This overlooked and orphaned drama presents Candice Bergen as an alienated newcomer to Chicago. James Caan contributes a carefully modulated performance, and Peter Boyle feels real in a part that we’d expect to be pitched for comedy. Writer Peter Hyams presents a dark tale of Woe in the City, director Herbert Ross emphasizes the gloom and isolation, and it’s not recommended for the lonely or depressed. Critics found it thin and unbelievable, and had little good to say about Bergen’s performance, either. The disc’s best feature is an in-close talk with writer-producer Hyams, about his entry into feature filmmaking.

T.R. Baskin
Blu-ray
Fun City Editions
1971 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 90 min. / Street Date November 7, 2023 / Limited Edition / Available from Fun City Editions / 27.95 / Available from Amazon / 25.98
Starring: Candice Bergen, Peter Boyle, James Caan, Marcia Rodd, Erin O’Reilly, Howard Platt, William Wise, Jane Alderman, Joyce Mandel, Fawne Harriman, Hope Hammersand, Mariann Walters.
Cinematography: Gerald Hirschfeld
Production Designer: Albert Brenner
Film Editor: Maury Winetrobe
Music Scored by: Jack Elliott
Written and Produced by Peter Hyams
Directed by Herbert Ross

In an extra on Fun City’s new Blu-ray writer-producer Peter Hyams describes his first script as angry and feminist. Hyams says that director Herbert Ross made the leading character more serious, and added a ‘Hollywood’ feel.

That’s not the impression we got when we saw T.R. Baskin in 1971. The show unspooled as 90 minutes of slow torture, watching Candice Bergen’s character suffer. The young heroine is made to endure everything demeaning, alienating and off-putting about a young outsider having a rough time in the big city.

“I just wish everybody else didn’t look like they knew exactly where they were going.”

Most of the movie is told within a flashback structure. When we first see the young T.R. Baskin (Candice Bergen) we know nothing about her. She accepts a crude pick-up call from Jack Mitchell (Peter Boyle), an out-of town tire salesman who has solicited a hot tip for an afteroon lay from his old fraternity pal Larry Moore (James Caan). T.R. comes to Jack’s hotel room, but she impresses as a poised college student, not a call girl. It’s an absurd situation. When Jack can’t perform, T.R. explodes in a fit of laughter and tears. When they begin to talk, the flashbacks begin.

It’s a bald tale of bad times in Chicago, where a young woman learns that Hell Is Other People. T.R. Baskin has apparently escaped an unhappy family situation in the small town of Findlay. After finding an overpriced room, she takes a job in the typing pool of an insurance company so enormous that the personnel clerk Dayle Wigoda (Marcia Rodd of Little Murders) handles only those employees whose name ends in ‘B.’ The work is stultifying, and the corporate culture suffocating. Dayle offers friendship, but T.R. is put off by the dating scene. Her co-working women are far too eager to please the insultingly self-important businessmen that take their favors for granted. One is convinced that his fancy car, loud ties and shag rugs should be an irresistible turn-on. T.R. is disappointed that Dayle also subscribes to these values — she’s invested in the office gossip and malicious name-calling. She even shoplifts.

“I think you’re a schmuck.”

Even that miserable social life vanishes after T.R. openly states her opinion of her blind date. But solitude isn’t fun either. After climbing the walls at home, and a fruitless attempt at cruising a bar. T.R. breaks all the rules. Shes sees a reasonable-looking guy reading a book in a coffee shop, walks up to him and waits to be invited to sit down. Larry Moore (James Caan from the first scene) shows no obvious ugly edges, and is receptive to T.R.’s twisted sense of humor. T.R. goes with the flow, hoping for . . . what exactly?  Larry almost seems a potential soul mate, all the way into bed. Since we already know that Larry will soon enough be giving Jack Mitchell T.R.’s phone number ‘for a good time,’ we don’t share her optimism. What will go wrong?

We fear for T.R. Baskin through every step of a movie that convinces us that something horrible is always just about to happen. Six years later, Richard Brooks would take much the same urban tale in a violent direction, in the devastatingly abusive Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

T.R. Baskin wants to be more introspective and profound. Candice Bergen was surely hoping to break out as a major star. We missed Bergen in everything but Getting Straight and Carnal Knowledge; the lazy critical slam that circulated was that her acting was as wooden as her father Edgar Bergen’s Charlie McCarthy. This show may have been aimed to do for Bergen what Alan J. Pakula’s solid hit The Sterile Cuckoo did for Liza Minnelli. But Cuckoo is a sentimental comedy, and Liza’s goofy character connected with audiences. T.R. Baskin’s funny lines are mostly clever comebacks that induce only pangs of trepidation. What exactly is T.R.’s problem?  Will she implode from a lack of meaningful human contact?

“Yeah, we have this medical retirement thing. It’s really neat, if you happen to get run over by an armadillo.”

Chicago is a hostile place. Taxi drivers try to splash mud on their fares. Pedestrians aggressively crash into T.R. on the sidewalk. A potential landlord becomes impatient when she balks at the price asked for a hellhole apartment. These Chicagoans are less friendly than the unpleasaant New Yorkers that torment Neil Simon’s ‘comedy’ The Out-Of-Towners. T.R. opts to live alone after meeting a potential roommate from Hell (Erin O’Reilly), a hyper-chirpy air hostess who ends every sentence with “If you know what I mean.”

