The arthouse cinema scene of the 1980s and ’90s introduced audiences to a number of independent filmmakers. One such creator who developed a small but devoted following was a Big Apple-based writer/director who sometimes appeared in his works. He was known for a string of seriocomic screenplays feautring strong female characters, with the actresses often becoming his muses/lovers. His movies, however, tended to divide viewers and critics even as he pursued his own idiosyncratic visions. No, not Woody Allen. The autobiographical auteur in question here is Henry Jaglom, who passed away earlier this week at 87.
While he was linked personally and cinematically to New York City, Jaglom was actually born in London in 1938. The son of German and Ukrainian Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, Henry and his family emigrated to Manhattan when he was an infant. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1963, Jaglom studied acting with Lee Strasberg at the Actor’s Studio and worked in the off-Broadway theater community. Moving to Hollywood and signing a contract with Columbia Pictures, he appeared with various TV shows (among them the Sally Field series Gidget and The Flying Nun) and made his feature film debut in the 1968 “flower people” drama Psych-Out, alongside Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern.
His friendship with Nicholson earned Jaglom small roles in the 1971 indie efforts Drive, He Said and The Last Movie, but more importantly it landed him a job co-editing 1969’s landmark counterculture road movie Easy Rider. Henry’s time at the editor’s table, along with a fascination with Fellini’s 8 1/2, convinced him that his artistic future was behind the camera. He later told journalist Robert K. Elder, “I realized that what I wanted to do was make films. Not only that, but I realized what I wanted to make films about: my own life, to some extent.”
Jaglom’s first feature as writer/director, 1971’s A Safe Place, starred Tuesday Weld as a troubled young hippie haunted by visions of the magician (Orson Welles) she met as a child and purused by two men (Nicholson and Firesign Theater co-founder Philip Proctor). The film was a commercial and critical failure, and Henry wouldn’t complete another picture until 1976’s Tracks, a powerful tale about a troubled Vietnam War vet (Dennis Hopper) accompanying a fellow soldier’s body home for burial.
1980 saw Jaglom venture into lighter fare with Sitting Ducks, a road comedy about two penny-ante hoods (Zack Norman and Henry’s real-life brother, Michael Emil) who set off down the Eastern coast with a fortune in stolen Mob cash. Karen Black played a Manhattan musician whose husband leaves her and who tries to find solace in various desserts and with a divorced social worker (Emil) in 1983’s Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? Jaglom co-starred with ex-wife Patrice Townsend as an L.A. couple whose fracturing marriage may not survive a Fourth of July party with their friends in 1985’s Always. And Someone to Love (1987) is set in a soon-to-be-demolished movie theater where a filmmaker (Jaglom) hosts a Valentine’s Day event. Someone marked the last live-action movie appearance by Jaglom’s good friend Orson Welles. The duo met weekly for lunch for two years, talks which were chronicled in the book “My Lunches with Orson.”
A pre-X Files David Duchovny turns up in New Year’s Day (1989), in which a Hollywood filmmaker (Jaglom) returns to his New York apartment only to find three women (Maggie Jakobson, Gwen Welles, Melanie Winter) living there. 1990’s Eating, billed as “a very serious comedy about women & food,” followed its all-female cast during a get-together at an L.A. mansion. An American director’s (Jaglom) trip to Italy’s Venice Film Festival is followed in 1992’s Venice/Venice. Henry’s second wife, Victoria Foyt, is a woman trying to get her work and personal lives in order before her biological clock winds down in 1994’s Babyfever. Viveca Lindfors played the matriarch of a theater family whose lavish Long Island estate is being sold in Last Summer in the Hamptons (1995), which also starred Foyt, Andre Gregory, Melissa Leo, and Roddy McDowall. And a Beverly Hills boutique and its upscale clientele were the subject of 2005’s Going Shopping, with Foyt, Lee Grant, and Rob Morrow.
Jaglom’s later works–all of which starred his third wife, Tanna Frederick (their union was later annulled)–included the 2006 Tinseltown comedy/drama Hollywood Dreams and its 2010 follow-up Queen of the Lot; 2012’s 45 Minutes from Broadway, based on a stageplay written by Jaglom; 2014’s The M Word, where a sinking TV station’s crew stages a documentary on menopause; and his final film, 2018’s Train to Zakopané, which explored anti-Semitism in pre-WWII Poland. Henry himself was the focus of a 1995 documentary, Who Is Henry Jaglom? He died on September 22nd at his Santa Monica home.
A New York Times reviewer once said, “Henry Jaglom’s autobiographical films, with their navel-gazing introspection, require a degree of patience that many moviegoers are loath to extend. But even the most self-indulgent Jaglom films loiter in psychic territory that more mainstream explorations of well-heeled angst often overlook.” The degree of introspection and often sardonic humor that he brought to his creations certainly gave viewers much food for thought.