cult film freak: GARY LOCKWOOD DRIVES THROUGH JACQUES DEMY'S 'MODEL SHOP'

Gary Lockwood in MODEL SHOP Year: 1969 Rating: **1/2 Grade: C+

Leading up to French New Wave director Jacques Demy's car-cruising hangout ode to 1969 Los Angeles, actor Gary Lockwood had a decade of interesting characters, like an idealistic young lieutenant on Gene Roddenberry's THE LIEUTENANT; Captain Kirk's lethal foil on an episode of Roddenberry's STAR TREK; a crude gunslinger in the Western FIRECREEK; and most famously an astronaut in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY...

And here he's dropped any pretense of his usual intensity in MODEL SHOP where he drives a classic jalopy around town, smitten with French starlet Anouk Aimée, who's only first-billed since she'd worked with the director previously... when she was younger, much prettier... and it's not like she's unattractive...

Gary Lockwood in MODEL SHOP

But as a so-called model working in the titular shop where customers take alluring photographs instead of having sex, and as the targeted lady that Lockwood's proudly-broke George Matthews is not only smitten with, but literally follows/stalks around town, a more instantly-alluring actress should have been cast...

Like perhaps Alexandra Hay, who, despite having a whiny, annoying delivery, surely looks the part of a solid knockout... that Lockwood lives with, despite her having another boyfriend in the wings... or blonde beauty Anne Randall, another model at that bizarre brothel-like (and relatively unimportant) title location...

Gary Lockwood in MODEL SHOP

Anouk Aimée also lacks the chemistry to make Lockwood's obsession seem legitimate, or to base an entire 95-minute movie on, deliberately plot-less or otherwise... He says he loves her within their first conversation, which is as hard to believe as the mature actor about to become another reluctant young soldier in Vietnam...

While looking great, Lockwood's too old and far too intense an actor for such a laidback role in such a laidback picture: one that's aesthetically pleasing, visually representing the late-60's Los Angeles in all its existential, pot-smoking, anti-war, boulevard-roaming glory... but there needed more of an edge for his otherwise dire situation to really matter.