WALK ON THE WILD SIDE starts out brilliantly, in a stunner title sequence designed by Saul Bass with a black cat confidently slinking in perfect timing to Elmer Bernstein’s arrogantly sexy theme music. Later in the film there’s a vocal version sung by Brooke Benton; it nabbed an Oscar nomination for Best Song. Other than some interest from the star power factor, the rest of the 1962 drama is a dull, depressing drag, 114 minutes spent with broken, mostly disagreeable characters in tawdry settings and sordid situations.

The 1930’s. ‘Dove Linkhorn’ (Laurence Harvey) makes his way from small-town Texas to New Orleans, searching for his idealized former flame ‘Hallie Gerard’ (Capucine). En route he encounters libidinous teenage vagabond ‘Kitty Twist’ (Jane Fonda), alluring but duplicitous, and mature cafe owner ‘Teresina Vidaverri’ (Anne Baxter), enticing and genuine. When he finds Hallie he’s understandably dismayed to learn she works in a swanky bordello, is favored by nail-hard madam ‘Jo Courtney’ (Barbara Stanwyck) and cocooned by Jo’s thuggish underlings. Dove can’t (or “cain’t“) take no for an answer, which spells disaster all around.

So does the script, a limpid bowdlerization of Nelson Algren’s 346-page novel published six years earlier. The book’s full-throttle dive into depravity, despair and dumbness was never going to make it to the screen with a decent degree of indecency, but the go-ahead to try must’ve been based on good old-fashioned exploitation. The novel is famous for the cautionary “Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.” Unfortunately the script is all cheese and no toppings, a group mash-up slopped together by John Fante and Edmund Morris, with uncredited pitching in from several others, including Ben Hecht and Raphael Hayes.

Joanna Moore, 1934-1997

Edward Dmytryk directed, indifferently, at least until he had enough of dealing with unhappy cast members and producer interference; Blake Edwards stepped in to assist without credit. Apart from a couple of old autos, 30’s period feeling is absent, the costuming and hair is straight from ’62. As for brothels in New Orleans in the 1930’s, if any of them looked like this—both staid and foofy—The Big Easy would have had a much harder time making it thru the Depression. This marked Harvey’s third of four runs at a Southern accent, preceded by The Alamo and Summer And Smoke, trailed eight years later by a cameo in WUSA. Hot to trot newby Fonda, 23 (also sexed up in The Chapman Report), went the Dixie route that year in Period Of Adjustment and later in The Chase and Hurry Sundown. Along with Baxter, 38, they get knocked for the accents in this movie, Baxter fielding the most diss for her character’s Mexican-American variation. They all do okay: it’s their script that stinks. The cleavage battle between Jane and Anne is more attention-getting than anything they’re given to say. Baxter’s kindly, down-to-earth character and a cheerfully dim hooker (‘Miss Precious’, nicely done by Joanna Moore, 27) are the only sympathetic folks in the stew. Harvey, 33, fared much better that year in The Manchurian Candidate. Capucine, 33, tries but is badly miscast (she was the producer’s girlfriend at the time), her elegant 60s attire is absurd and she has zip chemistry with Harvey (she couldn’t stand him, a frequent complaint of his female co-stars). There’s a decent lineup of baddies—Richard Rust, Karl Swenson, Donald Barry, Ken Lynch. Coming off best is Stanwyck, 54, effortlessly acting circles around the rest, and Jo’s obvious ‘interest’ in Hallie always draws catty chatter about being one of the first lesbian characters in a major American picture, offering up gossip trolling for those who care. When she took the role, affronted columnist Louella Parsons asked her why and was slapped back—Babs style—with “What do you want them to do, get a real madam and a real lesbian?”

With Juanita Moore (a thankless part as a servant), John Anderson (as a blowhard preacher—“Oh, sinners is my business. You and that hip-slinging daughter of Satan. You know there’s the smell of sulfur and brimstone about you. The smell of hellfire.”) and Todd Armstrong (about to become ‘Jason‘ of the Argonauts). The box office snare of $8,600,000 registered position #28 for the year.