Pete ‘n’ Tillie (1972) Queer Film B-

DIRECTOR: Martin Ritt

Tillie (Carol Burnett) is a single woman in her late thirties when, at a party, she’s introduced to Pete (Walter Matthau), a confirmed bachelor whose charm lies in his curdled misanthropy. On their first date, when Tillie offers him a choice of beverages, he replies, “Whatever’s the most trouble.” It’s the best line in the film—and it arrives far too early.

Before long, they’re married and unexpectedly blessed with a child, Robbie (Lee Montgomery), despite Pete’s loudly professed atheism. The years pass, the marriage settles into a workable if imperfect rhythm, and then tragedy strikes: nine-year-old Robbie is diagnosed with a fatal illness.

Both Burnett and Matthau were at the height of their powers in 1972—Matthau would deliver his greatest screen performance the very next year in Don Siegel’s Charley Varrick—but Pete ’n’ Tillie never rises to meet them. The film is curiously flat, as if the stars are afraid to push past the script’s limitations. It has the look and feel of a “TV movie of the week” from the era when that phrase was an insult.

After Robbie’s death, Pete and Tillie grieve along separate tracks. Pete moves out, drinks heavily, and drifts into affairs. Tillie leans on her best friend, Gertrude—played by Geraldine Page, earning her fifth of eight Oscar nominations. Page gets comic mileage out of Gertrude’s refusal to divulge her age, and she participates in a long, operatic catfight with Burnett that later inspired the Anne Bancroft–Shirley MacLaine brawl in The Turning Point (1977). But despite my deep admiration for Page, this is one of her least distinguished performances, and the nomination feels generous.

Tillie’s other confidant is Jimmy, the film’s token gay friend, played by René Auberjonois—whose name alone is one of the era’s great cinematic credits. Jimmy’s defining trait is that he knows Gertrude’s real age (of course he does). Otherwise, he’s written as a kind of sexless saint, a man with no interior life whose sole purpose is to tend to Tillie’s emotional needs. He even offers to marry her if it would make her happy—an act of devotion that’s meant to be touching but lands as another example of the era’s one-dimensional “helpful gay” archetype.

The screenplay, nominated for an Oscar, was written by Julius J. Epstein of Casablanca fame. But neither Epstein nor director Martin Ritt seems willing to push the material beyond its safe, middlebrow boundaries. The result is a film with two great stars, a prestigious pedigree, and a story that never quite finds its pulse.

STREAMING: YouTube.

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