One of my favorite film genres is the alienated youth films from the late sixties. I am a sucker for those movies featuring aimless young shaggy haired guys who reject conventionalism while trying to find themselves during such a turbulent period. For me, one of the best of this ilk is Model Shop, director Jacques Demy’s homage to the city of Los Angeles and the youth culture of the time. Not to everyone’s taste, it is very laid back as the cameras follow Gary Lockwood (fresh off 2001: A Space Odyssey) during the course of a day where he encounters practically every type of young person who populated LA ca. 1969 from grasping starlets to pot smoking hippies to long-haired musicians to radicals who want to change the world.
A laconic Gary Lockwood, at his sexiest wearing tight blue jeans and a T-shirt, plays George Matthews an alienated twenty-six year old unemployed architect who quit his job because his creativity was being stifled by “the man.” He now has the draft hanging over his head and needs $100 to prevent his roadster from being repossessed. He lives with his vapid, self-absorbed blonde starlet girlfriend Gloria (lovely Alexandra Hay, the poor man’s Sue Lyon, who should have turned down the whininess a notch or two) who has given up on him because he won’t marry her or give her a baby.
The movie then follows George during the course of a twenty-four hour period as he drives around LA to get the cash. While trying unsuccessfully to borrow money from his friend who works as a parking lot attendant, George spots a beautiful French woman (a touching Anouk Aimée) clad in a white form fitting dress with matching head scarf picking up her white Mercury convertible. On an impulse, George follows her out of the parking lot and into the Hollywood Hills where she enters a mansion with beautiful views of the LA basin. George drives off and picks up a hitchhiking hippie who needs a lift to the Sunset Strip. She chatters while rolling a joint, which she gives to him as payment for the ride before she hops out of his car.
George returns to his task of getting the dough to save his automobile and visits his friend the lead singer of Spirit. George hits pay dirt as the group’s first album is hot off the presses so they have money to spare. George takes it and stops at a burger joint to eat where he spots the French woman walking down the street. He follows her to the Model Shop where perverts can rent cameras at fifteen minute increments to take photos of their “models.” George chooses his mystery woman of course and learns her name is Lola. He barely says a word as he snaps away. The rest of the movie has George obsessed with Lola. While visiting some friends who publish an underground radical newspaper, we learn George is really a lost soul. They talk of the Vietnam War and George confesses his fear of death. He then recounts his feelings about LA when seeing that view from the Hollywood Hills and how he wants to design a building for the city he loves but doesn’t know how to begin. He then calls his parents in San Francisco and shockingly learns he is to report for military service the next day. Dumbstruck, he opts to spend time with Lola who he thinks he has fallen in love with (and eventually learns is an unhappy divorcee trying to earn money to return to France to see her 14 year old son) rather than with Gloria who is only interested in landing a TV commercial set up by a male friend. By fade-out George has lost most everything.
Both Hilarie Thompson and Anne Randall have small roles in Model Shop. Thompson is the pot smoking dark-haired hippie and Randall is the model/receptionist painting her toe nails at the Model Shop when George comes to see Lola the second time. Both actresses had scenes only with Gary Lockwood and both only had fleeting memories of him. Thompson said, “All that I remember about Gary is that he took me out on a date and tried to seduce me—unsuccessfully I might add.” Blonde Anne Randall must not have been Lockwood’s type as she remarked, “I found him to be very professional. By that, I mean, he didn’t ‘hit on’ me. I didn’t get to know him and I really can’t remember any kind of exchange with him.”
Despite their small parts, both actresses consider Model Shop one of the highlights of their careers due to director/writer Jacques Demy. Anne raved, “Jacques was a very nice man and so easy to work with. He was wonderful and [doing this film] is one of my favorite memories!” Thompson mused, “I hardly remember the picture itself but as I was playing this role I felt more like myself. I usually felt like a cartoon caricature of a hippie in most of the hippie roles that I played but not here. It’s hard to talk seriously about “hippies” these days because it is conceived as a silly, youthful fad. But I was a hippie. Having survived a harrowing, bohemian childhood, to finally be able to be the neurotic, war protesting, free loving and thinking person I was “raised” to be was quite liberating. The late 60’s liberated me from that 50’s and early 60’s bourgeois life style of the normal and functioning which my family was not.” Kudos must go to Jacques Demy for making such an exceptional film of this genre.
You can read my interview with Hilarie Thompson in my book Drive-in Dream Girls and my interview with Anne Randall in my book Glamour Girls of Sixties Hollywood.
