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Years Later, Play It As It Lays Is Back on the Screen
Frank Perry’s film of Joan Didion’s novel is a bleak and beautifully stylized look at Hollywood despair.
The film’s signature image is that of its protagonist, Maria Wyeth (Tuesday Weld), driving along the highways of Greater Los Angeles in her bright-yellow Corvette, the arteries and cloverleaf intersections all helping create the impression of someone going around in circles. He made the existential wasteland of suburban Connecticut irresistibly lush in the otherwise bleak Burt Lancaster vehicle The Swimmer(1968), and his devastating teen psychodrama Last Summer(1969) is shot through with the balmy glow of a soft childhood memory harboring a toxic secret. The director had emerged about a decade earlier, through a series of unusually expressive, independently produced movies he made with his then-wife, the screenwriter Eleanor Perry.
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