Office life has been coldly stylized. The giant insurance company is more oppressive than the one in The Apartment, where employees were at least allowed to have personalities. There’s no comfort in the ugly office culture or the intolerable dating scene. T.R. is painfully unhappy but in no way wants to join the ladies’ roll call of abuse. At one point she commandeers the Insurance Company’s public address system after hours, to deliver a mournfully cynical speech to the rows of empty desks. Getting a handle on T.R. is not easy. She’s a lost lamb in the city, unable to connect … and yet she looks and talks as if she’s the last person to be lost or isolated anywhere.

Peter Hyams’ best work may be the excellent abortion-issue drama Our Time, which he directed but did not write. His script for T.R. Baskin wants us to identify with T.R. while knowing nothing about her. She seems reasonable and sincere, but everything she encounters is an exaggerated modern horror. After a while we realize that the character just doesn’t add up, at least as someone functioning in the real world. Candice Bergen’s T.R. does not behave like someone lacking in emotional defenses. She’s an intelligent, poised beauty with a wry sense of humor. Why has she no friends to go to when feeling down?  One would think T.R. would attract worthy friends wherever she went.

Is T.R. Baskin a mystery character, or just a very thinly written one?  Ms. Bergen just tries to act natural. She projects movie star poise even when scenes become less believable. On the surface, at least, she carries off some very difficult moments. At one point she brings forth the decade’s biggest, most spontaneous belly laugh. But most of the time, T.R. seems to be a bubble of sanity in a forced tale of alienated isolation.

“I’m not really crazy about bowling, I just love the shirts.”

Only in the scenes with Peter Boyle and James Caan does T.R. feel that she’s making contact with somebody, the thing she really needs. Peter Boyle’s Jack Mitchell is an adulterous weakling but his reactions feel fresh. Having made all the assumptions about a girl willing to come to his room, Jake turns to jelly when T.R. doesn’t proceed with an expected sexual tease. Since T.R. is mostly written to react (and add clever asides) Boyle’s Jack is the one to make the scene come alive. His sad little dream of escaping the rat race to a house in Florida isn’t all that insightful, but we’re grateful to find one character besides T.R. who is emotionally vulnerable. This was a relief in 1971 — fresh in our minds was Peter Boyle’s breakthrough role as a right-wing psycho in the previous year’s Joe.

James Caan’s Larry Moore is more of a problem. When T.R. accosts him, playing such a risky game, we fear that she’s lost her mind. She rolls the dice and Larry plays along in a positive, non-threatening way. Larry would seem a dream catch — he edits children’s literature, no less. He’s not an obvious lizard like the unctuous Frank Langella in Diary of a Mad Housewife. But neither does he drop any flags saying he’s interested in anything else than a one-night stand. The encounter plays out in a dramatic void. Their night together is mostly an exchange of clever dialogue and more non-sequitur observations from T.R.. The actors take it all very seriously. We wish a Rom-com Fairy would arrive to tap them on the head and make everything good. But T.R. knows that’s too much to ask. She appears to accept the one night stand as a success — until Larry makes a truly horrible gesture.

Candice Bergen has one more actors’ showcase ‘soliloquy’ scene. It’s an ‘Awkward Call Home,’ a one-sided phone call that we found emotionally effective. But it’s almost our only contact with the life T.R. has left, and leaves us with too many unanswered questions about her. All we know is that the parents seem incapable of listening to her. T.R. may be an idea but she’s not a coherent characterization. She exists in the present tense with Ms. Bergen’s performance.

After being battered for 90 minutes, we at least do understand why T.R. might respond to Jack Mitchell’s call for a Fast Lay, and walk into his hotel room ready for whatever abuse comes next. That doesn’t mean that we know the first thing about her. T.R. Baskin is a curiosity that will certainly reward fans of Peter Boyle, and James Caan as well. Just don’t expect laughter at the finale; my 1971 audience were concerned for T.R. but filed out of the theater like funeral attendees. It goes without saying that this is NOT appropriate fare for anyone insecure or depressed.

Fun City Editions’ Blu-ray of T.R. Baskin is an excellent 4K restoration of a film that Paramount has hardly let out of the vault in half a century. Chicago looks great in the film’s clean images — even the occasional snow-sludged streets. Ms. Bergen is criminally photogenic, with makeup that aims for a no-makeup impression.

Jack Elliott’s effective music score doesn’t telegraph surprises. An active sound mix features radio chatter and random TV sound in a media cacaphony that envelops the lonely T.R. in a circle of Hell. Back in ’71 we associated that kind of audio clutter with the dispiriting audiovisual barrages in John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy.

Almost every Fun City special edition offers a one-of-a-kind interview. T.R. Baskin gives us writer-producer Peter Hyams, who sketches his take on his work background, where his film idea came from, and that he had no idea how unusual it was for him to be given such a creative break at such an early age. He remembers the show as the beginning of a good career and a lifelong friendship with Candice Bergen. Hyams’ advice to people with directing ambitions is to just ‘get into the show biz tent’ in any way they can.

The audio commentary by Chicagoites Ben Reiser and Scott Lucas is a light and conversational podcast-style overview. They take extra time to point out Windy City locations, almost shot by shot.

Fun City commissioned new art for the disc’s slipcover. The original poster artwork inside looks purposely designed to repel movie patrons, to make them choose whatever is playing at a theater down the street.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

T.R. Baskin
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Very Good — Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
All-new Supplements:
Get in the Tent, a video interview with writer/producer Peter Hyams
Audio commentary with Ben Reiser and Scott Lucas of the 70 Movies We Saw in the ’70s podcast
An illustrated 16-page pamphlet with a very good essay by Kat Sachs
New slipcover art by Pip Carter.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: November 2, 2023
(7020bask)

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Here’s Larry Karaszewski on T.R. Baskin: