J Paul Johnson
Back in the 1970s, a young Sissy Spacek had as splashy a film debut as can be imagined. She played alongside Martin Sheen in Terence Malick’s Badlands; a few years later, she made her troubled telekinetic teen Carrie one of cinema’s most indelible characters. She worked with Robert Altman and helped to finance David Lynch’s Eraserhead; not long after that, country singer Loretta Lynn personally selected her to portray herself in 1980’s Coal Miner’s Daughter, the film that earned Spacek the Academy Award for Best Actress. Long forgotten in those heady highlights was a modest road-comedy/romance she made in 1974, Ginger in the Morning, recently remastered and re-released by Film Masters on a limited edition 50th anniversary Blu-ray disc.
No one (until now) is likely to have ever used the phrases “Academy Award” and “Ginger in the Morning” in the same sentence, but even in this low-budget, small-scale B-movie production, Spacek shines. She’s effusive, ebullient, and radiant as a young hippie hitchhiker traveling the desert roads with only a small satchel and her acoustic guitar in her possession. When a few years later Lynn cast Spacek to play herself, she did so by a photo, not even knowing Spacek could actually sing: Spacek sang, wonderfully, Lynn’s hits in Coal Miner’s Daughter. Here in Ginger in the Morning, she performs a handful of sprightly, idiosyncratic, and tuneful songs to her own guitar accompaniment, sometimes with some syrupy string arrangements on top. My favorite includes the memorable line “I got a bad case of sweet cheeks and it’s showin’ all over me.” Ahh, the Seventies!
Those aside, there are moments when Ginger in the Morning looks and feels very much like a generic Seventies sexploitation film, except it’s not. Monte Markham co-stars as a recent divorcee, a bored businessman experiencing a midlife crisis: one of the film’s first scenes has him disembarking a plane with a character played by David Doyle, practically salivating, yapping away at Markham’s Joe about the joys of no-strings-attached sex. The advice seems like it’s falling on deaf ears, but when Joe sees Ginger hitchhiking and learns she is headed to Colorado Springs, he lies that he is headed to Denver when he actually lives in Santa Fe, where they head for a night’s sleep at a condo he says belongs to a buddy but is actually his own.
If that sounds at all charming, it’s the kind of smarmy male gaslighting that too often passed for rom-com shenanigans in the Seventies. Yet, to the film’s credit and thanks to a pair of strong performances from Spacek and Markham, the plot leads to a surprisingly sweet and unexpected destination. Though Joe lures Ginger on the pretense of sex, there’s none of it in the film and nearly no discussion of it at all. Ginger, a free spirit, espouses the love-and-live-in-the-moment philosophy of the hippie culture; Joe is successful at business but, in his personal life, miserable and ready to learn a thing or two. Spacek, wan and sweet, is completely convincing, and Markham, dispensing with his game-show-host demeanor for a more nuanced characterization, turns out to be a creditable Joe, a regular guy who made a dumb mistake and works hard to atone for it.
If only it weren’t for an egregiously awful subplot involving Joe’s rowdy friend Charlie (paid, apparently, by the mouthfuls of scenery he thinks he has to chew) and his ex-wife Sugar (Susan Oliver), Ginger in the Morning would make for a perfectly pleasant affair. The two are necessary to the plot, to an extent: Charlie outs Joe’s ruse, and Sugar is there to demonstrate just how awful monogamy and commitment can grow. But the two’s Who’s-Afraid-of-Virginia-Woolf? act wears frightfully thin and serves ultimately only to waste precious screen time.
When Markham and especially Spacek are onscreen, though, Ginger in the Morning is a lovely curio from the decade and an interesting, if largely unknown and unseen, chapter in Spacek’s journey to becoming one of cinema’s most recognizable and renowned actors as a six-time Academy Award nominee. It’s a film that borrows a little from Clint Eastwood’s 1973 Breezy in plot and tone (in it, Kay Lenz played a free-spirited hitchhiker picked up by William Holden’s grouchy older man, and the two fall in love). Breezy was a bit of a bomb, but I’m guessing the middle-aged men running the studios, greenlighting the productions, and writing the scripts were more than a little fond of these fantasies about free-spirited young beauties like “Breezy” and “Ginger” falling in love with them.
Film Masters’ presentation of Ginger in the Morning is billed as “an exclusive new 4K restoration of the film from the original camera negative,” and while the film grain is relatively soft, its color scheme is lively and varied with deep blacks and discernible textures. No details about the DTS-HD 2.0 mono audio track are made available, but it’s hard to imagine complaints: character dialogue is perfectly clear, as are Spacek’s voice and guitar in her few musical compositions. As always, Film Masters provides optional SDH subtitles in English, not only for the main feature but for the supplements as well—a commitment to inclusion not practiced by every distributor but much appreciated.
Special Features
Interview with Monte Markham. A newly-recorded 18-minute interview with 89-year old Monte Markham reflects on the production of Ginger in the Morning and his career more broadly. It’s illustrated with clips from this, his other films of the era, and production stills, with Markham on camera sparingly. It’s a charming segment, but be forewarned: it will make you wish Film Masters had the cachet to score the same with Sissy Spacek.
Audio Commentary. Film Masters regular C. Courtney Joyner teams with Made for TV Mayhem podcast host and author Amanda Reyes for a largely improvised commentary track. It’s pleasant and insightful and only very occasionally off track (say, when it spends minutes elaborating on the television careers of actors not even cast in Ginger in the Morning). To the company’s eternal credit, Film Masters provides optional SDH for the commentary track as well as for the abovementioned interview.
Also included is the film’s 35mm original theatrical trailer and a 12-page full-color booklet insert with an essay from Susan King on Spacek, based primarily on a 2015 L.A. Times interview. The cover art features the original and impressively awful promotional poster with a drawing of an actress not resembling Spacek in the slightest (you can have fun with that: is it Susan Anspach? Cybill Shepherd? Bo Derek?) surrounded by floating-head photos of the stunned-looking supporting cast.
There’s just the two special features, but they add value to Film Masters’ restoration of Ginger in the Morning, and any chance to see an actor of Spacek’s caliber in an early-career role—especially one, like this, that could fall victim to cliche but that she imbues with depth and nuance—makes for a couple of hours spent in her company a good thing. After all, they say a little ginger in the morning is good for your health.
