The Neon Ceiling

Several posters have been wondering where a copy of this movie can be found. There is a website called modcinema.com that specializes in hard-to-find films (including made-for-TV movies) from the '60s and '70s. "The Neon Ceiling" is available from that website. The movie is well worth seeking out.

The work of all three main characters is first-rate. Gig young just came off of his Oscar-winning role in "They Shoot Horses, Don't They" and here delivers a completely different performance as a grizzled, lonely greasy-spoon diner owner who is effected by the mother & daughter visitors. Lee Grant was at the top of her game at this time. She had just gotten nominated for an Oscar for "The Landlord", then won an Emmy for this movie. 4 years later, she won an Oscar for "Shampoo". She, too, plays a lonely soul looking for an escape. Denise Nickerson was the true revelation here with a performance that exhibits the transition between childhood and maturity. Her next acting job would be as the gum-chewing Violet Beauregarde in "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory".

"The Neon Ceiling" makes the most of its locations, from the clean, white, antiseptic and confining suburbia to the expansive, darker and freeing spirit of the desert.

I saw the movie in 1971, I suppose, on TV and never forgot it. I would very much like to have a copy of it. Can one be purchased from any source anyone knows?

Never play cards with a man named pops and never eat in a café called mom's or words to that effect, so you see, even though I am now 71, I remember part of the movie quite well after 30+ years. I remember the driving scene when the girl was learning and the incredible private show that Gig Young's character had arranged for himself and which he did not really care to share with others. It was an unlikely love story that had to end as it did.

I was very young when I seen this movie. For years I could not remember the name of the movie. I would talk to my late husband about it and he said he had never heard of it.(this was surprising because he had seen just about every movie made from the 30's to the 90's and the fact that his father was a projectionist in Redondo Beach, Calif). I will never forget two parts of the movie; when Jones would turn on the 'Neon Ceiling' and when he taught the daughter to drive & she dressed up and left to go back to her father. I think this movie is what made me like neon fixtures so much. Great movie, great story line, great actors, just all around great movie. If only they would make movies like this now.

... in spite of all of that navel gazing! This film was a good effort among a string of mainly made for TV films made from 1967 until about 1973 in which middle class people opined and whined about how unhaaappy (yes I know that is a misspell) and unfulfilled they were. These people were usually too old to be boomers and too young to be the greatest generation, having been born during the Depression but not having many memories of hardship. Thus their earliest childhood memories were of WWII, so they did not contribute to that effort, and up until the 70s they had plenty of material comfort that sprang from that effort and the 25 year postwar boom that came with it. During the late stage of this material comfort, these kinds of films came along.

So Carrie Miller (Lee Grant) is a very pretty very bored 30 something California housewife married to a dentist who is equally bored and has discreet affairs with his nurses to cope. Carrie copes by taking off on unannounced adventures across country. The night she leaves with her daughter -apparently she takes Paula with her with no regard for her schooling - her husband is awake and knows she is going. He just lies in bed. He is OK with it if it diffuses the tension for awhile.

Both mother and daughter have their car break down at a desert gas station/lunch counter run by a gruff ruffian known only as "Jones". At first, stranded there, nobody gets along with anybody. But Paula breaks down Jones' defenses, because underneath the explosive temper and the hermit demeanor is a guy who seems to want a family, but that never came his way. Played by Gig Young, this is the kind of part that Robert Ryan would have excelled at in his day. You wonder just who is this guy? And you never get a complete answer to that question.

Paula plays the kind of kid you find in so many 70s films - she is thirteen going on a thousand as she is much more together than any of the adults. She actually wonders "What will mom do when the money runs out?" Meanwhile mom is happy to sit in the sun in a semi comatose state and sing "Hallelujah". The neon ceiling in the title? It is a ceiling in the desert diner full of antique neon signs that Jones has wired together into a Reddy Kilowatt kind of spectacle. It seems to be the only thing in his life that gives him pride.

The finale is very open ended, and you see lots of things in this film you would never see today. No mom would trust her daughter alone with ruffian hermit strangers today. In 1970 this still seems like a non threatening thing. To me the actual story is about a 6, but as an example of the changing culture of the time it is an 8. I average the two to give it a 7/10 rating.

This movie has many darkly lit scenes despite the title. Herb Edelman truly proves he can act in this tour-de-force drama of a bored housewife seeking adventure. Lee Grant is excellent also, but the stand-out is Denise Nickerson, who showed quite an acting range.