Cult Movie #2: Adrienne Barbeau

1997 — The future. The crime rate has risen 400%.

North America is a police state. New York City is a maximum security prison. Fires burn in Manhattan, gangs kill for sport, violence reigns. In the midst of the city’s black streets is Maggie: strong, loyal and compassionate. In a world of fascists, mercenaries and crazies she is the last vestige of unbeaten humanity. But then in ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, Maggie is played by Adrienne Barbeau, and from her we can expect nothing less.

Barbeau has been acting steadily since the early 70s. Her career has been varied and displays the versatility of a skilled actress. She’s sung in GREASE, won the Cannonball Run, dated a Swamp Creature, married Rodney Dangerfield, tried to kill Isaac Hayes, danced with a snake and flirted and fought with Gotham City’s Dark Knight.

Underneath all of these performances lays a strength that Barbeau cannot hide. Perhaps it’s her Armenian decent; perhaps that she has lived a full and occasionally difficult life. Her parents divorced when she was 12, she lived alone in New York at the age of 19, she was a Go-Go dancer in mafia run restaurants, she’s been a working single mother, gave birth to twins at 51 and in an industry that is both sexist and ageist has defied the odds by producing quality work well into her early 60s.

Barbeau is beautiful and alluring. But she is also intelligent and determined; something that must have troubled Hollywood in the early 80s. In an era of muscle bound heroes Barbeau was one woman who didn’t need rescuing. She found a place in 1981’s testosterone driven CANNONBALL RUN, but on the grounds that she display her ample cleavage and let Burt Reynolds make tit jokes.

The film is strictly boys own stuff (fast cars and faster women.) Barbeau’s character may have won the race, but she was too tenacious to be a tangible love interest for Reynolds’ JJ McClure. That was left to Farrah Fawcett, the kind of cute, ditzy and ultimately vacuous girl that the moustachioed alpha male could feel comfortable with (i.e. superior to).

Her big break came on stage with a Tony nominated performance in the original Broadway production of GREASE. TV work followed. MAUDE, a sitcom spin off from ALL THE FAMILY (big in America but all but unheard of in the UK) ran for six years and turned Barbeau into a household face, if not name, in a way that only television can. After MAUDE, Barbeau appeared in a number of one-off TV movies, the best of which, 1978s SOMEONE’S WATCHING ME was written and directed by John Carpenter.

SOMEONE’S WATCHING ME was only a supporting part; Lauren Hutton took the lead. The film is a suspenseful Hitchcockian thriller about a woman being stalked in her high rise apartment. Barbeau played Sophie, the doomed best friend. Her character is revealed early on to be a lesbian, but both Barbeau and Carpenter avoid the stereotypical trapping that often befall homosexual characters onscreen.

Sophie clearly doesn’t need men (and when Leigh reveals she is being stalked, is the only person to believe her instantly and to stick around when she needs help) but nor does she hate them, and becomes friendly with Leigh’s boyfriend. She is stalwart, yet sexy and fun. Early on she tells Hutton’s character Leigh about her sexuality, but reassures her by stating, “Don’t worry, you’re not my type.”

The self assuredness that could so easily intimidate was the very thing that attracted Carpenter. A long time devotee of the western, Carpenter had a particular soft spot for Howard Hawks, the director of RED RIVER and RIO BRAVO. Hawks became famous for his portrayal of resolute women; professionals who could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the boys. Women like Rosalind Russell, who does the job of reporting better than most men in Hawks’ HIS GIRL FRIDAY. In a 1980 interview Carpenter said of Barbeau:

“I’ve kind of been looking for a Hawks woman. And I finally found one!”

He not only made her his leading lady, he also married her. In THE FOG, Barbeau, and an ensemble cast featuring Tom Atkins, Jamie Leigh Curtis, Janet Leigh and Hal Holbrook, finds herself terrorized by an evil entity hiding in the mist.

Barbeau’s character is a single mother and the owner of an isolated lighthouse/come radio station. On air she is flirtatious, “Keep me turned on for a while and I’ll try to do the same for you.” Her voice is as smooth and as easy as the jazz records she plays. Off air she gets the job done; hair tied back and sleeves rolled up - changing records, getting weather reports and keeping things rolling.

As the horror descends, she watches from her lighthouse and uses the radio to direct the townsfolk to safety. Stevie is their only hope and accepts this role willingly and without complaint, despite knowing that her son is still out in the fog. When the demons come for her, she stands alone, never calling for help, never needing anyone but herself. The part of Stevie was written for Barbeau, and one wonders how much of the real person Carpenter put into the screenplay. Stevie is smart, sensuous and strong. But Barbeau is these things too. Always has been.

