Tall Story

When she was 23, a director friend of Jane Fonda’s famous father was determined to make her an actress. He decided to base a movie off of a Broadway play starring her and Warren Beatty in what would have been both of their debut movie roles. But the studio didn’t want ugly old Beatty. They demanded teen hearthrob Anthony Perkins instead. This movie became Tall Story, a dumb, boring, badly written, and sexist portrayal of a female college student trying to get her M.R.S. degree. It’s only notable as Fonda’s first film role, in which she plays a character very different from the feminist icon she would become, and as Perkins’s last time as a normal romantic lead before forever being known as Norman Bates in Psycho, which came out three months later. It’s a bad movie that only real Fonda-heads should bother watching.

The opening credits warn you what you’re in for. A woman kisses a picture of Anthony Perkins in a basketball uniform. She’s surrounded by cartoon hearts that throb to the beat of a corny title song sung by Bobby Darin.

The credits end with wedding bells, and we’re introduced to an old, bald man excitedly sniffing the air. He tells the woman in the nearby house that her cooking smells delicious. The sniffer is Professor Osman, who teaches science, and the cook is Myra Sullivan, who just moved in with her professor husband. She serves him dumplings while men carry a piano into the house as another man plays Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 on it. The piano player is Professor Sullivan, who teaches ethics, and he pretentiously says, “I always feel that when moving into a new home, the first person you ask in is Beethoven.”

Osman gives Sullivan a tour of the Custer College campus and stops in front of a ridiculous statue of a basketball player that looks like a Greek god. Osman explains that the school is known for basketball, which brings in alumni donations that fund his research lab. They agree basketball shouldn’t be the priority, but they’re clearly in the minority, as students suddenly start a pep rally around them, carrying star player Ray, played by Perkins, and lifting him onto the statue’s shoulders.

Meanwhile, we’re introduced to the airhead June, played by Fonda, biking through the crowd like a maniac, honking her horn and yelping “Oh!” before screaming, covering her face, and crashing into the two professors. As they gather themselves, she tells them she transferred to Custer because she's tall, so she wants to date a tall basketball player. Sullivan is shocked, and she explains that she came there “for the same reason that every girl, if she’s honest with herself, comes to college: to get married!” Specifically, she wants to date Ray. She begs them to sit her next to him in their classes, then runs off to join the pep rally, where she helps carry Ray and rubs her cheek against his leg. Ray is rightfully weirded out by this.

June gets her way and sits next to Ray in chemistry and ethics. He’s a science major and an honors student, so she convinces him she’s an academic like him, even though she causes an explosion in their chemistry lab because she’s really just an idiot.

June babysits for the Sullivans, who are going out with Osman, and asks if Ray can keep her company. At dinner, Sullivan complains that June’s using his classroom and now his home as a “matrimonial agency,” saying, “I’m a professor of ethics, not a madame.” The restaurant owner asks them about betting on the upcoming game. Everyone is excited because the touring Russian team is coming, and the pressure’s on to win, not just for the college, but for the entire country.

Back at the house, June and Ray finally get the kids to bed. June turns down the lights and starts talking about genetics, asking what hers and Rays kids might look like. Flustered, Ray turns her obvious advances into a dull lecture, talking about fruit flies mating under a microscope, so she asks if he’d be willing to make love under a microscope. She says elephants only mate once every seven years, he says some manage it every six years, and she jokingly calls them nymphomaniacs. Now he’s finally getting it and says that the Japanese like to kiss each other on the back of the neck, so she suggests they try it as an experiment. She lifts her hair, and he kisses the back of her neck, which the score punctuates with an obnoxious gong. He says she tastes good but needs to compare it to traditional American kissing, so they make out, but he doesn’t know where to put his hands.

That’s all it takes for them to fall in love. They visit her friends Fred and Frieda, a married couple living in a trailer labeled “Lovesville, U.S.A.” They exist mainly to make obvious sexual innuendo as Fred shows them around. June and Ray keep getting stuck in narrow spaces together. When they’re alone, they kiss, and Ray suggests they get married. Fred says he's selling the trailer, but Ray says they can’t afford it. June is devastated, shouting, “We’re almost as bad off as those elephants!” and running away.

