The Great American Beauty Contest Perfectly Captured the Cultural Tumult of 1973

Often in this column, we talk about the ABC MOTWs that were surprisingly ahead of their time. The 1970s were a decade of profound societal shifts, and with their fast turnarounds and desire to engage with the zeitgeist, TV movies like That Certain Summer and A Brand New Life could regularly be found at the forefront of the upheaval, helping the at-home audiences deal with the ramifications of the culture changing all around them.

The Great American Beauty Contest is not one of those movies.

The 1973 MOTW follows events during a second-tier Miss America-style pageant, where there’s plenty of drama afoot. There are rumors swirling that someone is intending to rig the competition. Others suggest that a “Women’s Lib” activist has hijacked the contest, and is trying to win just so she can use her victory speech to deride the sacred pageant. A famous Hollywood producer (Louis Jourdan), who is one of the judges, conspires to use his power to manipulate the vulnerable young contestants to his bedroom–a scheme he’s deployed before, as pageant director and former winner Peggy Lowery (Eleanor Parker) well knows. It’s up to Peggy to keep a handle on all the various catastrophes brewing all around her.

There were a lot of contemporaneous issues at play in The Great American Beauty Contest. The sole Black contestant, Miss New Jersey (Tracy Reed) is bothered that her participation is sheer tokenism – it was only four years earlier that the first Black woman, Cheryl Browne, competed in the real life Miss America. The MOTW also borrows from reality with that looming threat of the Women’s Lib protests, which had disrupted Miss America in 1968. And if anything, Louis Jourdan’s character feels very much like a proto-Weinstein figure.

Nevertheless, The Great American Beauty Contest whiffs when it comes to engaging with any of these issues with any measure of depth. It’s hard to work out where it stands on the beauty pageant thing as whole, even. On the one hand, we see the patently ridiculous rules, such as a chaperone who advises Miss Oklahoma, “Try not to use words like terrific, or marvelous, or sensational – the judges seem to be biased against them.” Farrah Fawcett as Miss Texas performs a ludicrous belly dance, which is treated as ludicrous. Throughout the movie, there are moments that gesture toward a lumpy sort of satire.

Yet those scenes never quite cohere into any kind of a unified viewpoint, and there are just as many that seem to harbor a genuine, misty-eyed fondness for the pageant concept. A sequence where a group of Women’s Lib protestors are sent away outside the contest venue is portrayed as a moment of triumph. The finale (spoilers ahead!) sees the undercover protestor who’d infiltrated the competition crowned the winner, but she too has been won over by that point, and fails to deliver her damning speech, exclaiming in front of the cheering audience, “I just didn’t know how much I wanted to win!” A sharper movie might have cast her change of heart as part of a Stepford Wives-esque brainwashing, and perhaps that is how it was intended. But after the conflicting messaging that led up to it, at best the finale reads as muddled, and at worst, downright noxious.

So if that is the case, then why is The Great American Beauty Contest still so worth watching? Well, as is so frequently true with these MOTWs, a large part of the enjoyment factor comes down to the cast – and here, they are an eclectic, but talented bunch.

Eleanor Parker is the sole actor in the whole movie who has more than one note to play, and she plays them wonderfully. Making her sophomore entry in the ABC MOTW franchise, after the previous year’s excellent Home For The Holidays, Parker once again takes potentially silly material seriously, and in the process elevates the whole production. She imbues genuine emotional weight into her central dilemma–whether she is willing to burn her own reputation to the ground to stop Jourdan doing to another woman what he once did to her. Although that dilemma only takes up a small part of the MOTW’s overall duration, Parker’s regal bearing invests all her scenes with a dignity that’s often the sole thing stopping the movie from combusting with the wild, campy array of performances around her.

But that’s not to downplay the joy of that campy array! The MOTW boasts a murderer’s row of fun turns that round out the ensemble. Two-time Hitchcock leading man Robert Cummings is entertaining as the host of the show, who seems to care more about the reputation of the contest than anyone else. Although he’s even more out of touch than the movie around him – “Oh, for 1945 again!” – there’s a sweetness to his devotion that sits nicely alongside the film’s more underhanded goings on.
Three years before the role that would make her a household name in Charlie’s Angels, Farrah Fawcett is clearly already a star, very much in the Goldie Hawn vein, as the ditzy Miss Texas. And Louis Jourdan, one of classic Hollywood’s foremost suave creeps, and future Bond nemesis in Octopussy, is unsettlingly chilly as the villain of the piece. Though the material they were working with was thin and tonally unwieldy, the cast still charm (or unnerve, in Jourdan’s case).

In a wider sense, the imperfect nature of the screenplay charms too. The Great American Beauty Contest is so very much a time capsule in both its identification of hot-button issues, and its failure to address them. It’s trapped between satirical urges, a desire for relevancy and an old-fashioned fondness for pageant culture; like Cummings’ character, it’s often mired in nostalgia, yearning for the days before everything seemed to be so complicated. These conflicting inclinations may make the movie dramatically unsatisfying, but from a historical standpoint, are really quite fascinating.

And if the whole thing is lacking in its satirical bite, then it certainly laid the way for pageant-centered comedies like Smile (released the following year), Drop Dead Gorgeous, and Miss Congeniality to do the chomping. Sometimes the joy of these ABC MOTWs lies in knowing what would happen next, and seeing how far we’ve come. “Ahead of their time” is the compliment, but there’s merit to be found in “of their time” too.