It is with a certain self-satisfaction that we have watched New York go absolutely gaga over a movie called ”Henry.”
This film, which opened about 10 days ago in Manhattan, has driven New York critics into spasms of hyperbole.
The party that attended the movie`s opening was covered in gossip columns. The director, John McNaughton, was interviewed in The Village Voice.
And earlier this week, that staid Time magazine, observing the film`s X rating, noted ”. . . this movie rates an X as in excellent.”
Though New Yorkers are fighting one another to jump on the ”Henry”
bandwagon as if it were some homegrown discovery, we know better.
This is how we discovered ”Henry” in the fall of 1986: Coming out of the Downtown Sports Club one morning, after a particularly savage tennis match with a cagey columnist, we spotted a flier pasted to a lightpole. It contained the film`s full title, ”Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer,” the information that it was a presentation of the Chicago International Film Festival and this haunting line: ”Yeah, I killed my mama.”
It took some digging through the festival`s schedule to find the film, buried in part of one of the two daylong fests-within-the-fest highlighting Illinois filmmakers. We were able to get hold of a videocassette of the movie, watched it and were stunned.
Disturbing, brutal and set in Chicago, it tells of two blood-splattered weeks in the life of a drifter named Henry, living with an ex-cellmate named Otis, whose homicidal urges he nurtures, and Otis` sister, with whom he falls in love.
We tracked down the director, a young man named John McNaughton, from the Roseland section of Chicago, and took him to lunch. He told us how little money he had to make the film and what a hard time he was having getting any distributors to take a chance with ”Henry.”
”I think some people feel it`s too arty for the blood crowd,” he said.
”And others think it`s too bloody for the art crowd.”
He said he would fight to keep the film intact and we wished him well.
Over the years, we kept track of ”Henry.” We went to see it when it started playing, at midnights, at the Music Box Theater. We noted that the Tribune`s Dave Kehr named it one of the Top 10 films of the year. And then we started to hear the rumblings of hoopla from New York.
We`re happy that McNaughton`s determination has paid off but we`re less pleased by the sort of call we received from a N.Y. friend.
”You`ve got to see this movie called `Henry` whenever it gets to Chicago,” he said. ”It`s a hot new film about this guy who. . . .”
”Wow,” we interrupted. ”You New Yorkers are so far ahead of us. You haven`t seen this hip new play that just opened there . . . `Grapes of Wrath` ”?
