Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon

Otto Preminger’s quirky film about three social outcasts who move in together to join forces. Liza Minnelli, Ken Howard. Warren: Robert Moore. Mario: James Coco. Miss Gregory: Kay Thompson. Beach Boy: Fred Williamson. Miss Farber: Anne Revere. Jesse: Ben Piazza. Marjorie Kellogg adapted her novel for the screen., Junie Moon’s face has been disfigured by ill-gotten burns, and depends on her friends and her wit to cope. She, Warren, and Arthur leave the hospital-they yearn for independence-and find a house to live in. Together they stumble into adventures involving the local fish vendor, nosy neighbors, surreptitious vacations, love, and frustration in finding jobs as they face subtle prejudices in their community, and their own particular medical problems., Upon completing Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, a tearful Liza Minnelli declared publicly that she would never, ever work with tyrannical director Otto Preminger again. Worse luck for her: Junie Moon contains what may well be Minnelli’s best non-musical performance. Based on the novel by Marjorie Kellogg, the film surprisingly manages to evoke humor and pathos from some of the least promising material in movie history. Minnelli plays an emotionally imbalanced young girl whose face is horribly disfigured by her psycho boy friend Ben Piazza. Ken Howard is cast as an epileptic who has wrongly been diagnosed as mentally retarded. And Robert Moore (future director of such films as The Cheap Detective and Murder by Death) portrays a homosexual, confined to a wheelchair after a hunting accident. After meeting one another in a hospital, these three social outcasts decide to move in together, forming a united front against a cold, judgmental world. The devastating events that follow might have lapsed into the grotesque and exploitational, but director Preminger is extremely careful to depict his protagonists as three-dimensional human beings rather than “freaks.” Unfortunately, some filmgoers, assuming that any film with a title like Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon just had to be a campy laff riot, were turned off by the repellant aspects of the early scenes and refused to give the rest of this fascinating film a chance.