The remarkable career of the great indie maverick Henry Jaglom
The ‘New Hollywood‘ movement was responsible for introducing a wave of actors and filmmakers who would eventually go on to become renowned as legends of cinema, but Henry Jaglom didn’t quite make the cut despite being both an actor and a filmmaker held in the highest of esteem by his peers.
He studied under Lee Strasberg, worked on Easy Rider, collaborated with Peter Bogdanovich, called Natalie Wood a close friend, and forged a long-standing personal and professional rapport with Orson Welles, which are hardly the accolades of a journeyman who struggled to keep their head above water.
And yet, Jaglom never found mainstream acceptance in a manner similar to many of his contemporaries, not that he would have wanted to anyway. Part of that is down to the polarising reception that greeted much of his work, with opinions varying on whether he was a genius and one of American cinema’s last true mavericks or an overrated and overhyped would-be auteur who wasn’t even good at their job.
Noted critic and media personality Michael Medved said he’d “rather be held prisoner in Beirut for three years than watch another Jaglom film,” while celebrated filmmaker Louis Malle said of his filmography; “He improvises almost completely. But excuse me, it shows.” On the other side of the coin, his fearlessness and desire to play by his own rules endeared him to many, with fellow maverick Dennis Hopper among his most vocal supporters.
His loose, improvisational style was tailor-made for the counterculture era, with his directorial debut coming at just the right time when 1971’s A Safe Place was released. Like many of his subsequent films, it featured a female protagonist who could more than hold their own in a male-dominated narrative, something that would go on to become a hallmark of his work.
There was plenty of autobiography, too, with many of Jaglom’s most famous films taking the form of pseudo-documentaries inspired by his own experience. There’s an authentic, freewheeling style to his work that appealed to performers and fellow filmic outsiders, but on the other hand, it’s easy to see why many decried him as being self-indulgent and left at the mercy of his own self-obsession.
His regular repertory included past, present, and future romantic partners, family members, and close friends, which were regularly used as the backdrops from which to mine dramatic tension. Sitting Ducks echoed Easy Rider‘s subversive approach to society by tracing the misadventures of two men who steal money from a gambling racket, while the Manhattan-set Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? echoed Woody Allen’s repeated odes to New York, complete with a neurotic and nervous protagonist.
Always (But Not Forever) was shot in the house that Jaglom shared with Patrice Townsend and used footage from their real wedding, turning the concept of the idyllic domesticated lifestyle on its head by detailing the husband and wife characters they played in the film as enjoying a nice dinner while celebrating the impending signing of their divorce papers. This came after the couple had actually divorced, too, with the lingering fallout of fact seeping into the thinly-veiled fiction.
That was Jaglom’s approach to cinema in microcosm; if he’d lived it, then it was fair game. It won him plenty of adoring supporters, but there were always the dissenters who quickly grew tired of a filmmaker they denigrated as a one-trick pony who couldn’t rely on technical skill or proficiency, so instead opted to mine their personal life for inspiration in perpetuity.
There’s a lot to be said for any aspiring filmmaker who grabs their own destiny by the horns and makes a career out of it, but Jaglom is in a class of his own. He’s a trained actor who stepped behind the camera to spend decades straddling the delicate line between authoring motion pictures that exist on their own as works of cinema and facing accusations that he’s a hack for refusing to alter his style under any circumstances and it’s an argument that doesn’t have a definitive answer more than 50 years later.
