she plays Colin Farrell's mother like an alien from some absurd planet in the Joan Crawford/Bette Davis/Barbara Stanwyck galaxy. She's the only thing about the movie that makes it worth watching, so ridiculously over the top.

All the actors in this:

Interesting choice r158. I'm surprised the gays haven't claimed that movie yet. Alexander is hardly a camp classic. Nobody seems to appreciate it, not the gays, not the history buffs and not the average joe.

Alexander is definitely camp. Love Colin Farrell's 80s hair rock wig.

Ah yes, Angelina Jolie. IMHO her recent "Maleficent" was a failed attempt at camp, she tried for the sort of non-realistic star performance that Joan Crawford could give while passed out, the film is a failure at that level and every other.

Why was it such a failure? Was it Jolie's performance? Or was it because there was nothing subversive about the film, in fact it removed every bit of subversiveness and edginess from a character who was in a fucking 1950s Disney film in the first place?

THIS IS CAMP! Apologies for the lack of subtitles. The one with the dark hair is seeking revenge from the blonde one for "stealing" her boyfriend. It's long, drawn-out, and she gives it all... I love it. Especially the evil/crazy laugh.

Would Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl be considered a camp performance?

R153, Interestingly, Jayne wasn't bad in one of her her earliest dramas, "The Wayward Bus." But in that clip, she can't seem to shake off the caricature she had become.

Pat Ast in Reform School Girls. I've seen her performance described as chewing the scenery so much that she threw it up and then proceeded to chew that as well.

Haha thanks R166, I'll be watching that Reform School Girls movie.

Lana Turner deserves a special spot in the camp hall of fame.

She was never a great actress, though I would argue that she earned her stripes as the queen of the late fifties/early sixties melodrama.

Her zenith came at the end with Madame X, the last of her great, glossy suffering on the screen, and also the final ultra-glamourous women's picture by Ross Hunter. They made a great team!

Olivia de Havilland Lady in a Cage, with a hip new sound.

Does a terrible but quite strident performance in an otherwise good piece count for something?

Borrowed from the current Memorable Dearh Scenes thread: Buddy Hackett as Lou Costello.

Spectacular failure in tugging at the heartstrings.

Stephen Boyd in THE OSCAR, which also features brilliantly campy appearances by Jill St. John (who gets it) and Tony Bennett (who doesn't).

This film should be in the pantheon with VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, but its lack of availability on DVD seems to have limited its exposure to a new generation.

[bold]"Oscar night! And here you sit — on top of a glass mountain called Success. ..."[/bold]

I don't agree with all of Sontag's ideas in "Notes on Camp." She had such severe aesthetic taste herself and never seemed to really appreciate camp for what it was. Her article reads sort of like someone with Asperger's trying to explain how you can tell which emotions other people are feeling.

Camp means giving it your all in the face of insurmountable artifice.

Ross Hunter deserves more credit than he gets for producing glorious camp that can often be interpreted on multiple levels, such as in Imitation of Life.

I think Lana Turner was best suited to his productions, but Doris Day as the wife in peril from Midnight Lace did wonderfully. She was almost as good in the film as she was in the accompanying fashion show.

Audio camp or just kitsch?

Presenting preposterous lyrics with a blissfully ignorant straight face.

If it lends itself handily to traditional drag, there is a strong chance it has a high camp factor.

R172, last year I watched all of "The Oscar" on youtube, the whole damn film was up.

The Oscar is a riot. And Stephen Boyd was hot as hell.

Butterfield 8 - the whole cast except Eddie Fisher, who dragged down every scene

I LOVE Butterfield 8!

^ Liz and Mildred Dunnock.

I miss Liz.

She really could do lurid with a touch of sophistication.

No Sale!

Sharon Stone and Isabelle Adjani in the nineties remake of the French classic Diabolique.

