It's not really a rom-com, but it's kind of a rom-com

It's My Turn (1980) and the beautiful weirdness of 1970s romances

Picture it: Tumblr, 2015. I started A Year of Romantic Comedies, a blog where I wrote about a different romantic comedy every week. After I’d been working on it for a bit, I realized something. I had movies from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. From the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. But the decade that was curiously underrepresented? The 1970s.

Because the rom-coms from the 1970s…well, they often weren’t romantic comedies. Most of them weren’t romantic at all. The 30s/40s gave us the classic screwball comedies we still watch today. The 50s gave us fun innuendo. The 80s had class struggles, and the 90s had big-budget coziness. But the 70s? Um….

You might even consider going so far as spelling “rom-com” correctly, but not me!

This is what Google showed me when I searched for “1970s rom-coms¹.” That’s a lot of Woody Allen! He dominated the decade, and truthfully, it’s just hard to write about his films now. I rewatched Annie Hall two summers ago when I did Flashback Summer, but ultimately never wrote a newsletter about it because what could I say? It’s a sharply written film, but it’s impossible to not think about him while watching because he’s starring in the film. The good simply doesn’t outweigh the bad! And he’s, like, the main guy of the 70s rom-com.

A quick glance at the rest of the options shows that many of them end with breakups or death. And they’re all very weird. You don’t need to have watched a year’s worth of romantic comedies to understand that romantic films from the 70s are way different than the films from other decades. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is romantic, Claudine is romantic, but they just aren’t comparable to, say, Maid in Manhattan. These films are sharp, they’re realistic, they’re gritty, and they’re weird.

And I say…bring it back. What I wouldn’t give for a romantic film landscape like this. We are living in a desert. Every time someone’s like “Rom-coms are back :)” they just mean that we’re gonna get a new Lindsay Lohan Christmas movie. You know that’s not the same. Why are we lying to ourselves like this? Give me a film with abrupt tonal shifts, unclear endings, a couple who may or may not actually belong together, grand gestures that make no sense…this is all I want out of a film! I want to be confused and shocked while watching a romance!

This was a very long intro to tell you that I recently watched the Claudia Weill film It’s My Turn, which stars the most beautiful woman ever (Jill Clayburgh) and my #3 celebrity crush (Charles Grodin). Also Michael Douglas with a beard. I’ve been wanting to watch this forever, but this month it showed up on Criterion as part of their NY Love Stories collection, which also features Moonstruck, Crossing Delancey, and a lot of other great stuff. I know I’m always trying to sell you on a Criterion Channel subscription, but that’s only because it’s truly the best streamer out there.

It’s My Turn technically came out in 1980, but I’m counting it as a 1970s film for my purposes here because isn’t the first year of a new decade really just part of the old decade, and doesn’t it kind of make sense given that the film was made during the tail end of the 1970s? Feel free to disagree with me…I don’t make the rules! Kidding, I made this rule just now.

It’s My Turn is part of the Jill Clayburgh is Mistreated By Men Cinematic Universe, which pains me as someone who believes Jill Clayburgh was the cutest woman in the world. Who could ever be mean to this woman?

All the men in Starting Over, An Unmarried Woman, and It’s My Turn, that’s who.

Jill plays Kate Gunzinger (great name), a math professor in Chicago who’s dating and living with Homer (Charles Grodin). An interview for a position in New York coincides with her father’s wedding in the city, so she decides to go and meets her father’s new wife’s son, Ben (Michael Douglas with a beard). It’s a rom-com set up. It’s a rom-com cover. It’s a rom-com tagline.

The apostrophe is a heart.

But nothing else about this movie is so easily explained. The best way I can tell you about it is to say that there’s fifteen hours worth of material here, but we only get a movie’s worth of it, and I mean that in the best way. You know how in a short story, you only get a momentary glimpse at someone’s life? You get that feeling of seeing just enough, the pleasant hunger of wanting more? That’s this movie. We see flashes of many things: how sad Kate is that her mother is dead, how conflicted she is that her father is remarrying, how she deals with sexism at work. But the film doesn’t stop to belabor these points—we don’t get a monologue from Kate about her experiences with sexism in academia. We don’t get a dramatic conversation with her father. The film trusts you to keep up—you’re smart!

So Kate is at this wedding and she feels weird about it. Ben, her new stepbrother, asks her to dance and I swear to you Jill Clayburgh has a physicality about her that reminds me of Miss Piggy, and I mean that in the best way possible. She’s just flailing all around that dance floor, hair flopping up and down. I love her. I was not prepared to see Michael Douglas as a convincing romantic lead, given that I primarily think of him in his role in Fatal Attraction, where he’s a very convincing loser and creep. The beard, however, was doing a lot of the leg work here. I don’t fully understand it, but he’s hot.

They go back to the hotel under the guise of “getting a drink” but the bar is closed and Ben is like, “Well I suppose we have no choice but to get room service, in your room, where the beds are.” It’s hardly worth noting that Kate is still with Homer and Ben is married with a kid. This means nothing in a 70s film—they’re so casual about infidelity. But they don’t make it to her room right away because they find an arcade and there’s a long scene where Ben proceeds to just school Kate at every single game, including foosball and a baseball video game. Ben is actually a former baseball player (for the Indians which means he lives in OHIO! They’re rightfully called the Guardians now, but in this film we were decades away from people in Ohio defiantly still displaying cutouts of Chief Wahoo in their garages to prove a point²). He had to quit because he got, like, one million injuries.

