Release date: June 24, 1969
There is a DVD out there from the mid 2000s. The back text makes much ado over Cher’s Oscar, as if to encourage you to buy this DVD for reasons of other performances,
The box text says the movie is about “a reckless rebel who’s taking the fast lane on the road…to nowhere…a gritty, gutsy ride through a powerful emotional landscape filled with love, adventure, tragedy and truth….desperate to escape her dark past, wild child Chastity hits the streets….only to find herself launched on an electrifying odyssey of self-discovery…with fewer and fewer options–she finally begins to see that the only safe place to run…is into the arms of the one man who truly loves her.”
This blurb is an extraordinary piece of writing. But I’m not sure it describes this particular movie. Especially that ending.
The DVD is also bereft of extras, nothing like the commentary track we have for Good Times. It includes the trailer and subtitles.
Reviews
There are not many reviews available. Reelfilm (2020) says Cher’s “performance is actually one of the few redeeming elements in the movie.”
I remember finding Vincent Canby’s 1969 review at my college library in St. Louis. Re-reading it now I see it has a bit of revisionist criticism for Good Times. Which he now seems to like. He calls Chastity a “purposeful, rather pretty, completely banal movie…she hitchhikes around the Southwest, searching for life’s meaning and being generally disagreeable to the unfortunate people who pick her up….Alessio de Paola, who seems to have directed Chastity simply by keeping Cher in focus….the film does have a couple of moments of genuine humor. At one point Chastity pretends to be a filling station attendant to hustle a few bucks and, with complete confidence, pours motor oil into the radiator…”
The radiator and focus bit will come up again below as we watch the movie.
Cher’s acting is competent. Not as good as she got in the 1980s, her great acting decade. But it’s hard to see how even 1960s Cher fans could have come around to this movie. It’s somewhat shocking material to immediately follow a movie like Good Times. But Mr. Cher Scholar notes the movie has a female lead in it and is entirely about a female struggle, up front and center, in a time when men were making auteur movies starring men about the lives of men.
What to Look For
Opening Credits Montage: This is the Cher’s profile montage: we get over a minute of 33 quickly changing, various images inside the silhouette of Cher’s face and hair profile. This may be the most interesting thing about the movie.
The montage includes the crucifixion, mother and child images, nature things (birds, the moon), compilations of people, a watercolor of the American flag, abstract things of all kinds, at one point a sponge,
The music that plays is dramatic and harrowing. It’s the “Chastity Overture” (the second song on the Motion Picture Soundtrack album).
Since the images are so symbolic and supposedly indicative of the character’s mental space and because they go by so quickly (and are either high-schoolish or pretty and psychologically on point, depending upon your mood and disposition), I’ve screen-captured all 33 below. Titles and art were created by John and Suzanne Charles.
Following the montage is a crazy long shot of Cher running toward the camera. It looks like a very hot run that day, too. We hope Cher didn’t have to do multiple takes. She looks tired in the shot and isn’t wearing a bra, which is distracting.
Mr. Cher Scholar commented that keeping her in focus was really impressive, not an easy shot to keep her in focus as she runs forward. They might have had to do it a few times to be sure they got it, he says. I asked him how it might have been done and he said probably an assistant camera person kept pulling the focus as she got closer.
Mr. Cher Scholar says this is good place to begin because you want to know “why is she running?” The drama is there. She runs for one minute and 14 seconds towards the screen.
But what is that cloudy bar of blue in the background?
This scene, in hindsight, depicts the character Chastity running away from home….literally, like she’s being chased or something.
Hitchhiking With a Trucker Scene: Chastity (Cher) gets picked up in a deluge of rain by a trucker. He’s creepy (“This is a new experience for me…meeting a pretty girl like you on the road”) but as men go in this movie, not the most creepy. And Chastity is surly in response to all his questions: “So what if I am?…What if I’m not?” She’s full of teenage sarcasm. “I’m just out for a lovely ride.” She deflects all his questions about whether or not she’s a runaway or how old she is.
“I just happen to be a guy that likes a little conversation,” he says. That sounds very much like something Sonny would say.
It looks humid in that truck.
Mr. Cher Scholar offers the fact that camera-shy performers who suffer from stage freight often go to sullen sarcasm during improvisation because it’s a safe space. They don’t have to emote. This certainly applies to Cher (and this strategy would be recycled again on The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour)…and yet Cher is about four years into show business at this point and she trained with Jeff Corey, so not sure if this was maybe in the script as a depiction of the sullenness found in Chastity’s (or Cher’s) natural state of being (as interpreted by Sonny). Another plausible theory. She also looks zoned out. Another possibility.
This is also a good time to mention this movie was filmed in Phoenix during the later part of 1968. While they were filming, Cher became pregnant and suffered reportedly bad morning sickness (according to reports from fans and movie extras who encountered Cher at that time). Chaz (Chastity) Bono was born on 4 March 1969. This possibly played into her performance as well.
When they get to a motel, Chastity stays in the truck somewhat cluelessly and the trucker doubles back to open her door for her. This feels like something Sonny would have added maybe based on personal experience. It’s just an odd detail. Did Chastity assume she’d be sleeping in the truck? Is she wary of going into a hotel room with a trucker? We don’t know. And we will be not knowing a lot.
The Motel Scene: This is an awkward scene. The motel is gloomy. Chastity tells the trucker she’s leaving her clothes on and will sleep on the floor. The trucker tries to be accommodating (asking Chastity if she minds if he gets undressed) and Chastity is cruel in response: “Look, I don’t mind if you slit your throat.” Apparently hitchhiker currency is gas, ass or grass…or sass apparently.
Mr. Cher Scholar says the lighting is good and that the movie looks well made, as good as any movie at the time anyway. The sound is good. The actors are all lit well. He thinks Chastity doesn’t want to reveal herself. She knows what he’s after.
I’m not sure I know what anyone is after yet (even after seeing this movie now for the third or fourth time). The trucker undresses by maybe a bathroom door without actually using the bathroom, which is weird if they’re both so uncomfortable with each other.
Laying on the floor, Chastity hugs a pillow. Look at her mouth. What an extraordinary mouth she had.
She doesn’t seem to be a hooker. Her long hair is messy and her false eyelashes are still on. When the trucker asks why she’s running she says she doesn’t know and if she did she wouldn’t tell him. She says “you’re not the kind of guy a girl pours her heart out to.” Ouch.
The trucker tries to ask her why she’s running away but Chastity just accuses him of not caring and trying to get her into bed. He gives up in frustration and says, “I don’t know why I got myself involved.” Total Sonny line, the word involved. But what’s the great involvement? He’s a trucker with a hitchhiker.
Chastity says, “don’t worry. I wont get you in any trouble.” (Is this a quote Sonny pulled out from their past, like when Cher was 16 and living with a 27-year old Sonny?)
She plays with some matches she has, matches that have managed to stay dry. She smokes a joint and then we get a monologue. The fact that she’s smoking a joint is extraordinary in itself, considering Sonny was so anti-drug and Cher was so ambivalent about them. Was this meant to be a signal about her lostness and depravity? Because it just comes off as rather on-trend instead.
Chastity says to a sleeping trucker, “How can you go to sleep so fast. Don’t you know there’s a world out there. People are dying. Girls getting raped. Kids are in the backs of cars making it.” She ends by calling him “a dumb slob, a married slob.” This is slightly revealing. She seems to be homeless, disconnected from a family and yet sees marriage from a point of bitterness.”
The only good thing about this scene is the lighting. Shout out to the Director of Photography, Ben Colman. The instrumental song “Motel 1” (third song on the soundtrack album) plays in the background through a transistor radio on the table.
The Credits Sequence: The next scene has Chastity skipping down the road, happy as a clam. She skips by some U-Haul trailers and turns around and waves goodbye to someone (the trucker?). Cher’s name comes up on the screen with an acute accent over the e as it usually shows on her 1960s and early 1970s record albums. (Très français.) Chastity lays down in a field of flowers, reminding us of Sonny & Cher running through the flower fields in Good Times. One shot has her dipping her feet in an acequia.
The movie was filmed in Phoenix and you can see mountains in the background of this scene. She stops to smell some sunflowers. Mr. Cher Scholar says the titles are cool. (I’m feeling comforted that he’s enjoying this movie so far but I know with 100% certainty that this will change pretty soon.)
This scene plays to the song “Chastity’s Song (Band of Thieves)” (the first song on the soundtrack album). Is it me or is the final title card (the one that typically shows at the end of credits with the logos and the year) in the middle of these credits? Is that on purpose?
The Gas Station Scene: Maybe my favorite scene in the movie, Chastity pretending to be a Maclo gas-station attendant to steal some cash. For some reason, I like to see my favorite music artists at gas stations. Cher isn’t the only one (and electric poles connect this movie and that video as well).
The movie likes to point out creepy guy behavior. Definitely a through line here. A guy from a car yells at Chastity, “do you wanna do a thing honey?” This is the late 1960s so people are always “makin’ it” and “doin a thing,” Sonny’s au courant yet prudish sex slang. Chastity retorts, “you gotta have a thing to do a thing, creep.” Ouch #2!
This is reminiscent of Cher meeting Phil Spector with her then-boyfriend (pre-Sonny) and Spector asking her “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?” (years before the LaBelle song even) and Cher responding “pour l’argent” because she knew French.
Chastity asks an attendant with elevated formality, “would you please direct me to the ladies room?” This kind of faux-upper-class speak is sprinkled throughout the movie, Chastity performing a posh accent and demeanor for effect. It shows the character’s (and probably Cher’s too) anxiety about the upper class, exclusion from that class due to poverty or social rank.
Chastity goes into the ladies room of the gas station, and, just like singers at gas stations, I am also fascinated by women in shitty bathrooms trying to pretty themselves up. Here is Cher’s version but there’s also Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie with her sister in a crappy bathroom in the movie The Runaways and Charlize Theron as Aileen Wuornos trying to get her shit together in a gas station bathroom in the movie Monster. It speaks to that part of a woman’s life that needs to work on making herself more presentable constantly, even in really shitty conditions. (Another example is Katharine Hepburn trying to fix her hair in the jungles of The African Queen.)
When she comes out, Chastity gets the idea to pretend to be an attendant and pocket the money. She picks a guy who has just driven in. He sees her and immediately starts ogling and primping. Another creep, I guess. But the thing is Cher is no bombshell in this movie. The other characters treat her like she is but this is not Cher’s bombshell phase. That is coming in the 1970s and it will be amazing. This is the gritty, hippie Cher. And so the responses to her “as a looker” feel off.
She tells the customer her Dad owns the station and she helps him out. Cher does a nice, comedic Your Other Left move.
She has to wing everything, (and with long nails too), pouring gas on his car at one point. Turns out she’s terrible at gas station attending or maybe just barely competent at it. And so this reminds me of The Mike Douglas Show where she tried to be a Jack in the Box cashier. The man in the car isn’t fooled. He looks bemused.
I want to take this opportunity to say Cher wears basically one outfit in this movie and she wears it very well (that belt!). That’s right, no costume changes (well, there’s a makeover scene later with a few try-ons but she will revert to this one outfit). And that’s one thing this movie should be remembered for alone.
She puts in some gas and then the man asks her to check under the hood (without a hint of innuendo). He continues to ogle and comb his hair. Both Cher (and Chasity) know more than the average girl about cars and so Chastity figures the oil can thing out (and I can’t not think of my brother re-enacting the “Cans! He hates cans!” scene from the movie The Jerk here). But she’s slow and uses her fingers to clean off the dipstick and her hair droops into the engine. My Dad made me learn to check and replace my oil but that reusable spout was thankfully before my time. (Cher tells a story in both of her memoirs about getting her first great convertible car in the early 1960s and trying to take the best care of it she could but not knowing about needing to check and replace the oil and so her engine burned out, ruining her beloved car. And Sonny and Cher didn’t have the money to replace it.)
Mr. Cher Scholar worries that Chastity is putting oil in the radiator. (So did reviewer Vince Canby.) At the end of the scene, Chastity asks the guy for five bucks and he can see by looking at the gas pump that the gas alone was $6.72. So he smiles happily and gives here the cash. She pockets the money and skips out. There’s no music playing in this scene.
The Writer and Director: Sonny wrote the script and Cher says the first draft was good. But then Sonny watered it down significantly while they were making the movie. He admits this too in his own memoir. He became uncomfortable seeing Cher in sexual situations with other people. He admits he felt jealous and this might have messed up his own movie.
For years Robrt Pela and I believed Sonny also directed the movie. After all, he helped direct Good Times alongside William Friedkin. Sonny, Cher and Friedkin all recount their guerilla filmmaking in memoirs and interviews.
In Cher Zine 3 (2011), Robrt Pela and I enumerated our director conspiracy theories:
- We ripped apart the likelihood of a name Alessio de Paola as sounding too much like a porn name or at least for not being Americanized like other Hollywood director names at the time.
- Add to that the fact that there is no information about Alessio de Paola on the Internet.
- And why hasn’t the director ever given an interview about working with Sonny and Cher? I mean even William Friedkin survived Good Times and lived to talk about it.
- Add to that the fact that on the back of the soundtrack album, Sonny looks like he’s slumping in a director’s chair.
In Cher’s memoir she notes her body double standing behind her in the center pic above. In Sonny’s memoir, he says the body double told her there was hanky-panky going on between Cher and Stephen Whitaker. Cher has always denied this and in her memoir she even said she had a good relationship with her body double and that she and Whitaker couldn’t have had a sexual relationship because eventually Sonny removed most of their scenes together..
Rumor was Stephen Whitaker found the whole experience so unpleasant he apparently quit acting. But that wasn’t true.
In any case, Sonny doesn’t even mention a director for this movie in his memoir. In Cher’s memoir, she says the director was from the world of commercials and not well known (and not very good).
Apparently this mysterious director was fired during the editing process and Sonny and their road manager, Denis Pregnolato, finished editing the film down from three hours of footage. I think Cher confirms this in her memoir.
“Editorial supervision” is credited to Hugo Grimaldi,
On the Road: We start this scene with a regrettable voiceover of self-talk. Chastity sarcastically says, “well Chas, now that you’re a financial success, have you decided where you’re gonna dine tonight?…I suppose the usual upper class restaurant. But one never knows these days, even in the finer restaurants, the service is so poor that one finds it quite difficult to enjoy one’s dinner. But I suppose we must all make sacrifices times being what they are.” She says this as she walks up to an outdoor food stand with picnic tables.
There’s a montage of gritty footage of Chastity hitchhiking. First a blue car, then a white one, then a blue truck, then another white car. This is Chastity traveling, traveling, traveling. There are Joshua Trees and desert looking landscapes but then a city poster of The Arch in St. Louis (which way are we going here?). We see a few shots of her riding in cars but no shots of the drivers.
The music playing under this scene is “Chastity Titles” (the seventh song on the soundtrack, or the first song on side 2 of the record album).
Meeting the Parking Attendant: Chastity rests on a bench one night and sees a parking attendant at Los Olivas Mexican restaurant. This is Eddie played by Stephen Whitaker, a British actor and director who died in 2003 from complications from a routine surgery (according to his Wikipedia page).
I think it’s significant that Eddie is a man who parks cars because Chastity is just coming off a big road trip. She sees Eddie is just getting off work. It looks like she’s planning some kind of a scam. He gets into his own car and she decides to make her move. She walks alongside his car as he’s slowly driving down the street. Chastity’s face is half in shadow. He offers to give her a ride. She asks where he’s going. He says no place. He says he means just going home. (He seems, and will turn out to be, a nice guy.)
Suddenly Chastity says, “but I don’t know you” (after days of hitchhiking and spending the night in a motel with a trucker days ago). Mr. Cher Scholar agrees it seems she’s trying to work something. She asks if there’s “some place around here to get a cup of coffee?” She says she’ll meet him there. He says that’s silly, that she should ride with him (they’re going to the same place after all). Chastity shuts that down with patented Cher deadpan, “Let’s do it my way. We’ll do it your way some other time.” His car engine is loud. You forget how loud cars were back then. She says, “don’t worry. I’ll be there.” (Is this foreshadowing? Because Eddie will have cause to worry about her being there often in the future.)
She talks to herself as she walks down the street. “Ok Chastity. Now what are you gonna do?” She says Eddie is not her idea of Prince Charming. (Sigh. Because Sonny is? It’s hard not to read these lines through Sonny’s head. Is Sonny writing about what he thinks Cher thinks of him? Does Sonny, too, feel like just a port in a storm?)
At the end of the scene you get a good look at Cher’s big bangs growing out into wings. Her skin looks good here.
So Eddie’s not prince charming, “but then who is?” she asks cynically. We’re supposed to read her character as aimless, depressed and confused. She also might have control issues (we’ll do it my way this time). She hopes Eddie “isn’t the octopus type” and she compares that to the “bulldog type.” Maybe he’ll be a lamb she wonders. She can tell he’s not a peacock. Finally she decides it doesn’t matter. “They all want the same thing, the same stupid thing. They want to pant and grunt and groan and then roll over like a dead body.”
Now we know for sure she has a sex hang-up. Awkward when considering this movie might be Sonny’s view of Cher. But then we can assume (based on interviews) that Cher had her sexual awakening post-Sonny. (Well, when you date a teenager…)
She stops in the street and says, “Chastity I don’t think you’re being very nice. You’ve got to be civil in this uncivilized world.” She keeps saying “what difference does it make” in varying tones throughout the movie, from sullen to optimistic.
Again Mr. Cher Scholar comments on the nighttime lighting and the good face shots where it’s all darkness but on her face. He says these shots are beautiful outdoor nighttime shots. He says the tracking shot as she’s walking is good, how they keep her in focus and in the center of the frame. She’s lit well for being outside.
But he also speculates that days on the road without a shower would have given her bad B.O.
There’s no music for this scene.
The Diner Scene: Chastity enters the diner and Eddie is waiting at a table. We get some nice table shadows. We see Eddie is a nice guy because he’s already ordered her a cup of coffee. But she moves the coffee cup from the seat next to Eddie to the seat across the table from him. This diner in the desert seems to have a nautical theme.
She pours in lots of sugar.
The dialogue is awkward (which it would be in this situation but also awkwardly written).
Chastity says, “Well?”
And then Eddie says, “would you like something to eat?”
And Chastity says, “you gonna eat?”
And Eddie says “yeah, I could eat.”
And Chastity says, “what’s good here?”
Not quite riveting conversation. Eddie recommends steak and eggs as “safe.” The waitress comes over and Eddie seems to be waiting for Chastity to order but she doesn’t and so he orders them both steak and eggs. Chasity asks for her steak to be well done.
There’s a nice shot of the smoke from Eddie’s cigarette floating up as he talks through these crucial plot points. It gives us something to focus on.
Eddie struggles to get the conversation going and Chastity comments on the awkwardness of meeting someone for the first time: “You know, this is always the worst part. This part is such a drag, The hello how-are-you what’s-your-name ceremony,” she says. She goes through the-first-date template. “You put on a big front. I put on a big front. Then we talk for a half hour trying to figure out what we both like.”
She kinds of nails it though.
This scene makes me think I should appreciate diner scenes more than I do. There’s no music in this scene except some very, very dimly heard diner music.
Walking to Eddie’s House: But then Chastity starts telling Eddie about herself in a dump of information about her name that lasts over a collage of locations. ‘
One of my pet peeves is when a movie cuts a conversation up unrealistically between locations, like starting one part of a sentence in front of a movie theater and finishing it up at a water fountain. Who could walk that fast? I was told by Mr. Cher Scholar that this is a common film trope to show conversation progression over the course of time. We’re supposed to suspend belief in these situations. He just thinks in this case it just goes on for too long. I am fine with that but I think the conversation needs to be abstracted in that case. (And this feels like a production tension of this movie: does it want to be realism or an experimental movie?)
She says things like “My name is Chastity. That’s not really my name.” (We find out it’s Emily.) She gave it to herself and says she’d like to rename Eddie, too.
Eddie doesn’t respond in any way to all this monologuing. He seems bemused by her childlike character. He says at one point, “You’re not a girl; you’re a whole other thing” indicating shes’s possibly a Manic Pixie Dream Girl character except in this case she’s not existing just to serve the interests of Eddie. But you can easily see how Cher did fulfill this role for Sonny IRL because her eccentricities unlocked his ability to “make it” in show business. After Eddie says this line, Chastity says, “I like what you just said.”
But we do find out Eddie is going to law school, just parking cars part time. Mr. Cher Scholar points out that Eddie is a professional-looking character with a collared shirt. This is not a Sonny and Cher couple here.
While they’re walking, Cher taps on the window of the store. Cher taps things with her finger at some point in most of her movies.
Eddie asks Chastity what she plans to be. “Why do people have to be something? I don’t want to be something right now. I just want to be myself.” (That’s a first-date big-front posing as a little-front.)
She then she abruptly asks Eddie, “Can I sleep with you tonight?” Very interesting ask. She doesn’t say “can I crash with you tonight?” Eddie is shocked by this, has to sit down on the curb even (he’s not one of the movie’s creeps, after all) and Chastity laughs and clarifies, “I mean can I sleep where you live?” She says she has no money and no where to go. Eddie reminds her that she wouldn’t take a ride with him earlier in the night. She says in her defense that she didn’t know him then. He asks, “Do you know me now?” She says “enough.”
“Do me a favor though. Don’t try and make me” she says. “I’ll tell you if I feel like it.”
There’s no music in this scene.
The House Scene: Now this is a bizarre scene where we are introduced to Eddie’s normal looking student’s house. Chastity gets suddenly and manically triggered by something mysterious and goes around the house turning on lights, faucets, stove burners (leaving them all on), flushing toilets and opening drawers and the refrigerator saying somewhat sullenly “that works,” as in everything in the house functions properly. I think this is supposed to show, very emotionally, how her prior house did not function well emotionally. She even pours salt and pepper on the kitchen floor. She announces sullenly, “your house works!” It’s like she’s burned herself out of a manic episode. Then she slumps on the yellow couch with the white trim, eventually to be known around the Phoenix theatrical community as The Chastity Couch. Until I knew this factoid, I never much noticed that couch.
Back in 2011, Cher Zine 3 contained an article by Robrt Pela, “The Virtues of Chastity.” and it has a lot of great commentary by Pela and information from a local 1968 article about the production of the film. There’s some context about the house provided by Gary Naylor (who owned it) and “The Chastity Couch” and the life it led in Phoenix after the film was completed.
After this manic episode, Eddie bizarrely asks her, “did you have fun?” and she says, “yeah.” WTF!
