In Hollywood, “the dating capital of the world,” according to the announcer of a famous game show on ABC-TV, Cheryl Bradshaw arrived as one in a long line of disappointed acting hopefuls — struggling, striving and putting up with one leering or dismissive audition experience after another. She hadn’t dated much, either.
Then she booked a one-off gig on “The Dating Game” in 1978, 13 years into the show’s various iterations. Bradshaw was the “woman of the hour,” for an episode anyway, tasked as the “bachelorette” choosing one of three eligible bachelors, hidden from her sight but not the audience’s. After a few coyly suggestive pre-scripted questions she chose the Texan, one Rodney Alcala, who had a strong interest in photography.
They met up for a drink after the taping. Bradshaw sensed serious danger. In a decision that may have saved her life, she declined the show’s arranged date with Alcal: tennis lessons for two followed by a day at Magic Mountain.
Now on Netflix, “Woman of the Hour” dramatizes the true story of Bradshaw and, in screenwriter Ian McDonald’s toggle between flashbacks and flash-forwards, scenes involving other women before and after Alcala’s appearance on “The Dating Game.” The film, barely 90 minutes minus end credits, is not an easy sit. But it is not exploitative or hypocritically salacious, and it isn’t depravity for depravity’s sake. The main reason for that is Anna Kendrick, who makes a formidable, clear-eyed directorial debut in addition to playing Bradshaw.
Using plenty of her own career experiences, Kendrick presents Bradshaw’s story as a grimly common one of pervasive, smog-like predatory threats in sunny SoCal. She’s a pleaser by training, which isn’t helping her much in Hollywood. “Woman of the Hour” begins with an audition scene, in which she endures one more round of casual humiliation that leads to nothing, except a scream, alone, out of pure frustration, in her car.
Surrounding these scenes, Alcala, who is a serial killer, tracks one human target after another, notably the young runaway Amy, who ends up with him in the desert holding the camera and murmuring compliments. This plotline’s resolution resolves the film itself, with justice at long last achieved after years and at least seven (some say more than 100) fatalities owing to warnings ignored and leads un-chased by police and others. It’s a maddening story.
Sometimes the dialogue announces the main theme a little bluntly, as when one of the “Dating Game” makeup artists, working on Bradshaw prior to taping, jokes about the quality of the bachelors and Los Angeles men in general. Is it possible to get a guy in this town that isn’t a maniac? For legal reasons “Woman of the Hour” invents fictional equivalents to real-life figures, including the show’s host (in reality, Jim Lange), here named Ed Burke. Don’t try to be clever out there, he mutters to Bradshaw. “I just need you to laugh and smile. Over and over.”
Some of this is for dramatic or bitterly comic effect; when Bradshaw trades her pre-scripted material for a lightning round of dazzling, needling repartee, it’s fun but willfully, gleefully anachronistic. (The real Bradshaw behaved on camera exactly as asked for, and it’s hard to watch now.) Kendrick is so good, though, you go with it. In the recent “Alice, Darling” she played an ordinary woman in the grip of an emotionally abusive relationship; she has talked to various interviewers about a similar relationship in her own life. In a lot of her screen work, the tension between her character’s shiny, happy exterior and the insecurities and pain underneath has given us so many vividly inhabited moments of truth, along with stunning comic chops. (Musical chops, too, as any “Pitch Perfect” fan knows.)
Here, Kendrick adds keen directorial instincts, a desire to deal with some hideous violence in restrained but not timid ways, and sure-footed tonal shifts to her resume. She has cast her project well. As Alcala, Daniel Zovatto does so much in his nonverbal transitions, when the sort-of-charmer fades out of view and the stony killer steps in. And as Amy, the runaway whose final run leads to an extensive what-happened-next crawl guaranteed to outrage anyone with half a brain, Autumn Best emerges as the heartbreaking core to this all-American tragedy.
“Woman of the Hour” — 3 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: R (for language, violent content, some drug use, and a sexual reference)
Running time: 1:35
How to watch: Premieres on Netflix Oct. 18
Phillips is a Tribune critic.
