Crew
Director – Anna Kendrick, Screenplay – Ian McDonald, Producers – Roy Lee, J.D. Lifshitz, Raphael Margules & Miri Yoon, Photography – Zach Kuperstein, Music – Dan Romer & Mike Tuccillo, Visual Effects – Frameriver (Supervisor – Adam Estey), Special Effects Supervisor – Tyler Shimkiew, Production Design – Brent Thomas. Production Company – Vertigo Entertainment/BoulderLight Pictures.
Cast
Anna Kendrick (Sheryl Bradshaw), Daniel Zovatto (Rodney Alcala), Nicolette Robinson (Laura), Tony Hale (Ed), Jedidiah Goodacre (Bachelor #2), Matt Visser (Bachelor #1), Pete Holmes (Terry), Autumn Best (Amy), Kathryn Gallagher (Charlie), Kelly Jakle (Sarah), Denalda Williams (Marilyn), Rob Morton (George Elliott)
Plot
Los Angeles, 1979. Sheryl Bradshaw has been trying to make it as an actress without any luck. Her agent gets her an appearance on the tv show The Dating Game. As the show is taped, Laura, one woman in the audience, recognises Contestant #3 as the man who raped and murdered her friend. She tries to get somebody on the show to do something about it. Contestant #3, who is in actuality Rodney Alcala, has had a history of luring women under the guise of being a photographer and then killing them. As the show continues, Sheryl finds him to be the most charming of the contestants.
Anna Kendrick is best known as an actress, having a reasonable profile after appearing in the Twilight films and going on to roles in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010), Pitch Perfect (2012) and sequels, Rapture-Palooza (2013), Into the Woods (2014) and voice work in Trolls (2016) and sequel. Woman of the Hour represents her debut as a director.
Rodney Alcala (1943-2021) was a serial killer. Between 1977 and his arrest in 1979, Alcala killed various women in New York and California, where he would usually approach them posing as a photographer. He was convicted of seven murders and was serving multiple life sentences when he died of a heart-attack in 2021 aged 77. The end credits of Woman of the Hour state that the number of other victims could be as many as 130, which is extremely high for the number of unknown victims for a killer – sixteen times more than the number on Alcala’s record. Alcala’s photos have been posted online by police, among which some of the people have been identified, but some 120 others not. However, it is a huge leap from 120 unidentified photos of girls to saying that that equals 130 unknown murder victims.
The strange aspect of the Alcala story – the part around which Woman of the Hour is focused – was Alcala’s appearance as a contestant on the tv show The Dating Game (1965-2021). On the show, a woman would choose from among three hidden male contestants which to go on a date with. Created by Chuck Barris of The Gong Show (1976-89) fame – the same Chuck Barris who claimed to be a CIA assassin – the show has undergone multiple revivals and different international incarnations since its original run. The original series featured a number of before they were famous faces including Farrah Fawcett, Ron Howard, Michael Jackson, Lee Majors, Steve Martin, Tom Selleck and Lindsay Wagner. Alcala was the winning contestant of the episode he appeared on in 1978, but the girl Cheryl Bradshaw decided not to go through with the date after finding Alcala creepy.
Woman of the Hour is a True Crime film based on the Rodney Alcala story, in specific his appearance on The Dating Game. It is easy to tell what attracted Anna Kendrick to the script – the story of a struggling actress in Hollywood who cannot get the breaks she wants and the slings and arrows of casual misogyny from various men encountered. Kendrick stated in interviews that she added aspects of her own experience to the characters. Often there are times that pieces of dialogue feels like they are boiler-plated self-inserts solely to make such points.
This is the upshot of the new initiatives in recent years (the 2020s) to increase the number of women directors. Woman of the Year could have easily made by a male director, but you suspect that the POV would have been a very different one and Kendrick’s character not as prominent. As it is, we get a lot of scenes where we feel the creepy unease that Kendrick does when she talks to Daniel Zovatto in the parking lot, or the casual crass sexism that among the three contestants, even a whole character (Nicolette Robinson) who is set up for the express purposes of having her warnings dismissed by security and police. The actual happenings of the particular The Dating Game episode that Alcala appeared on have been altered so that what we are presented with are three options – one where Anna’s choice are #1, a clueless idiot, #2, a crass jerk, and #3, who uses all the right moves that charm her but underneath is a dangerous psychopath. (Personally, as a representative of the male population, I think that that is reducing the spectrum of representation down to caricatures).
Nevertheless, what it shows is that with increased entry of women into genre material, we have what could have been a standard psycho film given new emphases. Most psycho films are directed by men – while women are portrayed as the victims of killers, there is often an underlying titillation about this – see Psycho (1960), many examples of the slasher and in particular the giallo film. A women directed psycho film also has women victims but places us in the shoes of the fear that is being experienced by said women. On the other hand, when it comes to the true crime aspect, you wanted Woman of the Hour to get darker than it does. As it is, it sits atop the material but never quite goes far enough with it.
Trailer here