It's a really fun film, mostly for the misfit glamour provided by the two leads, completely inappropriate for their roles but wholly enjoyable on the screen. Sharon Stone cannot fucking tone herself down for the role of a schoolteacher, vamping about in a black cocktail dress and heels while teaching boring lessons at a chalkboard. Isabelle Adjani is preposterously, incessantly wide-eyed as the naive, moral, cheated on wife, never wavering in her quivering, telegraphed victimhood. Both actresses make a serious go at it, and one suspects that neither has an idea of how wrong (Stone) or overwrought (Adjani) their performances are.

Camp is a lot of things, but it is not lazy.

Brando is masterful in The Island of Dr. Moreau. He knew exactly what he was doing and what he was in for every frame of this film. His performance was savaged, but it's one of my favorites - wry and outlandish, yet not quite unfaithful to its source.

Patricia Routledge as Hyacinth Bucket. Pronounced Boo-kay.

I cannot recommend highly enough the documentary about the making of Dr. Moreau with Brando and Val Kilmer.

The strife and insanity on that set hit peaks that seem incomprehensible.

But Brando was right about what he wanted with his character, especially the ice bucket. And he should have gotten royalties for Mike Myers' Mini-Me character in the Austin Powers series.

The doc is now streaming on Netflix.

I think Tarantino does camp quite well, female and male, unintentional and intentional.

Another from Dark Shadows - Grayson Hall as Dr. Julia Hoffman. She was always on. Never were acting tics so relentless and so savory.

A SUMMER PLACE

Especially Beulah Bondi's, Constance Ford's & Sandra Dee's performances.

Constance Ford's maniacal & vindictive hatred was so over the top, it was fun to watch.

In honor of Olivia de Havilland's 100th birthday:

R191 That's hilarious with the surprise ending.

Did mainstream audiences in the early sixties have any notion of the gay camp value in films like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte?

I am having trouble imagining the queue for opening night without a preponderance of gay men.

And on the note of Sweet Charlotte, Agnes Moorehead knew what kind of film she was in and played it accordingly. I actually think the whole cast did, and Olivia de Havilland seemed to relish getting to turn her saccharine screen persona upside down midway through the story to become a seething, scheming villainess.

^ Sweet Charlotte with Joseph Cotten and Olivia de Havilland tending to an insane Bette Davis, who they hope to drive further bananas.

An appreciation of the camp performance of Agnes Moorehead as Velma in Hush, Hush Sweet Chralotte.

She was nominated for an Oscar for this one.

Oscar Winner Jennifer Jones Plays Rtd Porn Star - Angel, Angel, Down We Go (1969):

Oh fuck, Angel Angel Down We Go is a bad movie!

Also starring singers Lou Rawls and lesbian Holly Near.

Rod Steiger's turn in "The Big Knife" is one of the rare camp performances by a male that isn't in a sexually ambiguous role.

The movie Brooke Shields and her mother FOUGHT to be finally released, as if was going to resurrect her career back then.

This is a great thread.

Al Pacino in "Dick Tracy".

Sort of along the lines of Brando in Dr. Moreau, I might throw in Jon Voigt from Anaconda.

He actually does some sort of vague Brando Godfather imitation - the accent never quite hits anywhere geographically - in his role as villain, and he plays the role to comic effect in contrast with the younger cast around him.

I'm not sure I would call it camp, however, as there is too much a knowingness in his performance. I don't think the actor should necessarily be in on it to achieve full camp.

We talk about a metaphorical winking at the audience to let us know they're in on the joke. Voigt makes an actual wink, and though it may close the door on the camp value of his character, it is spectacular.

Jon Voigt leering at Jennifer Lopez in Anaconda.

Discussion of Jon Voigt's performance.

Here his accent is compared to Pacino's in Scarface.

Has the definition of camp evolved? Acting styles change. Does camp change with them?

What distinguishes a bad performance from a camp one?

Johnny Depp has gone way over the top with his performances in the last decade, but I wouldn't call any of them camp. They're not sincere or even delivered with any particular endearing quality. I find them - and him - quite grating.

Figures that this was camp motivated.