If anything THE FOG showed that Barbeau could carry a movie, and along with Tom Atkins is the most interesting and dynamic character onscreen. She had all the warmth and beauty a leading lady requires, so why wasn’t she bigger? Why didn’t she become a movie star on the level of her ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK co-star Kurt Russell? Perhaps it was her inability to be dominated by men in a male dominated industry.

ESCAPE was her final movie with Carpenter. Her role as Maggie was small, but she is able to do so much with it – turning the character into a gun wielding heroine on par with Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley. When the United States President crash lands in the maximum security prison of New York, badass anarchist Snake Plissken (Russell) is the only man who can get him out. He’s got 24 hours. Maggie is already there (we never find out why.) She’s, “The Brain’s (Harry Dean Stanton) squeeze,” given to Brain to keep him happy. Yet Maggie belongs to no one.

She is feisty and voluptuous, enticing yet deadly; ready to spill Snake’s guts with a boot knife when he threatens Brain with a machine gun. She is his bodyguard, but also something more. One senses a deep respect and perhaps even love. They communicate through glances, eyes that say everything. She is ready to die for him.

When the group finally make their escape, they are pursued by the City’s gangster boss The Duke (Isaac Hayes.) Brain is killed by a land mine and Maggie not only loses her lover, but has also failed to do her job. As her eyes fill with tears, she reaches out to Snake, demanding his gun. For a second they share a look - an understanding. They’re two professionals still struggling to be human in a world gone to hell. Snake hands her the gun. She turns, pulls back the hammer and stands alone against The Duke’s approaching car. Her heartbreak has become a ferocious rage and she opens fire.

In the early 80s Barbeau would work with two other masters of horror. For Wes Craven she appeared in DC Comic adaptation SWAMP THING and her ability to take the material seriously (after all it is a story about a man who becomes a vegetable with superpowers) lends the film a credibility that is severely damaged by the monster’s cheap looking rubber suit.

In George A. Romero’s horror anthology CREEPSHOW, Barbeau deliberately abandoned her usual naturalness is favour of an outrageous caricature in keeping with the films EC comic vibe. She plays Wilma (“Just call me, Billie. Everyone does,”) a screeching and abusive lush who verbally belittles her hen-pecked husband. “Get outta my way, Henry or I swear to God you’ll be wearing your balls for earrings.” When her husband eventually feeds her to an oversized mutant Tasmanian devil, we can sort of understand why.

Over the next few years her cinematic appearances would become less frequent. She played a variation on CREEPSHOW’s shrew wife in the Rodney Dangerfield vehicle BACK TO SCHOOL and once again teamed up with George Romeo for TWO EVIL EYES. But her career was finding more prominence back on the small screen.

In the sumptuous and award-winning BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES, Barbeau voiced the adventuress and sexual Catwoman. Barbeau, with her own unique brand a feminine power, was a natural choice and if BATMAN RETURNS had been made in the early 80s, she would have been perfect.

The 90s saw Barbeau appear in a number of genre films, clearly produced by filmmakers who knew her as Maggie or Stevie Wayne. 1995s BURIAL OF THE RATS was fast and cheap, yet THE CONVENT was more impressive. The film is a neat piece of horror high camp, in which a group of deliberately stereotypical teenage dumbbells (Goths, Jocks, nerds and bitches) get picked off one-by-one by demonic nuns. Barbeau plays Christine, a motorcyclin’, no nonsense hard-ass who’s taken down the demon nuns before.

She carries a small arsenal and takes on the ghouls without hesitation. “I’m gonna walk in and blow the shit out of em,” she screams and when her bullets run out, she just squishes their heads until thick gloop oozes out of their noses. She’s like the female equivalent of Bruce Campbell’s Ash from the EVIL DEAD series.

Today Barbeau is still going strong. She ended up on the cutting room floor in Rob Zombies’ HALLOWEEN but has appeared on stage in THE PROPERTY KNOWN AS GARLAND and was a regular in TVs weird and Lynchian CARNIVALE. Few women could be as erotic dancing with a snake at the age of 58.

As well as acting, Barbeau has also proved herself to be a skilled writer, penning a revealing and intimate autobiography in 2006 entitled There are Worse Things I could Do. More stage work beckons, but the movies surely aren’t done with Barbeau yet. There are still demons to fight, Presidents to save and races to win. Sometimes when the world needs saving, it requires a woman’s touch.

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