Otto Smash

BONJOUR TRISTESSE is beautiful, odd, trashy at times — it perfectly captures the feeling if an endless summer, but brackets its lustrous Saint-Tropez Technicolor with monochrome scenes in Paris that make it all too clear the idyll is doomed. Preminger only mixed colour with b&w this one time, but it seems appropriate to his perversity that he used monochrome for the present tense. Of course it makes a clear emotional point about the joy having drained from our young protagonist’s life (and suits the particular looks of St Tropez and Paris) but of course it doesn’t withstand a literal-minded interpretation, and at the same time it’s too obvious to sublimate into symbolism.

Somewhat random side-note — just stumbled upon the fact that, while filming the Great Fire of London for FOREVER AMBER, Otto nearly incinerated Linda Darnell, eerily anticipating her eventual tragic fate by some years. It was a piece of collapsing set that did it, or nearly. And I thought, My God, Otto had form, because he nearly burned Jean Seberg to death making JOAN OF ARC, and did in fact take her eyebrows off. It may be unfair to blame him wholly, since a director is somewhat at the mercy of what the pyrotechnics people say is safe, but on the other hand, fish stinks from the head, and a director is quite able to say “That sounds kinda risky,” or “I’d like some more safety measures in place.” Otto instead follows in the tradition of his fellow Viennese Fritz Lang, who came close to creating Brigitte Helm on METROPOLIS.

There’s a smouldering death here, too, but off-screen, represented by a great black smoke signal against the azure Mediterranean sky, produced by car crash (see also ANGEL FACE), and anticipating Otto’s own accident when he was struck down and badly injured by a car (I imagine the driver’s astonishment at Mr. Freeze suddenly impacting his windscreen).

We’re in the world of Françoise Sagan, based on the novel she published at nineteen. Her youth seems to grant her a strong insight into the thought processes of teenage Cecile (Jean Seberg), with the slight disadvantage that everyone else behaves like an adolescent too. The one real adult, supposedly, Deborah Kerr’s character, is as extreme as everyone else, really, just in a different direction.

I wonder what the shoot was like? I mean, it looks like heaven: Paris and the Côte d’Azur (with Otto now starting his later shoot-it-all-on-location phase), attractive people, and David Niven on hand to stop Otto getting too beastly — Niv had stood up to Michael Curtiz (“Vhere is your script?” “I don’t need it.” “Run and get it!” “YOU fucking run and get it.”) and knew that all bullies are cowards. (It’s possible that everybody’s a coward, and bullies have just discovered a peculiarly extrovert way of handling it. It [a] works for them and [b] makes the world a more hideous place.)

The movie is a fashion show (Givenchy, Hermès, Cartier), and an art show, and a parade of beautiful, rich, foolish people we shouldn’t have any sympathy for and mostly don’t. But I found I still felt for Seberg’s spoilt brat a little, perhaps because Seberg herself was so tragic. Otto was determined to make her a star — she’d been roasted for JOAN OF ARC and the American critics wouldn’t accept her as French here either, as if it mattered. You accept she’s Niven’s daughter even though he’s English playing French. And if they’re French, what is the heavily-accented Mylene Demongeot? Doesn’t matter.

Critical hostility to Seberg was probably mostly about her flat Iowan accent, which Austrian Otto was perhaps not sensitive to — she can seem bad even when she’s emotionally on point — I remember her being wooden in THE MOUSE THAT ROARED, which came after this. Efforts to deaden the accent add layers of self-consciousness to someone whose charm ought to be in their naturalness. This is the movie where it all kind of fits.

Niven is very fine also, in a role with uncomfortable echoes of his own life — not the creepy Elektra complex stuff, the idea of the playboy who finally tries to settle down, only for fate to knife him in the back. Deborah Kerr seems like the kind of woman who could reform him. And here’s Martita Hunt, maybe the only actor to appear for Otto in the forties, fifties and sixties?

