Stop!

My review was written in June 1990 after watching the film at a Whitney Museum of American Art screening.

"Stop" is an ambitious but unsuccessful dissection of empty people in an arid marriage. X-rated feature was permanently shelved by Warner Brothers in 1970 and is reviewed here for the record.

It's easy to see why WB rejected this uncommercial effort. Obscure narrative is tedious to the point of an audience almost sharing the suicidal tendncies of the unsympathetic protagonists. Film nonetheless has several sharp scenes and would be of retrospective interest to European film festival programmers.

Writer-director Bill Gunn, who died last year, made a noteworthy breakthrough here as a black helmer not restricted to a black-themed picture. (Only Sidney Poitier's "Hanky Panky" vehicle for Gene Wilder and Gilda Radner, Michael Schultz' "Sgt. Pepper's" or Asian American director Wayne Wang's nonethnic "Slamdance" since have escaped that sort of typecasting.) Opening scene, reminiscent of the classic breakfast sequence in Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane", establishes whitebread, yuppie couple Edward Bell (a writer-translator) and Linda Marsh already at the end of their tether, barely able to talk to each other without sarcasm. They fly to San Juan, Puerto Rico, to take up residence at an inherited mansion, Bell's brother having just murdered his wife and committed suicide.

With Bell haunted by nightmarish fantasy memories of that incident (he obviously wasn't present but imagines the details), the film immediately suggests potential as a gothic horror pic, like Gunn's well-regarded next feature "Ganja and Hess". Since the film's structure and subplot suggest WB's Stanley Kubrick adaptation of "The Shining" a decade hence (writer in a remote hotel going crazy), that's a missed opportunity.

Instead, "Stop" disintegrates into a series of '60s semi-obligatory lyrical interludes. Always artfully photographed, these sequences of sex, brooding or just wandering are dullsville.

First half of the picture degenerates into the then-hot topic of spouse swapping (e.g., "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice", "All the Loving Couples") when old pal Richard Dow (named Richard Matheson in the script as an apparent in-joke) pops up with his beautiful black wife Marlene Clark.

Sex scenes are rather tame (no full nudity), but a homosexual tryst plus strong language probably earned the X tag. Low point here is a gauche dinner party scene using a Screw Magazine story on masturbatiion as the starting point for a vulgar discussion.

Gunn's best footage is a stark confrontation between Marsh and a Puerto Rican prostitute (Vicky Hernandez in the pic's best performance) after she catches Bell in bed with the working girl. Another set piece has a camera mounted overhead in the bedroom from a God-like point-of-view to record a take of Bell and Marsh screaming at each other and almost coming to blows. It lasts a couple minutes but is too shrill to be effective.

Heroine Marsh, who looks somewhat like Gayle Hunnicutt and Barbara Harris, played Ophelia to Richard Burton's "Hamlet" in WB's 1964 Electronovision feature, but has little characterization to chew on here. Bell is a blank. When the two are locked together in a "No Exit" finale, the viewer still doesn't know what makes them tick.

Gunn reportedly was unhappy with the studio's final version of the film. A cryptic penultimate scene and heavy use of voice-over exposition indicate some post-production second thoughts.

For a color-blind feature, it is perhaps not surprising that the one black role, played by Marlene Clark (later to star in "Ganja and Hess"), is presented as merely an exotic, erotic cipher rather than given an independent voice.

Pic notably represents the first feature for Owen Roizman, soon to lense William Friedkin's "The French Connection" and "The Exorcist". Roizman's compositions are unusual as is Fred Myrow's eclectic musical score, featuring guitarwork by Ry Cooder.

Gunn's first directorial feature is mostly famous for being a "lost" film, shelved by Warner Brothers due to its X rating and uncommercial nature-let's face it, it would have likely been seen by very few even if it HAD been released-then kept unavailable due to apparent legal issues. In style, atmosphere and occasional narrative fragmentation, it does sometimes recall his best-known work "Ganja and Hess," which suffered almost equal mistreatment by its producers but did at least manage to get seen.

Linda Marsh and Edward Michael Bell play a chic, well-off but discordant young married couple on the verge of breaking up-and it's hard to argue that they shouldn't do so, since they get on each others' nerves most of the time. Still, they're not quite so badly off as his brother, who (as we see in flashback) killed himself after killing his own wife. The lead characters must go to San Juan to dispose of the brother's house, and they treat it as a vacation, while remaining at one another's throats. They do however meet another couple, played by Marlene Clark and Richard Dow, and this leads to collective sexual experimentation that may or may not fill the (ahem) gaps in the protagonists' relationship.

With its characters almost invariably dressed in white, in white settings, "Stop" is always visually thoughtful and interesting, even if the video dupe by which it's become viewable in some underground channels hardly does Owen Roizman's photography or the production design full justice. The movie does get more trippy and intriguing as it goes on, a bit in the manner of something contemporaneous like "Performance," though in this case sex is apparently the only drug on hand. But the characters are shallow and uninvolving. There's nothing to them beyond their physical attractiveness (though unusually for the period, Gunn seems to care as much about the men's bodies as the women's), and the film doesn't weave quite enough of a spell for the now-fairly-mild orgiastics to lend the frail narrative a sense of sufficient meaning and (ahem again) climax.

It's an eccentric experiment, but if "Stop" had been available all along, it probably wouldn't have any greater stature than a number of other arty and pretentious dramas of the early 1970s, when Hollywood was willing to gamble on new talent and struck out more often than it scored a base hit. If it had been made in Europe, it wouldn't have impressed anyone as too out-there to release, and indeed it does feel like a lot of "decadent," vaguely countercultural, erotic melodramas that were being made there around the same time. Like most of them, it's not really a good movie, but it's a good timepiece reflecting the kind of cinematic adventurousness that was being encouraged then. In practical terms, Warner Brothers was right: Who was the audience for this film? Upscale swingers? In a couple years, even those people would have hardcore fare like "Deep Throat" available at their local theaters.