Dianne Wiest won an oscar for her ultra-campy Helen Sinclair in Bullets Over Broadway.

What makes camp acting enjoyable to me is the dissonance between the material and the performance. Lady in a Cage places Olivia de Havilland in such an outlandish predicament with such lurid and melodramatic elements all around her, yet she forges straight ahead like the old-school movie star that she is, never deigning to give us that Jon Voigt wink (r202).

She trapped in an elevator cage in a heat wave, tormented by thugs (including James Caan, who is sweating sex) and lowlifes (Ann Southern), all while panicking about the implicit gay confession and suicide announcement of her nelly son.

It's gay in a sense that doesn't quite exist anymore, just like camp doesn't exist anymore. We're more self-aware on both counts as a society, and something oddly, almost quaintly subversive has been lost in the transition.

I think that's why the greatest camp performances are from yesteryear. I'm not sure of a contemporary correlation. Maybe it has yet to arise.

R208, I believe "Nell" slipped in before the door closed.

My old boyfriend was obsessed with Nell.

I think it was because he could never figure out if Jodie Foster's performance was good, abysmal, or some undefinable combination of the two.

At any rate, I ended up forbidding any more Nell viewings in my presence.

I accidentally dropped this Nicole Kidman compilation from the unbelievable The Paperboy into the Olivia de Havilland 100th birthday thread, which caused me to wonder how Miss de Havilland might have approached the prison visit scene with John Cusack.

This scene!^

The full cast of The Baby, but especially Ruth Roman, who went from working with Hitchcock to this drive-in exploitation that took about twenty years before it reached the audience that it truly deserved.

She's channeling a latter-day Ava Gardner with a husky smoker's voice, as well as the Joan Crawford from her horror period in films like I Saw What You Did.

There are few movies that reach this level of depravity while still radiating a stunningly high level of charm, and I think Ruth Roman is the secret ingredient to this success.

Barbara Stanwyck in Walk on the Wild Side is GOOD high camp. Everyone else in the movie is BAD high camp.

Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard?

I think Psycho knowingly touches base with camp, noir and B-movie thrills, never once losing its lethal Freudian insights.

The Baby should have launched Ruth Roman into a second career in horror.

The scene with her on the front porch wearing those jeans was magic.

R214 - Stanwyck is perfect for the role of a southern lesbian cathouse madame with a legless husband who travels on a flatbed cart instead of a wheelchair. Her unrequited love for the majestic and fabulously miscast Capucine is one for the ages.

One seriously underrated 80s camp laff riot is the "hard hitting" "Miles From Home", in which the preening Richard Gere plays a distraught farmer, with expertly moussed hair, surviving the 80s farming crisis. I believe armed robbery is the solution. Roger Ebert gave this shite a rave review, which led me to suspect payola.

Patty McCormack as Rhoda in The Bad Seed. The child actress had to have a certain degree of naivety in her acting, but what comes across is raw psychopathy.

I'd throw in the Nancy Kelly as her suffering mother for a camp factor as well, along with Henry Jones as LeRoy, but not Eileen Heckart as Mrs. Daigle.

The latter an example of a really strong, non-camp performance that flies in the face of the camp production surrounding it.

NB: Heckart has had a thread running on DL recently.

Miles from Home featured the future Jackie on Rosanne, Laurie Metcalfe, as "Exotic Dancer."

Loved Ann Southern as the over-the-hill grifter floozy in Lady in a Cage.

She actually brought a touch of heart to the film. I wish someone had remembered to let her out of the closet at the end.

Eleanor Parker in Lizzie

The Killing of Sister George and anything else with Coral Browne in it. Robert Aldrich was an inspired director of camp.

Eleanor Parker looked like she was doing a terrible George Raft impression in that mirror confrontation from r233.

Splendid.

"Batman Forever" is on, and Jim Carrey is being deliberately, insanely, over-the-top campy. It works in a way, at least for most of the film, at least up until the final scenes when he goes so far over the top he ends up with his head up his own ass. Poor Tommy Lee Jones is stick sharing scenes with him, and is trying to match his campiness, but is mostly floundering because Carrey has taken control of all his scenes. So while Carrey is partly successful at camp, and is playing his character as very very gay, Jones is failing.