Later, Ray is contacted on his car radio by a mysterious man and finds an envelope of cash in his glove box--a bribe for losing the game. Ray is so worried about the bribe, he fails Sullivan's midterm exam. Due to his bad grade, he can’t play in the big game, and his coach yells at him, “Well you picked a fine time to get stupid!” The students are furious with Sullivan for flunking Ray and burn an effigy of him.

Sullivan and Myra go to Osman’s for dinner to escape the pressure, but Sullivan is surprised to find June there serving him all his favorite foods. He says, “You thought you’d soften me up with gefilte fish, beat me down with blintzes. They gave Socrates hemlock, and you offer me . . . borscht!” Osman admits he's trying to change Sullivan's mind about Ray so that he can keep his research lab, which depends on the school winning games to keep alumni happy. Ray shows up with the envelope of money and explains that he was bribed to lose the game, and when he tried to avoid the issue by copying off of June's test, he couldn't play and ended up getting another envelope of money after the team lost the game without him. Sullivan still won’t budge, so Ray says he’ll expose everything and become a national disgrace. Ray leaves the money and goes to the game.

At the game, Ray sits on the bench while the crowd glares. Without him, Custer is losing badly, and the coach complains, “They waste so much time around here on education! No wonder this younger generation’s so mixed up.” During halftime, a misunderstanding between the two professors and some undercover cops results in them getting arrested for attempted bribery. Sullivan tries to punch everyone but can’t because he’s handcuffed. The cops say they’ll release them if Sullivan gives Ray an oral exam, so he finally agrees to help out Ray.

The exam is incredibly boring to watch. As Ray answers correctly, he changes into his basketball uniform. June tries to help him answer questions, but Sullivan snaps that she came to college to “draft a man,” and she runs off, upset. Ray passes the test and is cleared to play. He quickly scores several points and hits the winning basket at the buzzer.

After the game, Ray is sad because June isn’t at the celebration party. Myra reveals to him that like June, she had a master plan to get a husband in college. She incorrectly credits June for confessing her scheming when it was actually Sullivan who exposed it. She leads him to June and gives them privacy. Osman tells Sullivan the cops will drop all charges against them, and Sullivan says he wants to make it up to June and slips Ray’s money into June’s coat. Ray and June come out and announce they’re engaged. June finds the money and says to herself, “Thank you, professor,” then lies to Ray about getting it from a rich aunt. So June’s an airhead, a schemer, and a liar.

After the party, Fred and Frieda drive off with the trailer while Fred counts money and talks about how June and Ray didn’t find the justice of the peace a moment too soon. The wall of the trailer fades away to reveal June and Ray kissing as they drive into a tunnel, the same tired joke Hitchcock used in North by Northwest the year before.

In addition to being sexist and dull, Tall Story just doesn’t make any sense. Custer is known for its basketball program, complete with a statue of a player in the middle of campus, but it seems to have only one good player. The school depends on wins for funding, but that system falls apart when Ray fails one test. Illegal gambling is supposedly a big problem, but the cops drop charges after Ray is allowed to play.

The movie also fails at the character level. Sullivan is so rigid he refuses to give a hardworking honors student a second chance, even as students burn an effigy of him. He’s also weirdly fixated on June’s love life, exposing her “scheming,” then slipping her illegally obtained money instead of apologizing. Ray is a nothing character, defined only by being nerdy and good at basketball, while June is treated like an airhead even though she successfully manipulates Ray into dating her. She’s later credited with confessing even though she never did.

Sullivan’s treatment of June reflects the sexist way Jane Fonda was treated when she made her first movie. In her book My Life So Far, she called her first role "a Kafkaesque nightmare” because the director Joshua Logan criticized her appearance, and she thought that both she and Logan were in love with Perkins during filming. Reviews at the time mostly focused on her father and her looks, including one that said, “The film wouldn't be reviewed in these pages but for the fact that Henry Fonda's daughter Jane makes her screen debut in it. She is a good-looking lass and she can act.”

Tall Story is not worth your time, but it is an interesting part of Jane Fonda’s career, illustrating how limited and sexist Hollywood was when she started out. She didn’t become a feminist icon out of nowhere. I’m guessing that she saw how much needed to change about the way women were treated and depicted in movies.

VERDICT: GUILTY