She says she could use a pillow and a blanket and “I’ll be cool.” But Eddie takes the couch (nice guy move) and gives her his bed. Chastity lays awake wondering “how many bedrooms this makes…30 or 40.” She says she’s losing count. I feel like this is Sonny, here, weighing in on the character’s (and maybe Cher’s) prior promiscuity. But bedrooms do not equal sexual encounters and we have no idea about Chastity’s entire sexual (or bedroom) past, just that motel room trucker.
The Bathroom Scene: Then, instead of showing us the conversation before they each go to bed, Chastity summaries it with internal monologue. She wonders about all the God stuff Eddie talks about. “It’s really weird to find a young guy that believes in that jazz.” She surmises that “God can’t hurt you” but she always thought people made God up to have something to believe in. “I don’t dig the way people use God,” she says. She describes the terms of going to church on Sunday as “Rent-a-God.” She wonders why you can’t just go to the bank and pray. “I’m sure he’s there,” she says. “He’s everywhere.” She’s not sure though. God isn’t bad, she says. It’s just all the hypocrites who don’t act the way they say God says you should. She concludes “it all seems silly to me.”
While all this is happening we get maybe one of the most memorable shots in the film, a tracking shot that goes from a colorfully disheveled bed, through the hallway and into the bathroom with Chastity in the bathtub. Mr. Cher Scholar was impressed with this floor tracking that stays smoothly in focus, all in one take with no bumps. It’s an old house (not a break-away studio set) and we get a cool shot of the floor and under the sink.
It looks like dried flowers or something on the edge of the bathtub but they’re out of focus so it’s hard to tell. We’re still doing the long tracking shot as we pan over to the white towel while Chastity gets out of the tub and grabs it.
Soft guitar music (not on the soundtrack) is playing in the background.
We then cut to a supposedly naked Cher for the first and only time you will ever see. Some ass, some side boob. Fans often wonder if this is a body double. Those long feet do look like Cher’s feet but the nude shot could be a body double.
As Chastity is going through Eddies dresser, you can see Cher with her hair up and you get another good look at her hair wings. Chastity looks through Eddies’ books, presumably one is the Bible. “He really believes that religion stuff.” (Is this like Sonny?) She goes into the kitchen and finds milk. Drinks some from the carton.
Leaving the House Scene: Chastity takes down her hair while looking in the bathroom mirror. She’s back in her purple top, which looks pretty clean, all thinks considered. She’s pretending to be domestic and self-talks some romantic conversation. She again pretends to be wealthy, saying aloud, “tell the butler to send the cleaning out. Call the furrier and tell him I’ve just got to have that coat by Friday.” She takes some money from Eddie’s pants and while he’s still sleeping says, “goodbye darling, I’m just going to get some groceries” and she leaves through a door with a stained-glass window.
The music tracks through the bathroom scene into this scene, a subdued guitar number that isn’t on the soundtrack. This makes the time-sense confusing. Was she taking a bath in the morning or just before bed? The lighting in the house seemed like nighttime but now we are into the next day.
The Soundtrack
The songs are not listed in the order they appear in the movie. Someone must have rearranged them on the soundtrack for some groovy, abstract listening experience. The full album.
According to the album’s Wikipedia page, it was released on June 20, 1969, the same day her solo album 3614 Jackson Highway was released. And on June 2, “Chastity’s Song (Band of Thieves)” was released as a single with Cher’s version of “Walk on Guilded Splinters” as the b-side. There is confusion here because “Walk on Guilded Splinters” is listed as a primary single released on the same date (June 2) from the Jackson Highway Wikipedia page. Cher’s own single discography on Wikipedia lists both songs as separate singles.
There are also two songs on the soundtrack I cannot match from the movie, “Motel II” and “Flowers (Love of a Family),” see below.
All songs were written and produced by Sonny (engineered by Stan Ross at Goldstar) except “Chastity’s Song (Band of Thieves” which was written by Elyse Weinberg and “Walk on Guilded Splinters” (written by Mac Rebennack/Dr. John, listed in the opening credits as “incidental music” by Malcom Rebennack).
“Walk on Guilded Splinters” was also not included on the soundtrack album although it plays through the brothel scenes. The version in the movie is the 1968 Dr. John version and Dr. John knew Sonny and Cher socially through The Wrecking Crew.
Side one (of the LP album):
- “Chastity’s Song (Band of Thieves)” (vocals by Cher)
Scenes: (1) after Chastity leaves the motel room with the trucker and (2) the end credits.- “Chastity Overture”
Scenes: (1) the opening sequence and (2) while she’s running out of Eddie’s house at the end of the movie.- “Motel I”
Scene: in the motel room with the trucker (playing on the radio).- “Chastity Walk”
Scene: Chastity’s return from Mexico.- Flowers (Love of a Family)”
Scene: ?? Is this from a possibly-deleted scene?- “Chastity Love Theme”
Scene: sex with Diana Midnight.Side two:
- “Chastity Titles”
Scene: on the road hitchhiking near the beginning of the movie.- “Motel II”
Scene: ?? Is this from a possibly-deleted scene?- “Chastity Carousel”
Scene: the park scene with Diana Midnight.- “Mexico”
Scene: driving to Mexico in the stolen car.- “Chastity (Closing Theme)”
Scene: the final “suicide” sequence.Let’s study the lyrics on this album. Maybe this will give us insight into the movie:
Flowers (Love of a Family)
Sung by a mystery man. (I asked Google who sang this track and A.I. butted in to say Denis Pregnolato sang it. This claim had no back-up documentation so I asked again. A.I. said Cher sang it. This is clearly not Cher singing but a man. So I asked again and A.I. said Sonny Bono sang it. Also incorrect. It’s a mystery who sings this. The singer is uncredited on the soundtrack album and there is no credible information online.Each one like the one before
The children who clung so near to me
Aren’t clingin’ any more
And the mourners unwanted and pushed about
For their memories all have died
Water the flowers with the tears they cry
All along the countryside
Karma, be good to us
For we’ve all been fools before
Some dwell in prosperity
Some dwell in a hole
Some find happiness in a groove
While other’s stand alone
The Church Scene: In this scene it’s clear Chastity isn’t wearing a bra. (Witches of Eastwick grocery store lady: “She’s not…wearing…a bra.”) Chastity is walking down the street and she hears church bells. She decides to go inside through huge, impressive doors (after all, she’s just been thinking a lot about God). She looks around the inside of the church, at the stained windows and the altar. (It’s almost as if Sonny is saying to hippies that they should just give church a chance!)
Instead of choosing an empty pew, Chastity sits next to an older woman praying with a rosary. Chastity innocently and inappropriately tries to make conversation with the woman. The woman scolds Chastity who keeps saying “Oh I see.” But she clearly doesn’t. When the woman says she’s just confessed her sins and is doing penance. Cher says, “well, why’d ya have to cop out?”
Btw, this movie lets all open doors fully close before any storyline can continue.
Chastity enters the confessional and there’s something about the priest’s voice that sends Chastity into a memory of another threatening male figure in her past. She is triggered into another runaway episode. We know it’s a sexual memory because the triggering male voice in her head says, “Hey! You wanna do a thing, honey?”
There’s a shot of just Cher’s nose and eyes that is very similar to the shot of Cher’s eyes in Good Times (in the scene where she’s taking in the Hollywood backstage lot).
-
- Chastity
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- Good Times
There is organ music in the background of this scene (music not on the soundtrack).
Driving to Mexico scene: Chastity tells the priest she left something on the stove and runs out of the confessional and out of the church and steals a car (a convertible with its keys in it). The music changes to the song “Mexico” (song #10 or #4 on side 2).
