Jeff next not only blew all the good will he’d acquired by showing She-Devils on Wheels and Breakin’ 2 at the fest, but as Chad R would strenuously argue throughout (with periodic F Bombs for emphasis), the entire pool of good will gleaned from a life of being a super nice guy. Jeff’s crime? His last film choice was Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?
A grotesquely smug and vile vanity project by inexplicable (not to mention charisma-free) musical star Anthony Newley, the repugnant Heironymus Merkin is a film that, luckily for you all, must be experienced to be truly loathed. In short, it’s Newley’s horrendously ‘arty’ tell all biography, which basically amounts to “Man, I got sooooooo much quality quim over the years…I mean, sooooooo much. Soooooooo very much. And I was a horrible husband and father. Because, you know, of all the gorgeous chicks I nailed. I mean, like hundreds and hundreds of them. They just couldn’t get enough. Oh, but I’m baring my soul with my blazing honestly here so that you can see that despite all the sex with the aforementioned hundreds and hundreds of hot chicks–believe me, I’m not exaggerating, they were all gagging for it–it never really made me happy. So, when you think about it, aren’t I the real victim here?”
Newley’s pretensions to ART are well summed up by the above image, in which he couldn’t decide if it would be more brilliantly metaphorical to appear as a clown or a puppet on a string. So he did both!!! Genius! He’s really a Super-Artist, perhaps the bravest and greatest of all time. Just ask him. And what a dry, sophisticated wit he evinces here. Not only did he name his own insert character Heironymous Merkin, and a child-aged lover Mercy Humppe, but Newley’s real life long-suffering wife Joan Collins somehow agreed to appear in the film while all their dirty laundry was being aired. Her insert name in the film? Polyester Poontang. Seriously. To know Anthony Newley is to despise him.
And I’m not kidding about Humppe’s tender years. Newley namedrops Humbert Humbert, the protagonist of the novel Lolita, an incredibly well known book back then. Lolita was 12 in the book, so I’m assuming Mercy was as well. Apparently she’s the one lover who has haunted him over the years, and not because by all rights he should have gone to prison for sleeping with her.
Again, Newley’s actual wife appears in this film, basically playing herself (albeit an herself named Polyester Poontang) in a movie in which her husband rhapsodizes about the achingly sweet agony in his soul he feels due to his estrangement from his jailbait child lover. As if that weren’t enough, Newley actually dragged his real life and extremely young children into the film (his daughter was maybe three or four, and there’s no way she could have understood why her father (in the film) was screaming at people and even hitting some of them. Newley also somehow convinced his real life mother to take part. She has a scene where she weeps copiously because she just couldn’t be the mother that the oh so talented, angelic really, Newley deserved.
Chad R demanded Newley (or Jeff) appear as Monster of the Day. I could not gainsay him. It took less than two hours for Newley to become as loathsome as Woody Allen, and for Allen I had to watch probably 20 of his films to because as grossed out as this single picture left me.
For those protesting the selection of Monster of the Day, well, Milton Berle, also above, plays the Devil. Newley’s conceit is that all the cheating wasn’t his fault. The Devil literally was throwing all those women at him, and God (George Jessel!) would only show up and in lieu of giving guidance would deliver a series of deadpan, cornball jokes. So really, what’s a guy to do? Stupid Devil. Oh, Anthony Newley. More sinned against than sinner, surely.
Just ask him.
Oh, and because I’m hoping to make Chad R’s eyes pop out of his head with rage, I’ll note that the screenplay for this film won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for Best British Original Screenplay. Good lord, the late 60s/early ’70s sucked.
