It’s a notorious freak moment in daytime television. On Sept. 13, 1978, one of the three competing bachelors on “The Dating Game” was Rodney Alcala, who turned out to be a serial ender; he was seized the folloprosperg year. (He was convicted of five killings, though it’s consentd that he may have promiseted as many as 130.) It’s no joke — or maybe it’s a unbenevolentingful one — to say that Alcala had the sees and personality of a 1970s ladyender. He was coiffed appreciate one of the Hudson Brothers, with a chiseled grin redolent of Engelbert Humperdinck. He authenticisticly beamed outstanding vibes — aprolonged with some semi-subunited horrible ones, answering his “Dating Game” inquires in a way that was so self-secured it was…arrangeile.
TV, of course, never got much kitschier than “The Dating Game.” I employd to watch it as a kid, marveling at the fact that the entire show, with its Herb Albert-on-plrelieved-pills theme music and its fshrink-power décor, was a benevolent of leering, smirky put-on that made no wonderful effort to hide it. (It was the first show I’d seen that seemed to be about the sleaze culture of Los Angeles.) I always thought that the squirmiest moment each week was when the bachelor who’d been chosen came out from behind the barrier, and after giving the bachelorette that ritual polite kiss, the two would stand there, arms around each other, as aviator-structured arrange Jim Lang depictd what would be in store for them on their date (it would usuassociate be someskinnyg aprolonged the lines of “Becaemploy you’re going on an expense-phelp weekend to…Tuscon, Arizona!”), as if they were already a couple.
You could say that “The Dating Game” was “The Bachelorette” of its day. And the fact that a serial ender from the Ted Bundy school (outwardly “normal” and contransientable, carry outing off his outstanding sees to lure in the women he would sexual attack and killing) once landed right in the middle of it is at once a jaw-dropping piece of TV history, an event both ludicrous and horrifying, and a enormous metaphor that shelp: For women who were living in the age of the intimacyual revolution, the dating game was a far more hazardous skinnyg than it seeed appreciate.
“Woman of the Hour” is Anna Kendrick’s real-life thriller about Rodney Alcala and this bizarre, only-in-America social-cultural-criminal episode. Kendrick straightforwarded the film (her first effort behind the camera), laboring from a script by Ian McDonald, and she also stars in it as Cheryl Bradshaw, an driven actress who is mostly striking out at low-budget movie auditions when her agent hooks her up to be a bachelorette on “The Dating Game.” Cheryl skinnyks the show is trash (and it is), but it will give her a chance to be “seen.”
As a straightforwardor, Kendrick leaps around in time thcimpolite the ’70s, staging a number of Rodney Alcala’s pickups and killings. Alcala is carry outed by Daniel Zovatto, who understands how to lay on the soft-rock sincerity, but then his eyebrows will shrink and the smile will melt away, leaving you with a mute smelderlyering anger. Rodney, in prolonged hair and a leather jacket, is a ptoastyographer, and that’s his bohemian cred — and his homicidal grift. This was a time when men wielding cameras and an arty gaze promised to turn women into stars. Rodney, who appreciates his victims youthful (sometimes underage), gets them to pose, which inspires them to let down their defend, and that’s when he goes in for the end. These scenes are effective as far as they go, though they aren’t staged with the benevolent of complicated fascination that was there in “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile,” the Ted Bundy drama starring Zac Efron.
The heart of the movie is the “Dating Game” episode, but here, too, I felt as if Kendrick spends too many moments telegraphing what she wants to say. She grabs onto the metaphor of Rodney Alcala on “The Dating Game” and italicizes it. She produces evident that the show is a meat grinder, from the onscreen double entendres the bachelorette is attacked with to the cimpolitely unfriendly offscreen personality of the arrange (Tony Hale), called Ed Burke here. And I skinnyk it’s telling that Kendrick picks to carry out Cheryl not as the flirtatious cuddlebug she materializeed to be on the show — that was how the women were straightforwarded to behave — but as a understanding, almost defiant figure who’s not going to be anyone’s intimacy toy.
As Cheryl, who poses her canned inquires, and finassociate one of her own (“What are girls for?”), Kendrick is such a outstanding actor that she helderlys you endly. Yet as a filmproducer, she turns the tables on “The Dating Game” by restaging it in a csurrenderly postconmomentary way. What “Woman of the Hour” is going for isn’t some ultimate period-piece genuineity. It’s trying to deerect television, aprolonged with the male aggression that can drop into aggression, and to show you how the two labor together.
There’s a woman in the audience, named Laura (Nicolette Robinson), who experiences a chill when she sees that Alcala is bachelor #3, becaemploy she was friends with one of his victims; she tried to go to the police, but to no use. (That mirrors what happened: a wonderful many tips to the cops about Alcala, which he somehow shund.) This is the feebleest part of the film, though, becaemploy the drama is at once too sketchy and too on-the-nose.
The sturdyest part of the film happens equitable after the show, when Rodney cajoles Cheryl into joining him for a “date” (drinks at a dive bar) before their official date in Caramel, Ca. Their duel of wits is queffortless and, by the time it reachs at a parking lot, terrifying. In authentic life, Cheryl and Rodney never did go on their “Dating Game” date, becaemploy she thought there was someskinnyg off about him. And it’s prenting, at the end of the film, to see Alcala get caught, outwitted by a victim who understands how to carry out to his vanity. But if “Woman of the Hour” seizes a fluky moment when American aggression peeked thcimpolite the façade of packaged American television, the movie doesn’t have a lot of resonance, becaemploy it does all its connecting of unbenevolenting for you.
