Did you hear the one about the serial killer who went on a game show?
True story. In 1978, Rodney Alcala appeared as a contestant on “The Dating Game” during a decade-long career of rape and murder. He won, but the bachelorette who chose him backed out of the date, creeped out by his “weird vibes.” Alcala was arrested in 1979 and eventually found guilty of killing seven women; he may have slain as many as 130. He died in prison in 2021.
How do you make a movie about this story? Do you spin it as a thriller, a true-crime drama, a horror film, a sick pop-culture joke? Actress and Portland native Anna Kendrick, making her debut as a director, does something fascinating. She juggles all four and then adds a fifth layer undergirding the others: the unceasing dread that comes from being a woman who knows men like Rodney Alcala are out there.
Lately, that notion has been argued over in the form of the “bear or man” meme (i.e., which would you, a woman walking alone in the woods, feel more comfortable seeing coming your way?). “Woman of the Hour” reminds us that the dread goes back a lot longer than that. In fact, Kendrick, working with screenwriter and fellow Mainer Ian McDonald, invites us to ponder how long.
The director plays bachelorette Sheryl Bradshaw, a struggling actress in Los Angeles whose agent signs her up for the game show as a way for her to “get seen.” The gig is beneath Sheryl’s talents and tastes, but she’s desperate for work – it’s hard in 1978 for an actress who won’t do nudity. On-screen and backstage, “The Dating Game” is a laughable, maddening parade of hubba-hubba Me Decade misogyny, with host Ed Burke (Tony Hale, in a fictionalized riff on real-life “Dating Game” host Jim Lange) oozing smarm and condescension from his bad toupee on down. “When you get on that stage,” he tells Sheryl, “I don’t want you to play it too smart. The guys get intimidated. I just need you to laugh and smile over and over.”
The middle section of “Woman of the Hour” is played for comic revenge against this leisure-suit sexism, with Sheryl tossing the leering cue-card questions prepared by the producers in the second round and improvising her own brainy, sassy variations, delighting the audience, infuriating the host and confounding the three bachelors. One of them is a genial moron (Matt Visser), another a preening stud (Jedidiah Goodacre), and the third is Alcala (Daniel Zovatto, the Prophet in HBO’s “Station Eleven” miniseries), who responds to Sheryl’s question “What are girls for?” by answering, “I suppose that’s up to the girl.” In 1978, that was downright evolved.
By then, of course, we know what Alcala is capable of doing to girls. In queasy flashbacks and flash-forwards, we’ve seen him with his ever-present camera, picking up women and asking whether they’ve thought about being models. It’s a hokey bit, but he’s witty and sympathetic and good-looking enough to lower their guards.
Yet there comes a moment in each of these scenes when we see fear come into the victims’ eyes and hear the alarm start shrieking in their heads. They understand they’ve met him – a woman’s worst-case scenario – and fight-or-flight kicks in. The casual horror of “Woman of the Hour” is that Kendrick understands the *not knowing* is her gender’s lot and always has been, and when that moment comes in Sheryl’s life – when a post-show conversation with Rodney pivots in an instant from pleasantries to weird – you can feel the bottom fall out of her stomach and the entire movie. The fear is that palpable.
Let’s talk for a minute about why Anna Kendrick isn’t a bigger star. If you were there at the beginning – if you saw her on Broadway when she was 12 in “High Society” or watched her take Sondheim’s “The Ladies Who Lunch” to the absolute cleaners in her film debut, “Camp” (2003), when she was 17 – you know the actress can do just about anything. Maybe she was born at the wrong time: In the era of the great studios, Kendrick might have been a valued triple threat like, I don’t know, Ginger Rogers – she sings, she dances, she can do drama and comedy.
And now she not only directs but directs ably, finessing the tonal shifts of “Woman of the Hour” like a skier on a slalom course and playing the lead with a nervy, brittle intelligence that makes Sheryl seem a smart but very lucky member of a terrible sisterhood. (So maybe Kendrick’s the Ida Lupino of her generation, moving from movie star to hard-boiled proto-feminist filmmaker. There are worse careers to model – and movies, like this one, that deserve to do more than go straight to Netflix.)
That sisterhood is represented elsewhere in “Woman of the Hour” not just by Alcala’s victims, played by Kelley Jakle, Kathryn Gallagher and Autumn Best – the last a standout as a quick-thinking runaway teen – but by all the women in the movie’s lens. It includes Laura (Nicolette Robinson), who met Rodney Alcala once when he went off with a best friend she never saw again and a second time when she was in the “Dating Game” audience – a subplot that involves her trying to get someone, anyone, to listen. And it includes the show’s makeup woman (Denalda Williams), a mother hen who’s seen bachelors come and bachelors go over 17 years of telecasts and who clues Sheryl in on what every bachelorette really wants to know.
“No matter what words they use,” she says, “the question beneath the question remains the same.
“‘Which one of you will hurt me?’”
Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.
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