Unterm Strich

This movie is basically The French Connection but instead of narcotics being the centrepiece of the movie , in Hustling ,it's prostitution. Jill Clayburgh gives an outstanding performance as Wanda the high priced hooker. At certain points she resembles Sandra Bullock. The movie is a no holds barred, save perhaps for language, portrait of life on the mean mean streets of NYC at perhaps it's most vile and dangerous time the mid- 70s. Lee Remick is her usual solid , dependable, and beautiful self as the reporter writing an expose on the lives of these desperate, and often abused women. Don't let the rating and other reviews (?) mislead . This is a lost gem of a movie. Gritty, powerful with excellent performances.

This film is based upon Gail Sheehy's pseudo-sociological book dealing with streetwalking prostitution in midtown New York, and features Lee Remick as a middle class magazine journalist who selects one particular harlot named Wanda (Jill Clayburgh) with whom she somewhat bonds in the course of investigating unsavoury real estate dealings involving socially prominent figures who ostensibly benefit from prostitution income. Despite the use of open mikes and harshly grained lighting to bring about a sense of aural and visual realism, the work suffers from a romantic approach to its subject, presenting the prostitutes and local police who arrest them as one reluctantly interlaced family, with the pimps grotesque caricatures, and the direction by Joseph Sargent vying with Jerry Fielding's jazzy score for being the most unimaginative contribution, whereas those real problems associated with this type of vice activity: venereal disease, the deleterious effect upon local business establishments, etc., are barely touched upon, indeed being submerged beneath a flurry of bootless subplots.

Casting Jill Clayburgh as a NY prostitute sounds somewhat absurd in theory, and isn't much better in practice. But back then she wasn't well-known. Normally actresses have a field day playing hookers (I wonder why...), and do it with ease, very well - even the bad actresses. It's as if they were born to play them.

Far from being a bad actress, the beautiful Jill is simply wrong for the role, yet another example that casting is an "art form" that requires brains, something a bunch of film-makers lack. She might have been convincing as a Cincinnati hooker, or a Nevadan prostitute, but that Nu Yoyk accent makes her appear to be going for laughs. Sure, there are smaller elements of humour here too, but it is predominantly a social drama. If you manage to get past Jill doing that silly accent then you can believe her. I couldn't, at least not always.

How realistic is this film? For a TV drama it's realistic, but if you'd compare it to "Serpico", for example, or "Working Girls" (not to be confused with that dumb Griffiths film), then perhaps it isn't particularly.

What I like about it is that the writers made an effort to get acquainted with the NY street scene, rather than just make up an obviously artificial world of prostitution as happens so often on the small and big screens, which would completely defeat the purpose. The ins-and-outs of 70s NY Hookerlandia are pretty well covered.

Another plus is that the outdoor scenes were shot in the 70s, on location, a year before "Taxi Driver" came out. True, TD is much grittier, not to mention stylistically brilliant, but both movies give you the "old NYC" in similar ways: the one that punks, pimps, muggers, hipsters, lunatics and liberals still long for, still weep over, because they claim "it was better that way".

Yeah, it was better: but only for "hip" observers, tourists-with-bodyguards, millionaires hidden away in limos, and others wealthy enough to waltz through those areas safe and protected from the reality of such surroundings. They didn't have to live there. When I listen to the likes of Scorsese wax poetic about the "good old days" of muggings and pimps and hookers, I don't know whether to laugh or start a petition to get him locked up in a psychiatric ward. Ditto hipster punks, they too glamourize this era, as if hookers and muggings should be a mainstay of Manhattan life! Laughable. I understand the "romantic" appeal, it's not that I don't, but some people are also enamored with Nazi Germany, but without actually HOPING for a return to that era, without becoming Nazis. They are simply fascinated by that bizarre evil world without actually craving that ideology. Why can't Scorsese and the hipsters do the same?

Another positive is that the plot isn't over-dramatized. There aren't any ridiculous bombastic plot-twists to "create conflict", but things are kept low-key i.e. Mostly realistic, or as much as a TV movie can allow for.

What I didn't like is the stereotypical portrayal of the "idealistic" journalist, doing a story for all the right reasons. Lee Remick's character is pure fiction. American journalists (and journalists in general) are anything but idealist romantics: they are cynical, greedy, over-ambitious careerists who ruin lives at the drop of a hat. Their kind is only one rung above that of defense lawyers and politicians... (It's no coincidence that so many politicians stem from these two dark professions.)

TV-made adaptation of Gail Sheehy's book about the prostitution-overflow in New York City was considered heady stuff in 1975, but time has turned the picture into trivial camp, complete with 'colorful' dialogue ("How can I bust prostitutes on a typewriter with a broken P?" ... "Try W."). Lee Remick plays that warhorse of clichés: the eager magazine writer hoping to get a juicy inside scoop. She befriends a low-class hooker for the sake of her in-depth piece, but the reporter's ultimate loss of innocence rings false within this too-clean scenario. Jill Clayburgh (in platform heels and talking with an artificial Flatbush twang) would have been far more convincing as an upscale Manhattan call-girl; here, pacing the seedy streets in her mini-skirt and fake-fur jacket, she resembles nothing more than the invasion of Hollywood, U.S.A. Some of the location shooting is well-captured, but the movie is a far cry from the gritty expose it clearly means to be; the phoniness of the characters and in the framework of the plot (de rigueur for television movies) sinks nearly all interest in the subject matter. Sheehy (who did not write the teleplay) did work as a consultant on the picture, which fails to explain Clayburgh's 'respectable' makeover at the finale and the interminable bus station farewell scene, which looks like something out of a Ginger Rogers movie.

The characters are gritty and earthy. Jill Clayburgh was desrcibd as having a new York accent so thick you could cut it with a steak knife, and for a debut role she didn't do too badly at all.

So why criticism of her Flatbush dialect I'm not sure, but I know she was from a better part of NYNY. But hey opinions make the world go round.

The scenes are very 1975 so totally amazing to see, nice canvasses of Street life and soem beautiful touches of real people peering back at the camera as it trawls the streets. Oppressive police offices manned by jerks. Aesthetically I felt drawn completely into a compelling seedy and familiar underworld, even if the plot and script was a little watery at times. That's th problem they give Lee Remick I think.

The performance of JC was a taste of things to come, Remick was a little by her best, and all the seedy cops and fleabag hotel managers an pimps play fine roles and from the totally delicious across the decades Beverly Hope Atkinson brings some laughter to the scenes and she really put he stamp on those-when she was given lines to deliver-then in her 30s, still looking about 18. Total romp and immersion, ino a time lost, a very good movie.