Ben makes conversation by asking Kate, “Why are your clothes so dumb?” I’m sorry? This is how you speak to Jill Clayburgh? Her clothes are perfect. Yes, she’s wearing a weird quilted jacket with a belt and an unwieldy scarf that appears to be made out of fishing net. She has never, not even once, not even to work, worn a bra. Well I think she looks fun. Ben has apparently used his time off work to attend the Mystery School of Picking Up Women.

All Ben needs is a big hat.

They end up back in her room, where Kate gets a delivery of flowers from Homer as she and Ben are making out. This actually doesn’t make her pause as much as you might think. The scene is rife with tension, but not really sexual tension. More like, “why are these characters so mad at each other?” tension. At one point Kate tells Ben “tough titty” when he gets upset that she’s using his shirt to wipe off blood on her finger. They’re fighting like a brother and sister, which reminds me…they kind of are now! These people have no concern for how awkward future holidays are going to be. This is the premise of MANY a taboo romance novel.

They don’t have sex because of all the interruptions. He calls her “sis” (no). You’d think this would be the end of it…but you’d think wrong. Because the next morning Kate goes over to visit her dad as he moves his stuff into his new wife’s apartment and there’s Ben, talking to his wife and kid on the phone. Nothing hotter than a man with a full-fledged family back in Akron, if you’re Kate. Everyone keeps dissing Homer because he’s divorced with two kids, but at least he isn’t actively cheating on someone. And at least he’s Charles Grodin!

Kate is like, “I don’t know the first thing about baseball, I only know math,” so Ben is like, “Well have I got a surprise for you!” The surprise is that he takes her to an old-timer’s game at Yankee Stadium and boy, did I love this part. According to IMDB, it was filmed at an actual old-timer’s game and it’s just such a nice, loose scene. We get a bit of a feel for what Ben’s life and background are like, but not too much. It’s like we’re getting to know him along with Kate.

Oh, and then they sleep together. Obviously. Ben has to go back to Akron (and his family) and Kate is like, “Wait, why don’t we just stay together?” Right, because they’re such a good match! They both live with other people and they don’t live in the same city but Kate’s like, “I just think I could fix him.” He’s actually very mean to her in an airport and I didn’t appreciate that. Men Mistreating Jill Clayburgh Cinema can be a challenging genre.

But it turns out, this really wasn’t about the romance all along. Sure, Ben has a great beard and a bad attitude, but it was never about him. Kate’s weekend helps her realize she deserves better than a job in New York she doesn’t really want, or a relationship with Homer that doesn’t quite fit. She sees that her dad and his new wife are truly in love, and she wants that! She’s not content with a man who only makes jokes but doesn’t seriously connect with her (all this despite the fact that Charles Grodin sings the lyrics “Chicken broke toe and I don’t care” at one point and I’m still kind of laughing at it…listen, the jokes ARE good!). She wants to live life on her terms. It is, as the title suggests, her turn.

The movie ends with Kate walking around campus eating an ice cream cone (things are already going great for her). There’s romantic music and I was convinced Ben was gonna show up, like he’s Jack Nicholson in Terms of Endearment, there when you need him. But instead of Ben, we see a delivery guy who’s looking for Kate, because Ben sent her baseball-themed frozen yogurt (?). I mean, she just ate an ice cream cone, but sure. It’s a good gift. I guess he regrets being such a jerk at the airport. Maybe he even left his wife…one step at a time!

And then a Diana Ross song starts playing, and you won’t believe this…it’s called It’s My Turn. There is nothing I love more than a titular Diana Ross theme song. Mostly I’m thinking about Mahogany here.

Talk about an ambiguous ending! But it doesn’t matter. All this ending makes me think is…good for her.

Predictably, audiences at the time did not appreciate It’s My Turn. It was nominated for a Razzie for Worst Screenplay. Roger Ebert said, “It’s My Turn is one of those movies where you can almost keep a mental list of the Important Topics as they’re ticked off in the dialogue. The people in this movie don’t seem to be having conversations; they seem to be marching through current feminist issues.” Couldn’t disagree more, Rog. He even calls out the old timer’s game as an “extended sequence that sticks out like a sore thumb.” Don’t threaten me with a good time.

I feel like people back then didn’t know or appreciate what they had. What’s the last (recently made) truly weird romance movie you’ve seen? This is, honestly, what I liked about It Ends With Us (not a romance but you get what I’m saying)…it made no sense! Give me more inexplicable outfits, nonsense dialogue, confounding decisions.

It’s My Turn is currently playing on Criterion Channel. It’s not available at my library and it’s kind of expensive on DVD, so your best bet is renting it or just getting a Criterion subscription already!

I loved this movie and I’m so glad I watched it. Let me know if you’ve seen it, if you also love Charles Grodin, and your favorite weird romances that may or may not be actual rom-coms. See you soon. xo

1. Well, “rpmcoms” but let’s not split hairs.

2. The point is that they don’t care about explicitly racist imagery.