Of course it's not clear who was the keenest on intentional camp, Carrey or director Joel Schumacher, but it seems that Schumacher couldn't carry off that level of intentional camp on his own. The next film "Batman and Robin" tried for massive camp throughout, but was a failure on every possible level. Well, except maybe for Uma Thurman dancing her way out of a gorilla suit, a la Marlene Dietrich.

Shelly Winters in What's the Matter With Helen?

Doris Day goes for broke in Midnight Lace. There was a viewing thread recently on this film and much discussion of Doris's performance.

Whatever you thought of it, you cannot deny, SHE GOES FOR BROKE. The staircase breakdown and the elevator panic are two scenes that almost have to be seen to be believed.

I think she is fantastic in the film. It's a Ross Hunter production, so there's no sense in dialing it down, and she sure as fuck doesn't.

The elevator scene almost feels ahead of its time, like from the 70s.

Meredith Baxter as Betty Broderick

^

"Liar, liar, pants on fire"

Jessica Walter in "Bare Essence", also in "Play Misty for Me". Here she is insulting Genie Francis: "You simple self-deceiving creature". She also informs that she's pregnant. Now that's camp.

Karen Black in Trilogy of Terror

Bette Midler in For The Boys.

Cloris Leachman , Anne Francis & Donna Mills in Haunts of the Very Rich.

I think a ton of the old ABC Movies of the Week are camp, for better or worse.

What about Karen Black as Rayette Dipesto?

Joan Crawford & Suzy Parker in The Best Everything

Raquel Welch in Fantastic Voyage

Lena Olin & Frank Langella in The Ninth Gate

Annette Bening in Bugsy

The BRILLIANT late Susan Tyrell. In anything,

LOVED HER as Solly Mosler in the camptastic Angel from 1984.

Days of Our Lives Stella Lombard

Of course that story was the start of Days infamous camp turn during the 90's.

Ugly Betty

Don't forget about me!

Many of these suggestions point to the death of camp. Shows like Ugly Betty or possession storylines on daytime soaps point toward a mocking of the material or of the audience, which is antithetical to true camp, which really was born of a gay outsider sensibility that has been slipping away with increasing acceptance in mainstream society.

You win some, you lose some. Sometimes simultaneously.

I am still intrigued by the suggestion upthread of something new and perhaps more masculine, not camp exactly, but like camp, in the vein of the preposterous Christian Bale performances of Batman.

Something faintly fascinating happened between the Joel Schumacher Batman Forever debacle, which exemplifies how conscious camp fails by definition, and the deathly solemn Christopher Nolan Batmans.

The former begs us to laugh along with it, but it's laughing alone, hopelessly stale and mirthless. The latter commands us not to laugh, positioning itself as purposefully mirthless. It's so serious that when one takes a step back and sees grown men parading around in animal costumes one-upping one another's masculinity, the absurdity of not only the material but the approach to it becomes the real show. How could anyone accept this, I wonder, and that circles back to camp. Or something like it.

I think the problem with the new Batman and Superman movies is that they have absolutely no joy to them at all. They qualify as camp in many aspects, but they are not enjoyable on any level except for those to whom their (often nihilistic) appeal is directed, which disqualifies them and demands a new genre.

Ann Baxter in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS -- camp at its best.

Carrie Snodgress and Ray Milland in The Attic

A TOUCH OF PINK: Rock Hudson plays a straight man playing a gay man. Everyone in Hollywood is in on the joke.

I'd be fascinated to hear how you think Milo Yiannopoulos stands in relation to camp and postmodernity generally

*'Postmodernism

****

YouTube comments

"did anyone ever think they would live to see a auditorium full of conservatives/republicans give a standing ovation to a flaming Faggot in drag singing the national anthem"

"This is American conservatism now. What the fuck is going on? It's great."

