What's it about?

WARNING-- COMMENT MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS

Hi

"The Sterile Cuckoo" is a 1969 movie based (untightly) on a 1965 novel of the same title by John Nichols. The movie was shot in and around the campus of Hamilton College in Clinton, NY, which Nichols attended, and where, presumably, much of the inspiration for this very tender, very honest, and very idiosyncratic love story was garnered.

The story centers on a terribly lonely yet charmingly obnoxious young woman named Pookie Adams (Liza Minnelli in her most ominous role) who relentlessly pursues a stolid, shy entomology student named Jerry Payne (Wendell Burton). An intransigent misanthrope, she labels everyone at her school a "creep" or a "weirdo". She only wants to be with Jerry, who warms to her, as everyone who sees this movie does... except those who don't. She wins the intimacy with him she so ardently seeks, and it is consumated in a classic and hilarious scene in a lakeside cabin. From this point onward, Pookie's deeply wounded soul is revealed to Jerry in ever more troubling ways. She confabulates a pregnancy (which "went away"), accuses Jerry of homosexual tendencies for spending vacation time skiing with his roommate, gets drunk at a party and verbally savages her female classmates, etc. Her desperation becomes overwhelming for Jerry, who-- though he loves her-- needs to take care of business as a student. He asks for a "time out". Devastated, Pookie disappears. Jerry later finds Pookie-- by now inconsolable and confused-- and puts her on a bus toward her home, in some of the most heartbreaking scenes ever put to film. And that's the end.

I call this an "ominous" role for Minnelli because so much of the material invented for the movie came true for her in real life. The book contains nothing about Pookie's mother being dead, or Pookie accusing her lover of being gay, nor about pregnancies that never happened... yet Judy Garland died within months of this movie being completed, Liza has been married to more than one homosexual male, and through it all, she has remained childless. It is as if she created her own vision of the role of a "sterile cuckoo" (she was a big fan of the book, and pursued the part in the incipient movie for nearly three years) and then was fated to act out the role in real life. I sometimes think she consecrated this movie with a huge sacrifice: after her well-deserved Academy Award nomination, she was left with nothing but Pookie's private life. Like Nichols, in ensuing years she seems to have wished the movie would simply go away. Though I am no fan of Liza Minnelli, I think this is a great movie (my personal favorite, in fact) which includes the finest work by any actress, anytime, ever.

One thing about this movie that might really interest you, Lindsay: in some scenes, Liza very strongly resembles her father, while in others, she looks almost exactly like her mother! Now, this is absolutely impossible, because no two people could be more divergent in physiognomy than Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli-- but I swear it's TRUE! Watch the movie, and see what you think.

BTW, outside the USA, "The Sterile Cuckoo" was released under the title "Pookie".

I wouldn't really consider this to be a plot film, per se. It is more a charaacter study of this sad, kooky and terribly insecure girl named Pookie Adams and how she managers to manuever through her own particular orbit and the people she affects along the way, one young man in particular (Wendell Burton).