Don Klugman Collection

NIGHTSONG is a rare portrait of the Chicago Near-North folk club and nightlife scene in the mid-1960’s.  The film centers around the struggles and romantic desires of the film’s star, long-forgotten African-American folk sensation Willie Wright.  NIGHTSONG features rare exterior and interior footage of legendary hot spots such as The Fickle Pickle, Mr. Kelly’s, the Kismet Club, the Esquire, and the Tender Trap.  It also features as what is likely the only extant performance footage of Willie Wright, an African-American performer who crossed from the doo-wop and soul music scenes of Chicago’s South Side into the Near-North side’s burgeoning folk music community.  Wright, who gives an incredibly charming and heartfelt performance both on stage and as the film’s protagonist, is a man struggling for respect and survival as an African-American artist in a primarily white musical genre and neighborhood.  He achieved a small amount of recognition in the 1960’s for his folk performances, but quickly fell into obscurity.

I’VE GOT THIS PROBLEM, released in 1966, was a collaborative production of “The Problem Company,” which was comprised of Don Klugman, Ron Clasky, Judy Harris, Josephine Forsberg, and Mike Shea, among others.  The film was formerly distributed by Walter Reade, CCM, and Films Incorporated, won awards at the Cork, Edinburgh, Mannheim, Melbourne, Sydney, and American Film Festivals, and screened in theatrical release in the United States before Peter Watkins’ THE WAR GAME.

I’VE GOT THIS PROBLEM traces the development of a romantic relationship between a young man and woman (played by Klugman and Judy Harris) who meet in a downtown Chicago coffee shop.  Their unconventional attraction to one another is based in their mutual ability to analyze each other’s actions, which range from the quotidian (whether or not to have sugar, and how many lumps, in one’s coffee) to the psycho-sexual (relayed in his remembered Oedipal dreams and her guilt-ridden dates with Ferrari-driving playboys).  The non-stop dialogue between the couple fluctuates between playful psycho-babble and sincere attempts to relay their innermost feelings and sense of displacement in modern society.  The film’s humor is based in their relentless self-analysis and superficial adaptation of the tropes of psychoanalysis, yet this overt criticism of the popularity of psychoanalytic discourse in the mid-century is matched by the ridiculous futility of Klugman and Harris’ attempts to analyze the greater ills of society by means of a conscious turn inward.

YOU’RE PUTTING ME ON, released in 1969, mirrors the same aesthetic style, themes, and criticism of pop-psychoanalysis present in I’VE GOT THIS PROBLEM, and seems to pick up the same couple, again played by Klugman and Harris, a few years into their relationship.  It was also produced by Klugman’s “The Problem Company,” previously distributed by Walter Reade and Radim, won awards at the Cork, Edinburgh, and Sydney Film Festivals, and screened in theatrical release in the United States before Michelangelo Antonioni’s BLOWUP.

YOU’RE PUTTING ME ON follows the young couple from a car to the streets of Chicago, and finally into a swinging 1960’s bohemian party - complete with a bearded, pipe-smoking bouncer, scientific-discourse espousing priest, and a meditating “enlightened soul” wearing only sunglasses, underwear, and knee socks.  The couple’s non-stop self-analytical psycho-babble is taken a step further in this film, as they prattle on about their fears of everyday activities such as driving, and the overwhelming complexity of mechanized objects such as lipstick tubes.  YOU’RE PUTTING ME ON pushes Klugman’s comedic commentary on the inability (or unwillingness) of young people to move beyond self-absorption into the realm of political activism to new and outrageous heights.