-- Actually I'd say a room full of neo nazi adjacents. But whatevs. Something weird is going on in the culture. Iromy is dead or a campy zombie?

I now have a long list of movies to watch in addition to both Valley of The Dolls films and Myra Breckinridge.

Michael Caine and Angie Dickinson in "Dressed to Kill."

Actually, a lot of De Palma's work falls within the "actors succeeding in high camp" category.

Some people can be great doing self-aware camp, like Tim Curry in "Rocky Horror Picture Show," Rosalind Russell in "The Women," and Charles Busch in just about everything he's ever done. But it takes a really sure comic hand and a lot of skill to keep it from being boring or too obvious.

I would view "Another Gay Movie" and its sequel and "Mame" (the Lucille Ball musical) as self-aware camp that is very, very amateurishly done (and thus nearly unwatchable).

"Auntie Mame" sort of borders the two worlds. Rosalind Russell and Peggy Cass have almost no surprise left in their performances, and so sometimes they get tedious, despite the great lines; but Joanna Barnes as Gloria Upson seems to be saying all her lines as they come to her and is absolutely hilarious in every scene she's in because she says her lines in such surprisingly original ways (e.g. "What's WRONG with Muriel Puce?").

Tell more about Brian de Palma's actors and camp.

I recently watched The Fury from '78 and found Kirk Douglas to be quite hammy, though campy, I'm not sure about.

Amy Irving was really the star of the show, and while her performance was mostly subtle and engendered my sympathy, it didn't make me think of camp until I saw some of the stills, in which she looks wildly over the top. It fascinates me what an actor can do with a part. The stills expose the role for sheer camp or crap that it should be, while the actual performance doesn't quite make the camp grade, partially because it is better than the material without wholly exposing it as lesser.

r251, what on earth do we call that? I'm perplexed by the motivation, the reception, and the mere existence of the performance.

We are at a juncture that my childhood/teenaged self could never have imagined - for better or for worse.

Another case of a non-camp performance in a camp (or crap) film: Maureen Stapleton in Airport.

The rest of the cast seems hellbent on caricatures and plasticity (Helen Hayes, Burt Lancaster, etc...), but there's Stapleton in the thick of it, giving a tremendously sympathetic portrayal of a real human being.

She throws off the tone of the film with her talent and compassion for character in every scene she's in.

Every blessed person in every scene of "Touch of Evil." Welles, Dietrich, Heston, Leigh, Tamiroff - it's a master class in high, high camp. It's a pile of beans expressed through parodic noir like that Kopi Luwak coffee passes a civet's digestive tract before being packaged.

It is SUPREME CAMP, and the performers are at their absolute worst-best.

Watch it, r259.

Susan Hayward and Bette Davis in Where Love Has Gone

Ernest Borgnine in Go Naked in the World

Mercedes McCambridge in A Touch of Evil as a sadistic diesel dyke in leather.

I think just about everyone in the film knew what was happening except Charlton Heston playing a Mexican.

Mercedes McCambridge and Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar

Stephen Boyd in Ben-Hur

Ann Savage in Detour. Brilliance.

This thread proves that high camp, at least in the United States peaked somewhere between the 1950's and the mid to latish 1980's. Everyone in Hollywood is too paranoid to seem offbeat anymore. Only the straight faced, sober, dead serious get careers going... Boring.

The actors are sadly the visionaries now days that's why modern day re-tellings of camp classics like 'Mildred Peirce' and 'Flowers in the Attic' fall so flat. Actors are only concerned about winning awards and their ego's coming out in tact that the product suffers badly as a consequence.

The real problem is that everyone is in on it: the writers, the actors, and most of all, the audience. Camp isn't gay anymore. It's mainstream; it isn't for the outsider looking in from an off-kilter vantage point.

What is purposefully produced as camp is transparent and boring.

Everyone in Desert Fury

Sharon Stone is a throwback to movie stars giving their all to a part because she gives it her all no matter the role. She's absolutely gleaming with pretense and focus.