Chastity drives into the night and we get shots of oncoming car lights. Mr. Cher Scholar thought this scene was kina cool.
Mexican Street Scene: She pulls into….you guessed it, Mexico (not really Mexico but supposed to be the town Frontera). We know she is in Mexico because of the trumpet Mexican music playing as she parks the car on a crowded nighttime street. This is the music of the entire scene.
She calls the Phoenix police from a pay phone (“I’m a citizen” she says). She reports the stolen car anonymously. The police officer asks for the license number and there’s a pointless period of time where we see Chastity put the phone down and walk all the way back to the car to read the license plate and then walk all the way back to the phone. It’s HZC 542, btw. The police officer suspects Chastity stole it and so she hangs up. Mr. Cher Scholar keeps saying, “I don’t understand this scene. It’s not advancing anything. It just shows she’s not a bad person but it’s not revealing plot or character.”
Chastity then makes a sexual joke in a Mexican accent to some middle-aged, middle-of-the-road tourists who respond more confused than offended. She’s making fun of the tourists but the joke is about Mexicans whoring out their family members. Unfortunate.
Mr. Cher Scholar says this joke is so out-of-the-blue, so out-of-character for Chastity. She’s been so uncommunicative and now she’s making this joke. Mr. Cher Scholar says it’s more like a joke coming from the writer, not the character. Something Sonny would say. He says the movie is suddenly trying to be offbeat and quirky (like a Barbra Streisand comedy).
We get more inane monologue. Monologues always begin with “Well Chastity…”
Mr. Cher Scholar is starting to get frustrated. The monologues could’ve been deeper he says. They don’t advance anything. Chastity decides to buy some pot. She takes stock of her cash. She has a dollar for a couple of joints and a dollar for some frijoles.
For this reason, this is another favorite scene of mine: she buys two tacos for 25 cents and then sits down on a curb and eats one. Here we can see she has an almost perfect manicure…for a runaway. Her fancy nails don’t fit the character. Mr. Cher Scholar says her hair looks amazing in this scene, though. “Looks really good.”
Another well-lit night scene with Chastity walking around the streets, Mr. Cher Scholar says.
The Pimp Scene: While eating the tacos, Chastity watches a group of men talking and figures out somehow that one of them is a pimp. She makes her way through the crowded street and approaches him. He is stereotypically corrupt looking. She asks if he can sell her “some stuff.” She asks “what else do you sell, Don Juan? I bet you’re just full of little goodies.” He has pornographic pictures. They go off to an unpeopled area to look at the pictures. She hands him her spare taco while she looks at the photographs. She jokes sarcastically about the quality and the content. There’s more taco eating. “You have the whole family. Even the dog.” The scene seems improvised. Chastity goes into a whole routine about wallet photos. The pimp eventually says, “I bet you think they’re evil.” Chastity tells him she thinks the photos are just stupid, not evil; but that the two of them should make some money together. When the pimp is incredulous. She says, “I love it here….It’s a place I could really call home and on the weekends I could go fishing. No I guess the weekends are our most important days, huh?”
There’s more taco eating.
Mr. Cher Scholar says he doesn’t understand the pacing of this dialogue. And he wonders why she would want to be a prostitute, considering her chastity and all. He says he still loves the way it was shot and that it would be interesting to uncover the original script.
We discuss how this is yet another one-sided conversations with a character who mostly just silently reacts to Chastity talking and that one of the problems with the movie, (and I can’t believe I’m saying this), is that it’s too Cher-centric. It needs other characters to do more than just react to Chastity.
There’s no music in this scene.
The Brothel Waiting Room Scene: The music changes to a light, humorous music as they drive to the brothel. (And Chastity is still eating that last taco!) Mr. Cher Scholar brings up the human trafficking, the syphilis, the abuse…but Chastity here makes it seem like she’s going on a fun adventure and she wears a knowing look on her face throughout her time with the pimp. (“Well Chastity my girl…let’s go see what it’s all about.”)
There are men milling around the parking area. The pimp shoos them off. The pimp asks Chastity what her name is and he is nonplussed by her response. And maybe we’re to understand Chastity had no idea what she was getting into because the music abruptly changes from the happy-go-lucky to “Walk on Guilded Splinters” by Dr. John (a song not on the soundtrack).
The brothel is shot very, very realistically with very real looking prostitutes. Some are skinny. Some are overweight. Some are partially nude. None of them make eye contact with Chastity or the pimp. (Immediately creepy that part.) Chastity chides herself for her sudden loss of nerve, as “the girl who wanted to see everything. Take a good look.” (So much posturing with this one.)
Mr. Cher Scholar has come to hate these inner monologue parts. (This feels like a normal reaction to this movie.) He says if we knew anything about the character’s background, this might all make sense. He says it feels like we came into this story mid-way.
Chastity wonders “are they any worse than me?…whose the phony, them or me? (I think we know.)
For some reason, the background music, coupled with the brothel chatter, is very unpleasant.
Movie Locations:
From Wikipedia and Robrt PelaThe movie was filmed in Phoenix, Arizona and the locations include:
- The Malco Gas Station at 16th and Roosevelt
- Macayo’s Mexican-food restaurant (where Eddie parks cars)
- Eddie’s house at 2nd street and McDowell.
- St. Mary’s Basilica, a Catholic church in the downtown area (interiors at a nearby Methodist Church)
- Scenes in Mexico were filmed at Encanto Park.
- Outdoor scenes with Barbara London were filmed in Encanto Park’s Kiddieland.
- Cher has her collapse on Dysart Road.
- Apparently in a scene where she walks along 35th Avenue, Camelback Mountain can be seen and according to Wikipedia today the mountain cannot be seen from this location.
See some then and now photos in the Robrt Pela Cher Zine 3 article, The Virtues of Chastity.
Young Boys Visiting a Brothel Scene: A group of young American men come into the brothel along with a young nerdy kid. According to Robrt Pela, one of these men is Nick Nolte. Chastity doesn’t wait to get acclimated with the proprietor. Standing next to the nerdy kid, (they give each other the tiniest of smiles), she bluffs her way back into a room with him. It’s the gas-station scam all over again. When they get into the room, they both look abruptly uncomfortable. They’re both newbs. Chastity takes off her jacket and tries to take charge.
Again this scene seems uncomfortably improvised.
Chastity tells the kid he could have 1, 2, 3 girls “or even more” but she tells him he can have “just as much fun with one girl.” (If this was Sonny talking,…ugh). She tells him she costs $25. He then tries to leave but Chastity says she’s the youngest and the prettiest so she costs more. She backs it down to $15 for The Quickie. Then goes through other price levels called The Special ($10 more) or “The Whole Works is where it’s really at” ($15 more than The Special) without really clarifying what you get at each of those price points. Although the customer balked at the initial $25, he ends up giving her $40 in cash. It’s an excruciatingly slow and painful scene, mostly due to the kid’s obvious discomfort. The whole thing is about as sexy as a visit to the DMV. And the laugher and chatter in the other parts of the brothel still sounds tinny.
You get a good Cher smile in this scene.
She then tells him to take his clothes off. She hugs a pillow on the bed while the kid gets undressed very, very slowly. He never responds to her monologuing, not even to tell her his name. This is another character who doesn’t have much to say. She goes through names like Alex, Benny, Frankie, Roger, Tom. What man takes this long to undress before sex? Usually they’re like superheroes. It doesn’t matter because she’s bluffing anyway.
Apparently the full works includes a hair wash with the room’s wash basin and pitcher. “It’s cold!” is the only thing the kid ever says. While he’s incapacitated with wet hair, Chastity leaves the room with the excuse of going to get clean towels.
