It’s an infamously bizarre moment in daytime television. On September 13, 1978, one of the three bachelors competing in “The Dating Game” was Rodney Alcala, who turned out to be a serial killer; He was arrested the following year. (He was convicted of five murders, although it is believed he may have committed as many as 130.) It’s no joke – or maybe it’s just making sense – to say that Alcala had the look and personality of a 1970s femme fatale. He was coiffed like one of the Hudson brothers, with a chiseled smile redolent of Engelbert Humperdinck. He practically exuded good vibes – along with some semi-submerged bad vibes, and answered his ‘dating game’ questions in a way that was so confident it was…aggressive.
Of course, television has never been more fascinating than “The Dating Game.” I used to watch it as a kid, marveling at the fact that the whole show, with its music by Herb Alpert on the Happy Bells and its flower-energy décor, was a kind of smiling, uninteresting leer. A lot of effort to hide it. (This was apparently the first show I saw on Culture of corruption in Los Angeles.) I always thought the most tense moment every week was when the chosen bachelor comes out from behind the bar, and after giving the bachelorette that polite kiss, the two of them stand there, arms around each other, as described by host Jim Lange, who represents a pilot, what might be in store for them on their date (usually something along the lines of “Because you’re going on an all-expenses-paid weekend to…Tuscon, Arizona!”), as if they were actually two spouses.
You could say that The Dating Game was The Bachelorette in its day. And the fact that a serial killer of the Ted Bundy school (ostensibly “normal” and good-looking, who exploits his good looks to attract women he might rape and kill) once landed in the middle of it is both surprising and surprising. Dropping a piece of television history, a funny and terrifying event at the same time, and a giant metaphor that says: For women who were living in the era of the sexual revolution, Dating game It was something much more dangerous than it seemed.
Woman of the Hour is Anna Kendrick’s true-life thriller about Rodney Alcala and this strange episode and America’s only socio-cultural crime. Kendrick directed the film (her first effort behind the camera), working from a screenplay by Ian MacDonald, and also stars as Cheryl Bradshaw, an aspiring actress who often excels at auditions for low-budget films when her agent woos her. So that she can be single in the “dating game”. Cheryl thinks the offer is trashy (and it is), but it will give her a chance to “watch it.”
As director, Kendrick jumps through time during the 1970s, staging a number of Rodney Alcala’s captures and murders. Daniel Zovatto plays Alcala, who knows how to lean into soft-rock honesty, but then his eyebrows will lower and the smile will dissolve, leaving you with a quiet, smoldering rage. Rodney, with his long hair and leather jacket, is a photographer, such is his bohemian cred — and his skill for killing. This was a time when men with cameras and artistic looks promised to turn women into stars. Rodney, who likes his victims young (sometimes underage), makes them strike a pose, encouraging them to let their guard down, and that’s when he goes in for the kill. These scenes are as poignant as they come, though they’re not played with the kind of sophisticated fascination that was present in the dramatic drama “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile,” starring Ted Bundy and starring Zac Efron.
The heart of the film is the “Dating Game” episode, which is played with a kind of strange verve, though I felt as though Kendrick spends too many moments relaying what she has to say. She sticks with Rodney Alcala’s metaphor in “The Dating Game” and writes it in italics. She makes it clear that the show is a meat grinder, from the on-screen double-entendre that the Bachelorette is being assaulted to the host’s gruff, aggressive on-screen character (Tony Hale), here called Ed Burke. And I think it’s telling that Kendrick chose to play Cheryl not as a playful, flirtatious character like she seemed on the show — that’s how women were instructed to behave — but as a knowing, almost defiant character who was not going to be anyone’s sex toy. .
As Cheryl, who asks her own ready-made questions, and finally one of her own (“Why girls?”), Kendrick is such a good actor that she completely embraces you. However, as a filmmaker, she turns the tables on The Dating Game by re-presenting it in an almost postmodern way. What “Woman of the Hour” seeks is not some absolute originality. It attempts to deconstruct television, along with the male aggression that can descend into violence, and show how the two work together.
There is a woman in the audience named Laura (Nicolette Robinson), who feels goosebumps when she sees that Alcala is Single No. 3, because she was a friend of one of his victims; I tried to go to the police, but to no avail. (This reflects what happened: too many tips given to the cops about Alcala, which he somehow avoided.) However, this is the weakest part of the film, because the drama is both so superficial and at the same time overdone.
The most powerful part of the film occurs immediately after the screening, when Rodney convinces Cheryl to join him on a “date” (drinks at a bar) before their official date in Caramel, California. Their duel of wits is annoying, and by the time you get to the parking lot, frightening. In real life, Cheryl and Rodney never went on their “Dating Game” date, because she thought there was something weird about him. It is interesting, at the end of the film, to see Alcala arrested, overcome by a victim who knows how to manipulate his ego. But if “Woman of the Hour” depicted a serendipitous moment when American violence was peeking through the window of packaged American television, the film wouldn’t have much resonance, because it does all the meaning work for you.