I used to think she would have made a perfect Lana Turner for a biopic, but her onscreen persona is more Joan Crawford than Turner. She's often awful, but always magnetic and highly watchable.

Basic Instinct 2 is Sharon Stone at her most Sharon Stone. It's not a particularly good film (though nowhere as bad as critics claimed), but Stone is a wonder in it, non-stop vamping and strutting, all while trying to convince of her underlying murderous menace.

Below is a photo of her character in therapy on the psychiatrist's couch. Even the couch is camp.

To me, there is usually an element of failure in much of true camp performance - striving and falling short in some respect, laying bare another facet of the acting, be it runaway narcissism, mindbending miscasting, or gloriously misguided interpretation of character.

It's failure, but in real camp, it's making that failure into unintended art.

There is also a line between outright schlock and camp.

Sometimes the bar is already so low, that a wrongheaded or simply bad performance actually suits the project.

I implore everyone to watch this mercifully hyper-condensed two-minute version of Deadly Twins, also known as Deadly Trigger OR Deadly Avengers, an eighties German production starring the Landers sisters. It is inept in every sense, so the performances of Audrey and especially Judy miss the mark of camp, and instead fall into the category of numbingly awful, though entertaining in the sense of watching a group of earnest kindergartners write and act out their own production.

R264 DETOUR is brilliant.

R270 Crawford in BERSERK. Incredible...how about TROG?

Crawford in Trog - YES.

When I was a wee gayling, maybe ten years old, I would run home from school to watch the afternoon movie on TV, which was usually a semi-classic, but sometimes settled for featuring a once-classic star in a very unclassic film. Such was the case when I discovered Trog on the screen. My curiosity had been more than piqued by the blurb in TV Guide, so my expectations were high, but not for a camp extravaganza; instead, I was looking forward to seeing a real movie star playing a lady scientist opposite a short-statured Bigfoot.

AND THAT IS WHAT I GOT.

I think most people miss this because they are looking at camp through the wrong lens. You have to see camp for what it intends to be, not just what it turns out to be.

I had tears streaming down my cheeks at the end of Trog, not of laughter, which would be the result today, but of compassion for the misunderstood but murderous troglodyte and the passionate scientist who tenderly tamed him with a baby doll but in the end couldn't save her beloved cave creature.

It worked because Crawford sold it. It's what she did in the 1920s as a flapper and it's what she did at tail end of her career in sub-standard horror. She brought her movie-star persona and charisma to the role, period.

Camp is about commitment more than quality. Often the discrepancy between the two makes it fucking magic.

Joan accords her final co-star an intent, questioning, almost searing gaze that might have bestowed on former leads like Clark Gable or Spencer Tracy.

There is also the repeated misplacement of classic and glamourous film star in low-grade science fiction. The jarring career turn is part of the camp appeal, but not the whole of it.

The fact that Joan Crawford approaches this with such seriousness and sincerity speaks volumes to how much she fervently believes in her own stardom.

There's been some terrific posts in here clarifying vague notions I've had about camp but had not been able to articulate, particularly in relation to Joan Crawford and Sharon Stone. I think they are two peas in a pod, though I think Stone's viewpoint is fundamentally more cyncial than Crawford because she came of age in an era post-Camp, but still all the best ingredients of Crawford can be found in most of Stone's post-Basic Instinct body of work, 'Diabolique' in particular.

Camp is just caricature.

This thread is fascinating.

The first film that came to mind for me was "Robin Hood : Prince of Thieves." The British cast members like Alan Rickman and Geraldine McEwan, know the script is ridiculous and give marvelous campy performances. The US cast, Costner, Mary Elizabeth Mastriantonio, Christian Slater etc, take it all very seriously, which leads to inadvertent camp.

Rickman saves the film. He even shouts "No camp, no nothing!" at one point.

r278, see r15 for a similar Euro/US phenomenon with Flash Gordon from 1980.

The European cast plays it very self-aware; the American actors are wide-eyed throughout.