The Brothel Office and Tour: While she’s in the hallway the pimp she came with finds and grabs her and takes her to the madam’s office. The madam, Diana Midnight, is played by Barbara London, who shockingly has no Wikipedia page. This might have been Barbara London’s biggest role.
Midnight wears a 1960s mod suit (at least what I imagine one is in my head). Midnight is dismissive of the pimp and speaks with odd and self-conscious formality. The snappy dialogue goes like this:
Midnight, “did you have fun with the boy scout?”
Chastity doesn’t answer this but slumps into a chair.
Midnight, “how old are you?”
Chastity, “I’m old enough.”
Chastity tells her this place is a dump and she’d rather work by herself. Midnight responds, “what do you want, Chastity?” (Honestly, we’re all trying to figure that out, Diana Midnight.)
Chastity very surly says, “what do you mean what do I want?…I just came here to find out a few things, that’s all.”
Midnight, “did you find them?”
Chastity, “yeah.”
(This is a rewrite of the Eddie’s “do you know me now?” scene.) The lighting is very late-night.
Midnight offers to show Chastity more. Just the way the Midnight character moves is very creepy. She says, “we’ll do this the easy way this time” which is a very, very creepy and cryptic line. Mr. Cher Scholar says its a very disturbing line considering the realities of the profession.
Midnight grabs Cher by the elbow and they leave the office.
There’s no music in this scene
“Walk on Guilded Splinters” is still playing in the background. It must be on a loop.
And this brings us to the most disturbing scene in the movie. And not due to the sex scenes. Those are pretty tame. It’s the maliciousness of Diana Midnight.
The music drops off and Midnight shows Chastity the rooms of the cathouse. They come to the room of Chastity’s abandoned client. Chastity laughs about it, with embarrassment or coldness you can’t tell. There’s the Pleasure room (this looks like an opium or heroin room) where Cher runs out. Then there’s the Exhibition Room (people watching other people have sex) and Cher runs out of that room looking queasy. (So far, this all just sounds like Burning Man.)
Then a final un-named room (likely the Lesbian Room) where the prostitutes again won’t make eye contact with Diana Midnight and all seem afraid of her. One prostitute flirts with Midnight and Midnight plays with her hair and then slaps her in the face. The shots stumble between the deadpan faces of the women. Midnight sadistically (and also stupidly) says to Chastity, “I just thought I’d throw that in” and Chastity says, “you didn’t have to.” WTF!
This movie is full of nothing but staring faces, by the way. Chastity stares at things. Chastity stares at people. They stare back at her.
I mean I like a good Cher stare probably better than anybody else, but this is too much staring.
The Makeover and Kiddieland Scenes: This begins with a makeover scene. Chastity has moved in with the madam and there’s a makeover collage with eerie similarities to the movie Pretty Woman.
By the end of the makeover, Chastity ends up in a white baby-doll dress and is seemingly happy to be taken care of again. They go to the amusement park to ride the rides and slides and to visit a petting zoo.
The song “Chastity Carousel” plays during this scene (#7 in the soundtrack, #3 on side 2).
This is childlike, innocent happiness for Chastity. (And maybe for Cher with Sonny too. In her memoir Cher talks about how Sonny was willing to do these kinds of playful things early on in their relationship, like painting together. His other girlfriends only wanted to do adult things. Sonny might also be commenting on Cher’s love of clothes and wanting to be taken care of with gifts of clothes.)
While walking away from the petting zoo, Cher gives the same blissful look (very quickly) that she will use in Moonstruck when she is walking home in the morning from a night spent with Ronnie Cammareri (Nicholas Cage).
Laying in the grass (I’m sure there’s no symbolism there), Chastity monologues about thinking and again Diana Midnight is mute in return. “You’re thinking aren’t you? People always think. I even think. Once I tried not to but the thoughts kept popping in my head. Sometimes I don’t like to think, though. Do you?” Then they talk about the fact that Midnight is thinking about Chastity but Chastity is not thinking about her.
Chastity says that shouldn’t bother Midnight because “I never think about anything good. I mean I usually think about stupid things like if flowers cry when you pick ’em…sometimes I even think about my toes.”
The Movie Press Kit (From Cher Zine 3)
Note on the press kit: there was a time when aggressive men were called mashers, as in “beware of the mashers!” (And has anything really changed?)
The press kit suggests these headlines for movie reviews:
- Cher, Star of Chastity, Amidst Hitchhiking Career
- Husband Directs Wife Down Sin Path in Chastity
[another reason we thought Sonny directed this thing]- Sonny’s Cher Performs Striptease in Chastity
“What happens to a pretty and shapely girl who in today’s permissive and rebellious world can be seen on any country or city highway defiantly thumbing a ride to…nowhere?… Chastity is…faceless, because she doesn’t know who she is or where she’s going. …but there’s one thing for sure, Chastity is determined to live up to her name…not because she is against an uninhibited course of action so much as that her involvements must be meaningful.”
Says Cher, “This girl Chastity…is actually me. I don’t mean to say that all the risqué situations in Chastity figured in my life, but I was that same wide-eyed, searching girl, trying to explore every nook and cranny of today’s society. I was also that same girl standing out on a corner with thumb extended trying to hitch-hike a ride. No I never had any trouble with mashers or too aggressive males…”
“The tantalizing striptease by Cher perhaps marks the mod generation’s first renowned representative to attempt the terpsichorean art of undraping to musical accompaniment originally popularized by such notable proponents as Sally Rand, Gypsy Rose Lee and Lili St.Cyr.”
[Where is that scene in this movie?]
“Cher’s husband, Sonny, guided his wife’s histrionic path through these various cinematic pitfalls of life with loving care since it had been his driving ambition to capture Cher’s independent and free spirit, as he saw it, on film.”
More press kit copy:
“Meet Chastity
She picked out her name herself
but not for any reason you’d thinkShe needs men like a gambler needs money
and she throws them away just as fast
pick her up if you dare.Chastity….thumbing a ride…to nowhere.
A cop out!
A drop out!
And so far out!
She’s not just a girl
She’s an experience”Meet Chastity—she’s a bummer, a loser, using men like a drunk uses drink. She goes through men like a drunk goes through his paycheck with nothing left but a hangover at the end of each spree.
She’s too much woman for any man’s good. Maybe too much for her own.”
The Sex Scene: Back from Kiddieland we see that Chastity is wearing a bikini swimsuit underneath her baby-doll dress. She goes up some stairs and into a bedroom maybe. Chastity and Midnight stare at each other. It’s time for the sex scene. The inner dialogue is back. Chastity is asking herself “why is this bedroom different, Chastity? Why aren’t you waiting for morning so you can hurry up and get outa here? Why are you so peaceful? What happened to the world outside?”
There’s an abstract light shot similar to the ones we saw in Good Times. There is an image of a nature field, the stroking of Chastity’s eyelashes. “She’s weird,” Chasity admits about Midnight. “Too weird. Why isn’t she bugging me then? Be careful, Chastity. This is a new scene. You always get mad when people do that. Why aren’t you getting mad. You hate to be touched. She touches me like my mother did. Mother. That’s a joke.”
The sex scene includes shots of lips, water, palms blowing in the wind. What is up with these images anyway. Is this what Sonny imagines women think about during sex?
“Now I’m feeling sorry for myself. Well Chas, you’ve made the gamut. Now you’re rubbing noses with a dyke.” (Rubbing noses. Such a chaste Sonny image for sex that will follow them into the 1970s.) The montage continues. “I wonder why dykes are dykes. Maybe they really wanna be moms are something like that. That’s stupid. They just like girls.”
