Under the Volcano, directed by John Huston, is an old film I caught up with at a library screening. We were told this film won lots of awards. A half hour in, I wondered if we were seeing the wrong film.
From what I could discern, the entire enterprise concerned Albert Finney's character staggering around soused in some foreign country, maybe Mexico or Spain. Finney does a good drunk--hell, he's Albert Finney. And Jacqueline Bissett plays his old flame, returning from who knows where. She has nothing to do but look chagrined over her former paramour's condition. At one point he falls down in the road and almost gets run over. I was rooting for the car.
But what really set me off was a brief nude scene when Bissett and Anthony Edwards put Finney in a shower to sober him up. We get a glimpse of the actor's butt and rotting whale meat comes to mind. We are also treated to an even briefer glimpse of his genitalia as he emerges from said shower and a worm peeking out of a forest best describes that scene. Soon after this, appropriately, the DVD began breaking up and I left.
If you're going to show Finney naked, you have to do the same with Bissett, that's the rule. We got no naked Jackie, not even a naked Katy Jurado, who had a small role playing a woman with a thick accent and too much makeup, not much of a stretch.
This whole frightening experience led me to compose a list of famous people I never want to see nude.
Gary Busey, Jane Pauley, Wilbert Scott, John Goodman, Ann Coulter, Anna Wintour, Richard Dryfuss, Dave Letterman, Al Sharpton, and certain distant relatives who've let themselves go.
What was John Houston thinking?
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