Mary Woronov makes outrageous behaviour funny by treating it as a practical matter. Her dry partnership with Paul Bartel makes Eating Raoul worth an evening, even when the film settles for repeating itself.
Fi1m perspective
In Eating Raoul (1982), Mary Woronov’s Mary Bland treats killing as a way to finance a restaurant. Alongside Paul Bartel’s Paul Bland, she gives the scheme the seriousness of a couple discussing how to get a business open. We laughed because their plans began to sound reasonable, with the killing reduced to an ordinary financing problem. It is a good introduction to an actor whose composure can make appalling behaviour funny without asking us to approve of it.
Her route to that comedy began in the underground films around Andy Warhol, including Chelsea Girls (1966). Work in Roger Corman productions and with Bartel followed, with Woronov playing Calamity Jane in Death Race 2000 (1975). By Rock ’n’ Roll High School (1979), she was playing the formidable school principal Miss Togar. These parts helped establish the expectation that she would be the woman nobody wanted to cross. Eating Raoul gave that authority a lead role and a domestic setting.
Bartel is the useful partner here because his offended propriety gives Woronov something precise to work beside. Their shared restraint stops the film becoming a display of actors enjoying how outrageous they can be. Woronov’s camp style allows us to see the absurdity of Mary Bland without the character having to announce it. The two actors repeatedly played married couples. Here, the ease between them makes even a discussion of killing sound like familiar household business, which is much funnier than any invitation to admire their daring.
Eating Raoul does grow too comfortable repeating its central joke, and the actors cannot make every return to it worthwhile. Woronov has also been limited by the expectation that she will play somebody domineering or strange. Her later work remained largely in independent and genre films, including Mrs Ulman in Ti West’s The House of the Devil (2009). Start with Eating Raoul, provided a murderous restaurant scheme is your sort of evening’s entertainment.
Biography
Mary Woronov is an American actress, writer and painter. She began her career in the 1960s as a member of Andy Warhol's entourage, appearing in several of his underground films including Chelsea Girls (1966). She later worked extensively with director Paul Bartel, with whom she appeared in seventeen films, often playing a married couple.
Woronov is known for roles in cult films such as Death Race 2000 (1975), Eating Raoul (1982) as Mary Bland, Night of the Comet (1984) and The House of the Devil (2009) as Mrs. Ulman. She has also appeared in television series including Knight Rider (1982) and Murder, She Wrote (1984), and has written several books including the memoir Swimming Underground: My Years in the Warhol Factory.