OMG.
This scene plays to the song “Chastity Love Theme” (#6 on the soundtrack). It sounds like a Sergio Leone number.
The Break-up Scene: Fans remember this scene for Cher’s abrupt and unexpected histrionics in it.
Chastity is in the madam’s office again wearing her original clothes. She’s sullen and sitting on a couch. Midnight asks, “who are you mad at? Me or yourself. Chastity just gives her an angry stare. Midnight is in that mod green suit again.
Midnight sits down at a table to eat dinner and tries to get Chastity to come and eat. (Is this the day after? Days later?) Midnight sips her soup in a very annoying and formal manner (the napkin move). Finally Midnight loses patience and says “come and eat your dinner, Chastity” and Chastity comes to sit down at the table. Midnight places a napkin in Chastity’s lap. They stare at each other. There are soup noises. Chastity starts to cry. Midnight says patronizingly, “your food is going to get cold.” Chastity starts yelling at her.
“You stink! And this place stinks! And you can’t do anything to me.”
Chastity then knocks all the dishes off the table. There seems like a lot more water involved on the overturned table than was there in the glasses.
Next thing we know Chastity is hitchhiking back from “Mexico.” At one point she gets into a station wagon. (Kids today have no idea what a station wagon is). There’s a shot of Chasity and all those electric poles. Classic. But she looks worse for the wear.
The song that plays during her return to Phoenix montage is “Chastity Walk” (#4 on the soundtrack).
Themes:
- Mental illness
It’s possible Chastity’s sexual contractions are due to what some viewers have labeled schizophrenia but the movie never uses a label for Chastity’s problems (What are labels! This is the 1960s.) And her troubles come across often as confusion and contradiction and not rising to the level of clinical instability. After all, she’s talking herself through all this. And not in any insane way. Her episodes of running away and emotional outbursts seem just as likely to be caused by PTSD from a traumatic event or a series of events. You wonder if some therapy might have helped her troubles quite a bit and yet this wasn’t even suggested or considered. Too bad Eddie wasn’t studying medicine instead of law.- Creepy male behavior
- Class anxiety
- Hustling/Hustling Men
As far as Sonny goes, I have no doubt this hustler often felt hustled.- Sexual mores of the late 1960s,
- Running
- Cars
- Putting up a big front to get by.
Cher Themes:
Misfit Cher: This movie is sometimes called Cher’s Misfits referring to the movie Arthur Miller wrote as a roman à clef about Marilyn Monroe. In other words, slightly veiled truth. We agree the Chastity character is ultimately unlikable, that there’s nothing to hold on to. Is this meant to depict an unlikable Cher?
Cher as Runaway. In line with Sonny’s girls-in-trouble songs and Car own car theft story (with her friends), this matches a depiction of a young, pre=glamour Cher getting into trouble around the city of L.A.
Depression: Cher has gone public with the fact that she and her family line have struggled with depression.
Back at Eddie’s House: Chastity knocks on the front door and Eddie opens it wearing only a bed sheet. This time you see he has a guitar hanging on his wall. He says he thought he’d never see her again.
Chastity has two paper bags with $40 worth of groceries. She says she borrowed a dollar from Eddie and the rest was “government money.” She drops one bag of groceries on the kitchen floor and she and Eddie fall to the floor trying to pick them up. She pours Eddie a glass of orange juice.
Then she says she has a new name for Eddie. She wants to make a ceremony out of it and requests champagne or beer. He refuses to be christened with a beverage. She says okay but “it won’t be as official.” They sit on the couch together. Whitaker is very natural and likeable as an actor. Chastity says she gave his new name a lot of thought. She wants him to kneel and she turns off the lights. His new name is revealed to be Andre Tier (pronounced Tie-eer). Eddie is underwhelmed and wants to go to sleep. Chastity pouts about this. “If you don’t wanna talk, let’s go to bed,” she says. Eddie says he’ll go back to the couch but Chastity dramatically puts her hand over his mouth and says, “you’ll sleep in your own bed.”
“Have you got any clean sheets. It looks like a real hussey’s been sleeping here.” Chastity threatens to shoot this fictitious other woman and Eddie, too. They joke about this for a minute. Chastity makes the bed. Eddie is dumbfounded by her whole return. “I don’t get it,” he says. “You pop in and out of my life like a jack-in-the-box…what do you want, Chastity?”
(Nobody knows.)
Cher is back to playing with her matches. “I know I don’t want that anymore,” she says meaning her joints. Chastity asks Eddie, “if I got pregnant, would you marry me?” He pauses and so she says “don’t answer that” and leaves the room only to return while brushing her teeth. “How can I answer a question like that?” Eddie says. Chastity says, “you just did.” He says, “that isn’t even a fair question.” “Fair schmair,” Chastity says and although I agree she’s a nut case, she has a point. Fairness doesn’t enter into this for anybody, and this fact is part of what made the sexual revolution so confusing.
We see Cher’s feet again and her silhouette as she undresses completely. Not the same body shape as the towel scene, for sure.
Eddie continues talking about the pregnancy question. He’s worried he has said the wrong thing. “I like you…a lot,” he says. Chastity looks sad and says, “you know I feel like I’ve known you for a long time.” She worries he’s not getting any sleep and he says, “I don’t mind.”
Chastity gets in bed naked but then says “don’t try to do anything to me. Just cuddle me. We’ll pretend there’s no world outside this room. Let’s pretend that you and I are the only two people that exist.”
Eddie asks, “will you be here when I wake up in the morning?” Chastity says, “yeah, I’ll be here.” In the dark Eddie says he would marry her if she were pregnant and she tells him she is smiling and he says “so am I.”
That slow guitar number is playing again, just like in that earlier bathroom scene.
Chastity, The Word: So it’s time to question the name of this character and the name of the movie and soon-to-be child of Sonny and Cher. Does everyone know what the word means? I’m still not sure after all these years that this was the right word for all of this.
In an interview with the Arizona Republic, as quoted by Robrt Pela in Cher Zine 3, Sonny talks about the movie being about “frigidity” and “increasing lesbianism” and women’s new “repulsion at the institution of marriage.” The Wikipedia’s Chastity movie page also adds “”the lack of manhood” and “the independence women have acquired but don’t necessarily want. So many young girls are just spinning their wheels.”
A few shocking things about Sonny ideas about his own film:
One, Sonny totally sounds like a 2026 manosphere guy.
Two, we’re not supposed to identify with the lead character here but with a series of creepy men (and one nice guy) who are all in conflict with this character over her sexual availability. Sonny doesn’t say the movie is about a runaway with a mental health problem. He doesn’t say this is a vulnerable person moving through a dangerous terrain but just a chick who won’t put out.
Three: I don’t think Sonny is even really describing the word chastity, which is an intentional moral practice. Talking this through with Mr. Cher Scholar he noted that from a traditional, self-centered man’s point of view (the Man Dictionary, I guess), the definition of chastity (practically speaking) does mean frigidity. About himself, a man would likely use the word ascetic instead, make it sound more religious and intellectual.
Chastity the character defines the word in the movie as a name she picked out of the dictionary, a word meaning “abstinence, sexual purity, freedom from ornamentation, simplicity.” She says she liked all that “except abstinence because I didn’t know what that meant.” (This marks her as an innocent, Chastity defined as innocence, guiltlessness.) So Chastity then looked up the word abstinence to mean “nonindulgence and voluntary restraint of desires.”
