Background
Jaglom, Henry David was born on January 26, 1938 in London. Son of Simon M. and Marie (Stadthagen) Jaglom.
Jaglom, Henry David was born on January 26, 1938 in London. Son of Simon M. and Marie (Stadthagen) Jaglom.
He was originally an actor. Still, he studied at the University of Pennsylvania and the Actors’ Studio, to be a performer, and he has appeared in a few films beyond his own: Psych-Out (68, Richard Rush); Drive. He Said (71, Jack Nicholson); and The Last Movie (71, Dennis Hopper). 1 le was a part of the Hollywood avant-garde around 1970 that included Nicholson. Hopper, and Bob Rafelson, and Jaglom w'as credited as a consultant on Easy Rider (69. Hopper and Peter Fonda). His debut picture, A Safe Place, was part of the BBS deal with Columbia.
He has done remarkable things: Always (an account of the breakup in his marriage with Patrice Townsend) is a lovely, heartbreaking picture that adds to the list of great Hollywood bitter-sweet comedies on marriage and remarriage; Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? finds real pain in Karen Black’s performance; Someone to Love is a loving farewell to Orson Welles (a f riend to Jaglom and a profound influence). And even in the early films there are moments of wonder—Tuesday Weld in the epochally pretentious A Safe Place (which also stars Welles as a magician—now Jaglom’s logo), and Dennis Hopper as the cracking soldier in Tracks.
Jaglom’s most recent films have seemed increasingly forced: Venice/Venice, in which Jaglom is a movie director at the Venice Film Festival who meets a new lady .... is painf ully et cetera— as well as a fatal reminder that I lenry is not a good enough actor to play Henry Jaglom. That great role needs someone subtler. Jaglom also needs scripts, and a more structured way of shooting. Otherwise, his process might actually bring someone to lay hands on a weapon. He could be the first auteur to be silenced in the middle of one of his own films.
It has been said with wisdom that some great directors make the same film over and over again—Hawks, Ozu, Antonioni. But that great family-feeling sinks in slowly. Whereas, when the audience sees the ditto marks before they stick in the director's eye—then something is wrong. And, truly, Henry laglom is far too smart, far too creative, and far too insecure to repeat himself so much.
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Acting has edged over into psychotherapy for Jaglom—in other words, the decisions an actor faces have become for the filmmaker a model for the search for happiness and for the infinite metaphysics of being. It is also a way of meeting women, and some might say that the value of Jagloms films depends very much on the loveliness and personality of the women.
But these are films made resolutely outside the mainstream. Not that Henry is uninterested in money or naive at business. He works from independent means, yet he has been very successful at making and marketing his economical pieces of pseudo-verité in the 1980s. Thus, he is an odd mixture of the therapist/pilgrim open to everything and the sweet-talking tyrant who does everything absolutely his way. Yet he is well aware of, and eloquent about, the spoiled child-ism of Henry Jaglom—and that is a great subject, and not only in America.
He has sometimes found himself with women who do not quite stand up to the adoration of a whole film. There is no way of denying that Jaglom, at his best even, walks very close to the pit of absurd self-involvement and pretension.