In particular, Max von Sydow is incomparable as Ming, but far too knowing to qualify as camp.

Sam J. Jones, on the other hand...

Hapless Americans as sex toys for the royal court of Ming.

Something quite similar was happening in Barbarella with Americans Jane Fonda and John Philip Law, both of whom were exploding with naive sexiness at the hands of the far more sophisticated and non-naively sexy Ugo Tognazzi and Anita Pallenberg.

There is something ingrained in the relationship of Europe to the US that plays out in much of cinema, right down to performances in sci-fi films.

Sontag presumed a little too much to define camp as narrowly as she did.

Presentation or apparent presentation of naivete or willful commitment to convey naivete or a desire to affect a campy appearance or seeming to want to deliver a camp performance while actually delivering a different camp performance - all of that is fine, but the suggestion that camp MUST be, if it contains awareness, judgment or other indications of intelligence, "sweet" is just another twat trying to define something her way while reality is elsewhere.

She never got anything quite right. Including symptoms.

Camp is coded, sometimes in the deliverer but ALWAYS in the receiver. Code may be inadvertent or anachronistic. But it can be as savage as a maniac's razor. The final moments of SUNSET BOULEVARD contain one of the greatest series of camp moments in film history, leading up to the dazzling, ridiculous, complex, silly and devastating close-up.

Swanson, in providing a self-aware skewering of herself, her character, her colleagues, her life and the life she had and the life she tried to pretend to have, hands us nothing of a kiss-kiss kind camp, but a transcendent camp. It is not mere satire, parody, melodrama or tragedy. It is sublimely campy.

Suck it, dead white woman. You weren't gay enough to get camp in its fullness. So I suggest Gloria Swanson's Norma as an example of someone "succeeding in (a) high camp performance."

R283 just wrote the campiest post on this thread

I'll bite, r283.

Does camp still exist in currently produced work or has it died?

Tab Hunter in Lust in the Dust. It revived his career for a little while.

When I watch something like former movie queen Joan Bennett caterwauling while clutching a dismembered mannequin arm, I always wonder what their initial reaction was when first handed the script.

Did she just read through it matter-of-factly and think about how the scene would be blocked?

Or did she meditate for just one moment, on her career trajectory, from starring in classic film noirs directed by Fritz Lang and Jean Renoir to playing third banana to a vampire and a witch on a daytime soap? Was it that stark disparity that fueled the horror she conveyed as she stood there, in the twilight of her career, screaming with a department store dummy's detached arm in her hand?

Or maybe she looked at the scene and thought, "Fun! I haven't gotten to shriek on camera like this in over two decades!"

Another Joan movie queen, Joan Crawford, gave the world the most fleeting but intense piece of camp when she muscled her way into her daughter's soap role when the latter was hospitalized with an ovarian tumor.

JC's reaction to being cast opposite a handsome, decades-younger leading man: "Isn't he beautiful, I thought to myself. So be 24."

Camp can also have an aspect of ego and desire on the part of the creator or conveyor: how Joan viewed herself and willed herself to be beautiful and 24 when she was a late-middle-aged alcoholic faded actress. We see (or in this case, sadly, only hear) something strikingly, alarmingly different from how Joan imagines she presents. It's a fantastic failure of magnificent egotism and vanity.

If we could watch it, Datalounge might crash for an entire day.

Male movie stars reach for equally absurd attention all the time. Case in point: Septuagenarian Sylvester Stallone in last year's Rambo: Last Blood.

The original incarnation of Rambo was full of strident American macho posturing. It was preposterous then, but commonplace enough to pass without excessive ridicule, and in the Zeitgeist of the 1980s, somehow acceptable and believable.

In 2019, however, asking the audience to go along with a brawling action hero who received his AARP card over two decades ago leaves little room for anything other than ridicule.

It's not quite camp, however, because there's nothing to appreciate about it. Just bombast and an insistence or maintaining a tired status quo via the domination of an elderly white man through violence.