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'm 47 and I saw this movie on TV when I was 10. I remember the gist of the story- the mother and daughter running away, and the grumpy old man at the diner with the neon ceiling, but the scene I remember the most is when the old guy lets the girl practice driving; it seems to me like she was going around and around the diner, blowing up dust and cussing his old truck. I guess I identified with her. I also remember the old guy's face when he would light up the neon ceiling- he had a look of rapture, and even at 10 years old I recognized that he was opening up to them a part of himself he had kept hidden away, protected. I just liked the movie when I saw it, and would very much like to see it again. For whatever reason it made a lasting impression on me.

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.

Henri Simoun and Carol Sobieski wrote this teleplay from Sobieski's original story about the unstable, unfulfilled wife of a dentist who occasionally takes off with her 13-year-old daughter for adventures on the road; this time they end up in the desert near Nevada, at a roadside café run by a drunken cook/mechanic/loner who takes a shine to the two ladies and invites them to stay. The premise for this TV-made character study sounds formulaic, though the results are anything but. Loaded down with talent (including director Frank R. Pierson, producer John Badham, and actors Gig Young, Denise Nickerson and Lee Grant, who won an Emmy), the film is sometimes scarily precise about the ways in which we interact with one another. It is predictable that the two adults will find solace with each other--and that the youngster will disapprove and want her father back--however the conversations which lead up to the final events are heartbreakingly real (if at times facetious). Grant's chronic irresponsibility and sadness isn't played for big melodrama--she's more like a wilted flower; Young, gaunt and grizzled, comes to appreciate her company and soon finds himself through helping her. Nickerson (who went on to play Violet Beauregarde in 1971's "Willy Wonka") is a precocious kid who talks like a grown-up, carries around a self-help tome about sex, and makes all the actual adults very uncomfortable with her probing questions. This is a sterling performance from the child actress, although there's too much emphasis on her near the end and she becomes an unreal creation by virtue of her actions. I have no idea what the filmmakers were trying to say with their confounding conclusion. Baffling, unsatisfying and off-putting all at once, it will surely leave most viewers scratching their heads, wondering what the point of the whole exercise was. Still, for a television enterprise, "The Neon Ceiling" is mature and impressive, with excellent cinematography and wry horse-sense. It's worth finding.

I've been trying to find a video or even a review of this film for years. I recall what a deep impression it made on me when I first saw it. Definitely Gig Young's best part. Lee Grant was excellent,as usual & the story had an almost European bittersweet flavor to it. But best of all was that ceiling. Not long after I had accumulated a couple of dozen antique neon signs & constructed my own neon ceiling. Those were the days...