ME, BRATALIE

ME, NATALIE (1969)
dir: Fred Coe


Another movie I couldn't find the trailer for but was able to find in its entirety. Go figure.

ME, BRATALIE
Sick #75, May 1970
w: Fred Wolfe (Paul Laikin)
a: Bill Robinson

Leave to Sick for another strange choice for a movie parody. Not only is it not remembered much now, it wasn't much then either, but also back then the general public didn't keep track of what was a hit or not.

Story about Natalie (Patty Duke) growing up not finding herself attractive, then moving away from home and realizing who she truly is. She talks about how as a child she was picked on for her looks, despite being told she's not ugly by her mother (Nancy Marchand).

As a teenager, Natalie has a best friend who has no problem scoring with boys and she's always being brought along on her friend's dates.

Natalie's parents keep trying to set her up with boys who just don't do it for her. Her parents look nothing like this.

She can confide in her Uncle Harold (Martin Balsam), her father's partner at his pharmacy, who talls her standards of beauty are only superficial. Then she's upsetwhen he comes to a familt dinner and brings his fiancee (Salome Jens) who's a go-go dancer.

Natalie finds out her uncle has died (they leave out the part where she goes to college and is kicked out) and eventually moves to Manhattan to live on her own.

She moves to Greenwich Village, which has always been stereotyped as “the gay neighborhood” and post-Stonewall acceptance wasn't quite on the public's radar yet, so of course they had to have fun with that in the last panel.

The part with Natalie living on her own takes up at least half of the movie, but here it's only one of six pages. At her new apartment, her landlady (Elsa Lanchester) shows her the dumbwaiter, which she uses to get to her top floor walk-up instead of the stairs. One day she gets stuck and meets her downstairs neighbor David (James Farentino), an aspiring painter. Initially she resents that he paints nude models but eventually falls in love with him. He also has a house with a wife and kids, which he leaves for her.

In the middle of the first scene in the second act David does paintings of her face specifically for the flaws, which he sees as her inner beauty. Even having not seen the movie, you think there's more to this parody, but it ends like this. Makes me think they were allotted six pages, then realized they filled them, then had to end so abruptly.