Melissa Anderson
Rupture, rapture, running through fields: anything and everything goes in Richard Beymer’s hallucinatory 1973 film.
Richard Beymer in The Innerview. Courtesy Anthology Film Archives.
The Innerview, directed by Richard Beymer, Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue, New York City, April 18–24, 2025
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Richard Beymer, who made his screen debut, while still a teenager, in Vittorio De Sica’s Terminal Station (1953), will forever be remembered for two roles: as Tony, the ex-Jet who falls for Natalie Wood’s Maria in West Side Story (1961), released as Tinseltown’s Golden Age was lurching toward its demise; and as Benjamin Horne, the unscrupulous business titan headed for a nervous collapse who appears in all three seasons of Twin Peaks (1990–91, 2017). Beymer’s casting in Mark Frost and David Lynch’s cult TV series evinced the latter’s unmatched gift for defiling, and thereby revitalizing, the avatars of sanitized Old Hollywood (a treatment that also extended to Beymer’s West Side Story costar Russ Tamblyn, who played Dr. Lawrence Jacoby, the show’s loony psychiatrist).
But shortly after West Side Story and decades before Twin Peaks, Beymer underwent a radical reinvention, taking almost no acting jobs between 1964 and 1983 and devoting himself to filmmaking. Participating in ’64’s Freedom Summer, he made an acclaimed documentary short that year on the civil-rights struggle, titled A Regular Bouquet: Mississippi Summer. His next project found him both behind and in front of the camera and light years removed from big-studio musical bonanzas. The Innerview (1973) is a deep cut of psychedelia in which the image of toothy, clean-shaven, Brylcreemed Tony, sporting jacket and tie and chastely embracing his nightgowned sweetheart on her fire escape, has been forever annihilated—now supplanted by a bearded, Jesus-haired, hippie-beaded Beymer, thrusting away on top of his bare-breasted lover, her contortions while in the throes of ecstasy pleasingly revealing ungroomed armpits.
Joanna Bochco in The Innerview. Courtesy Anthology Film Archives.
That woman, essentially the star of this experimental opus, is identified in the closing credits simply as “Joanna.” She is Joanna Frank, née Bochco, a film and TV actress whose last credited work was in the hit NBC legal drama LA Law (1986–94), cocreated by her brother, Steven Bochco. A sharp-featured brunette, Joanna sometimes put me in mind of Toni Basil, the genius dancer and choreographer (and occasional actress and singer) who, like Beymer, straddled mass-cult and the avant-garde, shimmying in both Viva Las Vegas (1964) and Bruce Conner’s Breakaway (1966).
The experience of being reminded of something else—usually something better—occurs not infrequently in The Innerview. Its opening segment, which highlights the foreboding aspects of filmmaking itself, evokes Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966). Beymer cribs more copiously from the paragons of experimental cinema: eldritch characters carrying mirrors summon Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943); satanic figures, Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969); a newborn crowning and being expelled out of its mother’s vagina, Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving (1959). And so on.
Still from The Innerview. Courtesy Anthology Film Archives.
As the film’s feebly punning title suggests, The Innerview focuses on shifting psychic states, though a Q&A of sorts does take place in the beginning. Another beardo, in aviator sunglasses, asks Beymer, “And what do you recall first?” Staring hard into the lens, the director demurs, replying only, “Is all this necessary?” He parries further queries before picking up his Super 8 camera, establishing The Innerview’s most prominent motif: Beymer calling attention to himself as filmmaker, assembling the movie we are watching. (This meta conceit affords us glimpses of The Innerview’s most charismatic performer: a darling tabby who keeps Beymer company at the editing table.)
Joanna Bochco in The Innerview. Courtesy Anthology Film Archives.
Was all this necessary? Beymer takes a maximalist approach to The Innerview’s animating concept, which seems to have something to do with the filmmaker and Joanna dealing with a rupture (whether planned or not) in their dyad before reuniting for that scene of exalted copulation described above. Off-screen, she says, “I’m taking this trip. I know you don’t know what I’m talking about. I know you’re in a different place. But I, I want to tell you because it’s so wonderful. And you’ve made it so much easier for this moment to happen.” Joanna’s metaphorical voyage, its “mystical” nature sometimes underscored by long stretches of sitar music, involves a lot of weeping, running through fields and along the beach, burying a child, assuming her place within the vast realm of wildlife, and taking other lovers—one of whom (I think) is a woman. As frequently occurs during the sex scenes, Joanna’s orgasm face fills most of the frame, rendering her bedmates illegible. But even when not on the verge of coming, her visage is filmed in extreme close-up, these tight shots punctuating The Innerview. She often gazes right at the viewer—coquettishly, defiantly, tiresomely. In between these visions of Joanna, Beymer has inserted not only footage of Hitler and JFK’s fateful Dallas motorcade but also clips from Keystone Kops movies, Un chien andalou, Dracula, The Mummy, and The Wolf Man.
Still from The Innerview. Courtesy Anthology Film Archives.
It’s all too much, and yet never enough. Writing about The Innerview in the Village Voice, on the occasion of its weeklong run at the Whitney in late ’73, the great Molly Haskell had this to say about Beymer’s aesthetic of haphazard glut: “I’m all for exploring those levels of psychic experience that we have ignored for so long in Western thought but I can’t help thinking that the way to such a multiplicity of discovery must be through unity, through some kind of discipline, an orderly progression toward what Rossellini calls the ‘essential’ image rather than a hallucinatory flipping through one person’s mental scrapbook.”
Still from The Innerview. Courtesy Anthology Film Archives.
No matter how fatiguing its eighty-nine minutes, though, this freaky curio maintains an ineradicable appeal. While the film’s surfeit of shambolic images may reveal a lack of discipline on-screen, Beymer’s constant tinkering with the project demonstrates a touching steadfastness. He began revising The Innerview after its ’73 premiere, an aggressive intervention that involved cutting up all existing prints for future reassembling. On view at Anthology is a digital restoration of a version put together in 1975. Now eighty-seven, Beymer—who has made several documentaries in the twenty-first century, including one featuring Lynch, a fellow TM devotee—is apparently at work on yet another iteration of The Innerview, one that he claims will be “definitive.” Is all this necessary? Yes. No. Maybe.
Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns and the author of a monograph on David Lynch’s Inland Empire from Fireflies Press. A collection of her film criticism, The Hunger, will be published this year by Film Desk Books.