Though it has no particular reputation, Housesitter (1992) is one of the few romantic comedies of its time and genre that has the classical balance to be found in the great screwball comedy cycle in American cinema that ran from 1934 to the mid-1940s, where role playing was seen as a spur to romantic excitement and connection. The hope and thrust of those movies was the idea that a pairing between a man and a woman could lead to freeing disruption and the having of the kind of fun that might unleash dreams, fantasies, and energies that most people have been trained to repress or give up.
Steve Martin is expert in Housesitter as architect Newton Davis, a stymied man who has been rejected by his dream girl (Dana Delany) after offering her a house he has designed. But this movie relies on the enormous likability, skill, and heart of Goldie Hawn, who plays a very imaginative liar and con artist of sorts named Gwen. Hawn’s Gwen is first seen working at a restaurant and using a Hungarian accent, and the tipsy Newton pushes himself out of his comfort zone to try to pick her up. Gwen sizes him up fairly quickly and improvises her way through a one-night stand with him, for improvising and spinning yarns about herself is Gwen’s specialty, and you might even say that it is her gift, and Hawn suggests a cracked and very alluring kind of wisdom in this.
Gwen could easily seem unhinged or pathetic, but Hawn makes her a triumphant fantasist as she finds a napkin that Newton drew his now-empty dream house on and goes to his idyllic hometown to take it over herself. In these scenes where Gwen starts to tell the local townspeople that she and Newton are married, Hawn has the kind of racing comic nerve that propelled Carole Lombard in a picture like True Confession (1937), where Lombard’s character always sticks her tongue into her cheek before coming out with another lie. But Lombard’s lying in that movie has an air of economic desperation about it that does not touch Hawn’s extravagant liar in Housesitter, who is celebrated by the film for her boldness and her insistence on positivity.
When Newton finds this woman in his house and begins to lie himself to impress Delany’s Becky, the joke is that he isn’t as good at lying as Gwen is and tends to the negative, which displeases Gwen, who acts as a kind of romantic and social mentor for him. Gradually, Newton gets better at lying and spinning tales, and there comes a moment when he inadvertently makes one of Gwen’s lies about him come true, at which point her face lights up as if she knows this is what she has always been waiting for; this is one of her fantasies becoming a reality, this is kismet, and Gwen doesn’t want to give it up, but she will if she has to.
Hawn’s Gwen is a lush beauty somewhere in her forties, and so of course she has been disappointed many times before, but she is still ready to be happily surprised. By the end of Housesitter, she is actually living and feeling the lies she has told, and this is the dream of every fantasist, which includes most people who watch movies regularly. This is not crazy or venal or destructive, as it might be in life; it is a sign of Gwen’s pioneer spirit. You could argue that this part of the American character has gone so badly haywire in the 21st century that such spirit should not be trusted, but it still has its allure.
Hawn’s Gwen in Housesitter is perhaps the best comic performance she ever gave, and one of the best comic performances of its period, and it shows just what she is capable of when she has a role that inspires her. She is one of the few stars of her era who fitfully tried to keep the spirit of classic Hollywood romantic comedy alive, and the public has loved her without reservation since she first appeared as a giggling blonde on the TV series Laugh-In in the late 1960s, barely able to get a line out without lovably fumbling it or losing her place.
Hawn could have easily remained just a novelty, but a rather unlikely best supporting actress Oscar for Cactus Flower (1969), a stale adaptation of a slick Broadway comedy hit, put her in another category and acted as a vote of confidence. Her type at this point was not really the dumb blonde so much as the daffy blonde, the spacey blonde, the kook on her own wavelength.
Hawn learned well and she learned quickly. In her follow-up There’s a Girl in My Soup (1970), which is also based on a play and is basically a two-hander with Peter Sellers, Hawn has enough technique already to hold her own with the very difficult and ungiving Sellers, but she was even better as an aimless young girl who falls in love with a blind young man (Edward Albert) in Butterflies Are Free (1972), yet another play adaptation that asks a lot of her in its second half, where she stands up to the boy’s protective mother (Eileen Heckart) and believably chooses the responsibility of loving him over the lightly self-loathing drifting that has characterized her life so far.
Hawn was even better still as the nervy, flaky, and stubborn go-getter Lou Jean in Steven Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express (1974), a woman who does anything she can think of to get back custody of her young child and brings her jailbird husband (William Atherton) along with her. Again, there are elements of the screwball comedy heroine about Lou Jean, but this early Spielberg movie has a far darker edge than Hawn’s later comedy vehicles. It is a comic action movie predicated on following masses of cars that turns, finally, into a tragedy, and it is Hawn who is asked to carry this transition, which she does heartbreakingly in the late glimpses of Lou Jean tossing gifts given to her by sympathetic followers of her story out of a car window.
At age 35, Hawn reached a new status with Private Benjamin (1980), a big financial hit tailored to an image she started to build as an undervalued or even oppressed woman who learns to stand up for herself; this was a consciousness-raising movie that had a message smuggled in its “Goldie in the army? Ha ha” premise. From that point on, until she began to lose interest by the mid-1990s, Hawn had regular comedy vehicles in theaters that she also produced. Some were poor, like Wildcats (1986), where she really started to phone in her schtick of looking askance and pop-eyed alarm, and some were expert, like Protocol (1984), which has a sharp Buck Henry script, skillful direction from Herbert Ross, and a star performance from Hawn that is the equal of Judy Holliday in the best of her own vehicles from the 1950s; this was a movie made to appeal to just about everyone.
But there was one casualty in this star period for her, Swing Shift (1984), which Hawn took away from its director Jonathan Demme in an attempt to make it more of a crowd-pleaser and more of a showcase for herself. The original director’s cut of Swing Shift, which has been passed around for years in a bootleg copy, is an ensemble picture about 1940s wartime in which Hawn allows herself to play a rather recessive and flawed woman who makes mistakes amid the hustle and bustle of far more colorful female characters surrounding her.
As a star and as a producer, it is easy to see why Hawn was unhappy with Swing Shift. Screenwriter Nancy Dowd had originated the script for Coming Home (1978), which was set during the Vietnam war and revolved around a romantic triangle, and that had been successful, but Dowd made a mistake in trying to bring this same situation to a World War II setting. Hawn realized only when she saw the finished film that audiences were guaranteed to hate her character for cheating on her husband while he was off fighting that war with a man she works with at an armaments factory, who is played by Kurt Russell, a heartthrob who eventually became her own longtime companion. And so she tried to fix this, but it was unfixable. The Demme cut of Swing Shift certainly contains one of her best or bravest performances, the only one where she totally jettisons her innate likability.
Hawn’s relationship with Russell—open, affectionate, clearly fun and sex-loving—has been one of the things about her image that continually appealed to the public, so much so that she continued to garner affection for it even as she wisely backed away from acting after one more big financial hit with the three-way diva comedy The First Wives Club (1996), in which she sang “You Don’t Own Me” at the end with Bette Midler and Diane Keaton and managed to steal the most attention. Hawn had started out as a dancer, and she sang and danced on some TV specials in the 1970s, but this is an aspect of her talent that remained basically held in reserve; it’s often a surprise just how much singing voice she has in terms of tone and volume when she really lets loose with it.
If she had been signed to a studio during the classic Hollywood period, surely Hawn could have mixed musicals with comedies as Irene Dunne did. She took the easy way out sometimes in her film choices, but Butterflies Are Free, The Sugarland Express, Shampoo (1975), the director’s cut of Swing Shift, Protocol, and above all Housesitter will always explain her reputation as a beloved star, which has survived and even thrived after her early semi-retirement.
Thanks so much Dan.