But in any case, point four: this character isn’t even making a moral choice about sex (or ornamentation or simplicity). She’s been sexually abused and she’s avoiding sex because she’s not comfortable with it. And you could argue this innocence-to-experience exposure makes her beyond even the option of an original status of chastity. But she doesn’t seem to be even practicing a “renewed chasteness” as much as sexual confusion because she’s trying to practice abstinence but she is confused about what she desires. We know this because very soon after she defines herself as chaste and abstinent to Eddie, she asks him “can I sleep with you tonight?” And then the next day runs off to join a brothel.
The Breakfast Scene: Chastity tries to be domestic in the morning (“I’m playing wife today”), making a breakfast so bad Eddie cannot eat it. “Well what do you want? It’s my first day.” (This might tie into the fact that Cher was also a not very good cook when she moved in with Sonny.)
Eddie says he should go to class but he offers to stay with her instead. (He should have. Poor Eddie.) Chastity says no, he should go to school. She moves to the Chastity Couch and threatens to make him dinner that night. He kisses her on the head and says, “I’ll see you out tonight.”
Chastity’s final words to Eddie are “be smart or whatever it is you have to be when you go to college.” Eddie holds a prop book as he leaves, as if that’s what you take to a class. No notebook. No notes will be taken. How would you survive law school without taking notes?
The Breakdown Scene: Chastity is there laying on the couch when she starts to hear or remember voices in her head. It sounds like a mother is angry at a male father figure and we don’t know if this is a dad, a step-dad, a boyfriend.
“Didn’t you ask me to take her out” the man says and the man and woman start arguing about “the way” and “not that way” meaning a sexual way. The man doesn’t quite deny it but accuses the mom of being jealous because Chastity is pretty. Chastity says to herself “stop it, please….I wish she’d shut up…please be quiet…I can’t take it.”
The mother accuses the man of being a dirty old man. “I do not want that kid molested by a dirty old man.” Yikes!
Chastity tries to clean the bathroom sink. Eventually, she succumbs to the voices and turns over the coffee table of food. She dumps out a kitchen drawer and grabs a marker and starts writing on the white cabinets. She writes “I love you” and crosses that out and writes “I think I love you.”
The male voice refers to Chastity as Emily, “What does that have to do with Emily, for Chrissakes?”
The “Chastity Overture” song starts again as Chastity runs from the house. She does some very sad walking. (I can’t stop noticing that very cool belt she wears and I kinda realize this as an inappropriate thought to have at this juncture.) The music has stopped now. She walks by a lot of cars. This movie is full of cars, cars and stares.
As Chastity walks toward the outskirts of town, “Chastity (Closing Theme)” starts to play (the final song on the soundtrack).
What is that black spot on the ground in the last picture? It doesn’t seem to be a shadow.
Chastity hugs an electric pole. The image kind of reminds you of the rhesus monkey holding on to the wire mother from 1958.
A truck stops. Is this another creep? He says, “can I give you a lift, baby?” (Sigh. Yes he is.) Chastity sinks down to the ground, her hair catching on the wood. (But you know, in this whole ordeal she hasn’t broken a single nail.) Oddly, the trucker never gets out of his truck. No real help is ever available to Chastity. Chastity cries for her mother, saying something like “I love you, mother.” indicating her worst issues are with her mother.
She cries herself out. The music fades in and out.
Chastity stands up and you think she might get into the truck. But she walks in front of the truck and then collapses in the middle of the road. That’s where the shot freezes and we get some final blurry still images from different perspectives of Chastity collapsed in the road. And then the final silhouette framing device (from the opening) which is increasingly splattered with something that could be taken for blood (to indicate she was killed in the road) until the final note of the music coincides with a fully black image.
We had a debate about whether Chastity was collapsed in the road as a failure to cross the road or in a suicidal way, in order to purposefully get hit by oncoming traffic. It’s hard from the aerial shot to tell how far out into the road she is.
Foreshadowing the Future:
Sonny & Cher relationship problems: Sonny and Cher started having relationship problems toward the end of the 1960s kind of starting around the time of Sonny’s movie-making. They were still not legally married. Cher has often said that Sonny stopped wanting to do fun, arty things and started to want to spend all his time being a movie mogul (and he was, unbeknownst to Cher but not to everyone else apparently, having affairs with other women).
Chastity the person, would be born in March of 1969 as a female. She came out as lesbian in 1995 and would become a transgender man in 2008 around the age of 40, changing his name from Chastity Sun Bono (nicknamed Chas) to Chaz Salvatore Bono (changing the reference of Sun, Cher’s nickname for Sonny, to Sonny’s full first name). And although this is a real person (and a real family) we’re talking about here (not simply characters in a movie), Chaz’s transformation does throw further textual confusion on the word and name, because the word is about sex; and sexual orientation and gender are about a person’s sex and sexual orientation. Being touched (and how we prefer to be touched) is also an aspect of the documentary Becoming Chaz.
Walk on Guilded Splinters: Cher would go on to cover this song on her next solo album, 3614 Jackson Highway. On the inner sleeve Cher is laying in the grass and that image feels similar to the image of Cher laying in the grass in the opening credits of this movie.
The Jack in the Box stint of 1979 shows Cher trying to work the register at the fast-food chain. She has often expressed her love of their tacos, particularly those made at Jack in the Box.
Cher in bathtubs: Cher will be in another bathtub in Mermaids reading the novel Peyton Place. In the same movie, she’s in the bathtub dressed as a mermaid with her daughters before she leaves for a costume party.
Giving Cher Names: Cher is known for re-Christening her loved ones with nicknames just as Eddie becomes Andre. Cher will lengthen or shorten names or pick new names (Son, Chas, gris-gris, Genie, Mary Louise, Mish, etc. )
St. Mary’s: Shots from the church scene (and the movie’s opening running scene) will end up in an early 1970s video of Cher singing “Danny Boy” for a TV special Sonny & Cher did called The Nitty Gritty Hour.
Cher in Church: the scene with Cher sitting next to the woman in the church will mirror Cher doing the same with her mother Rose (Olympia Dukakis) in the movie Moonstruck, just as the confessional scene with the priest will mirror the same in Moonstruck.
Cher Driving: Cher will drive again in the movies Silkwood, Mask, Suspect, and Mermaids. She only travels by helicopter in Mama Mia II.
The credits roll to “Chastity’s Song (Band of Thieves).” This is the only song with Cher’s vocals on the soundtrack.
Mr. Cher Scholar sees the final scene as a complete giving up, if not a suicide. It is a very bleak ending in any case. His final review was “such a strange film. What do you take from that?”
I don’t know but I think close scrutiny of the movie got into my head because for two days I kept saying to myself in various moods, “what difference does it make?”
Influences and Other Movies: In Cher’s memoir she said Sonny was influenced at the time by the Mike Nichols movie The Graduate (1967) and we talked about how that might have made it into scenes from Chastity. Possibly just the similar sullen, sarcastic and cynical leads living through alienating situations. Mr. Cher Scholar says the movie has an almost Easy Rider (1969) feel about it, scenes just strung together with no plot. Mr. Cher Scholar reminds me that Phil Spector had a role as a drug dealer in Easy Rider.
That these experimental movies were reactions to big studio movies feels ironic since Good Times was an ode to the big studio films. This just shows how much times had changed for everyone, from 1966 to 1969, including for Sonny and Cher. Mr. Cher Scholar said everyone was trying to be New Cinema at the time, Italian Cinema. Even the Giallo films around that time had similar “overblown dialogue.” Everything felt like it was working toward Five Easy Pieces (1970), films trying to figure out life with insufferable characters, vague films where you had to fill in a lot of information yourself about characters and plot. Mr. Cher Scholar surmises that Sonny must have been trying to create this kind of meandering story because this kind of film was just “in the air” in Hollywood during the time, these supposedly gritty stories.
