Breezy

Another fine 70s adult character drama with typically rich details, compelling characterization and seemingly aimless pacing representative of that great and celebrated era in American movies.

Directed with inspired understatement by Clint Eastwood early in his film-making career and with a well crafted script it's an excellent spin on the older man/young girl conflict set in photogenic LA.

Kay Lenz so winning and charming as the free spirited idealistic temptress. With his fabulously craggy face and usual smoky boozy sincere caustic growl William Holden created another memorable portrait of aging dispirited masculinity.

If I had seen it last year I would have certainly been shrieking it's virtues during my rant against Lost in Translation.

Breezy (1973)

Never mind the Clint Eastwood penchant for having old men sleep with young women. This is a fairly nuanced story about exactly that problem—and it's a problem on one level or another when two people fall in love who are very different in age.

It also helps that veteran, 54 year old actor William Holden pulls off a delicate, charming, perfectly grumpy performance as the older guy—someone with a beautiful house in the hills near Hollywood, but where he won't be found floating dead in the pool at the end, or the beginning. Yes, this is the Holden of "Sunset Blvd." It feels odd to remind people (some of you) about an actor who was once, briefly, both a screen idol and an box office success. His rocky career never quite reached its intended peak, but there are some really fine roles he took on with surprising ease and sincerity. This is one of them.

The young woman in this case is Kay Lenz, a little known actress (19 at the time) with some television and a tiny part in "American Graffiti" under her belt before the director pulled her in for this role, which fits her like a glove. The very naive purity of the character is exactly what this actress seems to actually have in excess. When she meets Holden early in the film, they are exactly opposites—except that they are both deep down very kind. And so the differences become ways to learn and grow— especially for the old man, who doesn't quite get the hippie mentality for its better sides.

The plot actually fits into a few clichés a little too easily, and overall it's a bit simple. The details around the couple—her friends and his—are tossed in like peanuts on the ice cream, and the movie is worse for it. Holden is meant to struggle with being, on the surface, a kind of child molester, but it is carried only in his face, not in the external conversations. (Luckily this is enough.) The utter naiveté of Lenz's girl, named Breezy, leaves us with less to do inside her head, which is too bad because she seems smart and street smart, both. There was more here by far than gets plumbed.

Another aspect that makes this worth watching is the feeling of 1970 or so in the overall scenario. (The movie was filmed in 1972 but the hippies, and the clash of cultures, feels a couple years earlier.) Unlike some movies where the mis-en-scene feels timeless from this New Hollywood period ("Five Easy Pieces" perhaps), this movie is particularly dated, and that might be a good thing. It's so much about the era, and a product of it, that is drips with symbols from the time.

It also drips with sappy folk-rock music for a soundtrack, which is a product of the time and of Eastwood's lifelong attempt to make music in his movies pull from "real music" including his own compositions. It's a distraction here.

Despite all the gaffes and shortcomings, "Breezy" is really worth watching for all that works, especially the shimmering, contrasting main characters.

Clint Eastwood's 2nd directorial effort is a gentle, pleasant surprise that probably will evoke a completely different reaction if one were to observe a strict adherence to societal norms. A 50 plus well-to-do business guy with a 19-year-old hippie drifter? Not necessarily uncommon but in this film the girl's not in it for the money and the guy's not in it for the sex. They genuinely love and cherish each other, and strangely, this is the element of controversy.

William Holden plays Frank, a cynical divorced real estate broker who lives by himself with only a series of uncommitted relationships for companionship and a mental rulebook that precludes serious involvement. He is likewise surrounded by like-minded cynics that all want for something they have long since given up on . . . youth. Not so much in chronological terms, but more in attitude and that sense of wonder about life. Breezy is the very embodiment of that sense of wonder, and despite her 19 years, possesses a wisdom that cuts through the cynical disillusionment of Frank, who unlike what you'd expect, never makes a sexual advance toward the younger girl, even though she's very attractive and probably willing. For her part, Breezy recognized the sensitive soul that Frank has taken pains to suppress and confounds his suspicions by giving of herself to him without asking for anything in return. When he eventually gives in to his feelings, the age difference becomes irrelevant, but Breezy and Frank do not exist in a vacuum and the outside world eventually fills his head with doubt. His best friend, while being envious of the "zing " Breezy has put into Frank's life, laments thus: "Why should a young girl like that love an old fart like me? I'd be a meal ticket for her and nothing more." And even if it could be more, "where could I go with her without feeling like a child molester?" And so Frank smolders in a crisis of perception that already had been countered by Breezy in an earlier scene. "Is that how it is Frankie? Do you start believing what you see in the mirror and forget about what you feel inside? Do you stop feeling because the outside of you makes it seem foolish? Does becoming older mean feeling foolish? What's there to look forward to if you can't go on loving and being loved?" Surely this bit of wisdom transcends any distance of years between two people.

I have to echo some of the other comments here and say that this great film SHOULD BE RE-RELEASED ON VHS AND DVD!! ARE you listening Mr Eastwood??! A wonderful cross generational love story that doesn't ring a false note, I'm glad I was able to find a copy of the unedited for TV version since I've only seen a TV edited version some years ago and it stuck in my head....it's that good a film and I recommend it to all!

One of Clint Eastwood's early yet still obscure directorial efforts, `Breezy' gently and charmingly explores the nature of wisdom, which can be present in the most unusual of people and the real meaning of happiness, which is usually found in the oddest and least-expected of places, usually when one is not looking for it.

Amid the smoldering cultural wreckage of the recently-ended 1960s with its nagging remnants of the shrill `don't trust anyone over 30' crowd and the seemingly still-unbridgeable `generation gap,' the odd and quirky relationship between the youthful, Ophelia-like Edith Alice `Breezy' Breezerman (Lenz) and the middle-aged Frank Harmon (Holden) successfully and simultaneously reveals several very simple but still frequently-ignored truths; that shrewdness and insight are not necessarily the sole province of the `aged' and that a carefree, happy spontaneity isn't and shouldn't be automatically restricted to the `young.' And, more subtly, we also are quietly reminded that neither wisdom nor happiness can realistically exist isolated from one another and that the bitter memories of our own respective pasts can often tragically prevent us from getting what we truly need the most.

Like the Italian neo-realist director Sergio Leone under which Eastwood successfully toiled in the 1960s, the personalities of the film's characters are deliberately and slowly intensified but not over-presented or stereotyped, which adds to the power, insight and poignancy of this understated and well-produced film.