“If you lived here you’d be home now.”
The Gypsy Moths (1969) was the final film that director John Frankenheimer made with leading man Burt Lancaster. The two men began the decade with The Young Savages (1961) and ended it with The Gypsy Moths. The Gypsy Moths is a fitting end to a collaboration that so often pushed the boundaries of Lancaster’s physical abilities and Frankenheimer’s direction. Their partnership, their friendship, was built on the mutual desire to out do their last picture with their next.
Both men saw themselves in the character of Mike Rettig (Lancaster). Rettig, who had spent so much of his life courting death, could only ever feel alive when the ground came rushing up at him. For Lancaster that rush came from taking more challenging and more nuanced roles that pushed the actor’s vulnerability. For Frankenheimer that rush came in the form of technological innovations required to shoot the skydiving stunts (outdoing the technological innovations of his film Grand Prix).
The plot of The Gypsy Moths is simple. A trio of barnstorming skydivers arrive in the small mid-western town of Bridgeville (with its college and missile base) to perform a series of stunts on the Fourth Of July. They stay with one of the skydiver’s aunt and uncle. Then, on the third of July, Rettig pushes his cape stunt too far and dies.
The film reunites Lancaster and Deborah Kerr for the first time since From Here To Eternity (1953). Kerr plays Scott Wilson’s aunt whose life is one of “boredom and lovelessness”. She and Lancaster have a one night affair, each attracted to the other out of a shared desperation. Rettig only feels alive attempting the cape stunt while Kerr’s character Elizabeth only feels alive during adulterous affairs. When Lancaster invites Kerr to runaway with him she is terrified of the possibilities promised by such a venture and declines, leaving each of them to pursue those singular moments that keep them alive.
Curiously the dangerous cape stunt is treated with the same awe and terror of the “triple” in Trapeze (1956). In both films Lancaster’s singular obsession with these stunts costs him dearly. There’s a kind of fatalism that runs through both films that is connected to a doomed masculinity. It’s a masculinity that finds it difficult to exist beyond the high octane environs of war, combat, and death. Lancaster’s characters, like in The Swimmer (1968), are deluded and left alive because of habit more than drive.
The Gypsy Moths is a natural double feature with The Swimmer. Both films are leisurely paced character studies that gradually pull back the curtain on lives lived in self-destructive desperation. But more than that both films find the aging Lancaster grappling with what his stardom and role in movies should be. Lancaster is transitioning in these films from the action packed The Professionals (1966) to the nuanced character work of Conversation Piece (1974).
Frankenheimer is more than capable of handling the subtle drama of The Gypsy Moths. It’s in the high flying stunt work that Frankenheimer really shines. Using specially made cameras and rigs Frankenheimer is able to photograph the skydiving stunts as they were never seen before. And he cuts these stunts together flawlessly, telling micro stories of a single motion through the air from one shot to the next. These sequences find Frankenheimer’s sense for action at its most pure and unadulterated.
Suffice it to say that The Gypsy Moths is an excellent film. Unfortunately it is often overshadowed by films like Seconds (1966) or Elmer Gantry (1960) in the oeuvres of its authors Lancaster and Frankenheimer. The Gypsy Moths may just be Frankenheimer’s most human picture and it is certainly one of Lancaster’s most measured performances. The Gypsy Moths deserves a critical re-evaluation that puts it in its rightful place.
