Every once in a while, I think there are people who would be better known if we had more successful musicals. After all, Jessica Harper got her start in film as Phoenix, the Christine Daae parallel in 1974’s Phantom of the Paradise. She was also Susan Sarandon’s replacement as Janet Weiss in Shock Treatment. (She’s in Pennies From Heaven, but she only lip-syncs in it.) She’s actually done seven albums of children’s songs, though, so I suppose that’s something. I just think she could’ve been a huge star with the right scripts.
People who aren’t me probably know her best from Suspiria, the original by Dario Argento. Certainly it is considered a classic of the giallo genre. I must admit that I don’t know a lot about it, not being a fan of the giallo genre. But Suspiria is a film that gets brought up in conversation a lot when it comes to horror, and from what I understand, Jessica Harper has quite a lot to do with its success.
It’s harder to pick one specific person responsible for the success of Phantom of the Paradise, of course, because it’s such an ensemble movie. You can’t just have a good Phantom or a good Christine in a telling of that story; you have to have multiple strong performances. And Harper holds her own. She’s not Paul Williams, but who among us is? She does a good job as the ingenue who becomes an obsession, even if the version of it in this particular telling of the story is considerably more homoerotic and therefore less focused on her as a specific character.
IMDb suggests that she won the role over, among others, Linda Ronstadt. You could not prove this by me. Sure, it could be true, or it could not; who can say? But this is why I wish there were more musicals, even weird rock melodramas like Phantom of the Paradise. (I haven’t seen Shock Treatment.) And I don’t know; maybe she had the career she wanted, and all this speculation on my part assumes that she would have preferred another musical to, say, Minority Report. But even if it wouldn’t have helped her, certainly I’d enjoy seeing more movies like that, if they were good.
I would note that she has an apparently defunct recipe blog, if that’s your style, called The Crabby Cook. It’s the kind of recipe blog I honestly hate, the kind that’s more about random storytelling than about just giving you the damn cookie recipe you’re there for, but at that I’d rather read the storytelling of someone I’ve at least heard of than yet another suburban mother of four talking about getting her kids ready for school in the morning instead of just giving me the damn cookie recipe I’m there for. If I ran the world, I’d insist that you put the recipe before the story.
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