In which Baby Pfeiffer plays sexy, dumb, and drunk.
One of Michelle Pfeiffer’s earliest roles was in the ridiculous 1981 telefilm Callie & Son. My friend Nathaniel summed it up best years ago at his blog The Film Experience, when he wrote:
Summing up the plot of Callie & Son is a herculean task and you probably wouldn’t believe if it I did so let’s just say that it is a mess. It begins like a sympathetic woman’s picture about a sad girl-in-trouble pressured into giving up her baby and then morphs into a romantic drama fantasy about marrying up, then into a ‘the world’s gone mad’ tragedy before it picks its last lengthy identity as absolute junk (but sort of entertaining junk). Callie is, in the end, an Oedipal Prime Time Soap Opera in which a fabulously wealthy and powerful Texas family of two, newspaper mogul mother and politician son, are continually at odds with but way too into each other.
It really is a mess of a movie, with poor writing and either wooden or overwrought acting, but it’s worthwhile historically to see Baby Pfeiffer in what was, at the time, one of her meatiest roles yet. It’s a small role, but she plays a young wife who’s no match for her husband’s domineering mother. She gets to play some big emotional moments (including being sloppy drunk). Her character Sue Lynn Bordeaux is kind of a bimbo, and often intoxicated, and it’s all kinda hot, if also incredibly silly. The motel room scene where a hammered Michelle babbles incoherently through tears while wobbling around in her underwear because she’s just finished a three-way with some dudes and been found out by her future mother-in-law is, well, amazing.
It’s interesting, from a historical perspective, to see a young Michelle alongside two established stars of that era, Simon & Simon’s Jameson Parker and The Bionic Woman herself, Lyndsay Wagner—both of whom Michelle would soon surpass on the road to movie stardom. The telefilm is a slog though, and not worth your time, so just fast forward to Michelle’s scenes and thank the Hollywood gods that she managed to rise above this mess with Grease 2 the following year, and then Scarface in 1983.
Here are some sizzling shots of Michelle promoting Callie & Son. We’re talking pure pfive alarm Baby Pfeiffer pfire.
The Starfire Lounge 