BONJOUR TRISTESSE stars Sister Clodagh; Squadron Leader Peter Carter; St. Joan of Arc; Milady de Winter; Lieutenant Joyce; Georgette Aubin; Mr. Silence; Miss Havisham; Lord Desham; Jackson’s Doxy; Sir Hugo Baskerville; Adrian Baskerville; and the Fiddler on the Roof.

Forbidden Divas: The Greeks Have a Word for Her

Shadowplay is delighted to welcome back David Melville Wingrove with another of his Forbidden Divas. Now read on!

FORBIDDEN DIVAS

The Greeks Have a Word for Her

“You don’t know what it means to have no choice.”

~ Ingrid Thulin, Games of Desire

Early on in Games of Desire (1964) we watch as Ingrid Thulin drifts her way through yet another dull diplomatic cocktail party. We are in Athens and she is the wife of an ambassador. (The country he represents is left politely unspecified.) Thulin wears a long white gown that is draped like an antique Grecian robe. Her arms are bare and so is one of her round and shapely shoulders. Her blonde hair is piled high atop her head and her adorably too-wide mouth is stretched in the sort of smile that threatens to extend all the way round and meet above the nape of her neck. It is her mouth, in fact, that saves her face from bland and anonymous prettiness and renders her entrancing and perverse. One of the guests looks at her and exclaims: “You look like Aphrodite!” What sounds like an absurd bit of hyperbole becomes, in that moment, no more than a bald statement of fact.

Not many actors could bear comparison with a Greek mythological goddess. But Ingrid Thulin is the most radiantly glamorous Swede since Greta Garbo and shrugs it off as if to the manner born. Of all the actresses in the Ingmar Bergman stock company, she it was who built the most adventurous and satisfying career away from her dour Svengali and his highly rarefied dimension of Nordic gloom and doom. Her work ranged from films with other Great European Auteurs – The Damned (1969) by Luchino Visconti or La Guerre Est Finie (1966) by Alain Resnais – to such frankly tawdry fare as the psychedelic giallo Short Night of the Glass Dolls (1971) or the all-star Eurotrash disaster epic The Cassandra Crossing (1976). She even made a foray into soft-core porn as the madam of a Nazi whorehouse in Salon Kitty (1976) where she appeared to be having a whale of a time and came out with her dignity defiantly (and miraculously) intact.

This may or may not be welcome news but…Games of Desire is far more the latter type of movie than it is the former. It is vulgar and lurid and sensational and written and directed by two Germans (their names are Hans Albin and Peter Berneis) who deserve fully to be every bit as obscure as they are. But then just about any nonentity can look classy in a classy production. It takes a truly great actress to look stellar in an unapologetic piece of junk. It may not come as a surprise to learn that Thulin’s radiant exterior in this movie hides a profoundly troubled soul. Her husband (Paul Hubschmid) is a prissy, poisonous closet case who is trying to instil his handsome blond secretary (Bernard Verley) with his enthusiasm for all things Greek. He even has the effrontery to fly a psychiatrist in from Rome to analyse his wife – as if the parlous state of their marriage were somehow her fault!

Being of a practical nature, Ingrid knows better than to waste her money on doctors. No sooner has the last of her guests gone home than she high-tails it out of the embassy and heads for a squalid white hovel at the foot of the Acropolis. There she changes out of her chaste white robes and into a figure-hugging dress of black silk. (The kind that makes wandering about in the nude look like a sudden attack of modesty!) She lets her hair hang loose and wraps it in a tacky gauze scarf spangled with giant sequins. Then she heads to a sleazy bar in the red light district and offers herself for sale to room full of horny sailors. An urgent question springs immediately to our minds. If she gets arrested for hooking, will her husband’s diplomatic immunity be enough to get her off?

She certainly does not lack for clients. Before too many scenes have elapsed, she is shacking up with a stud (Nikos Kourloukos) who works on the docks. He has smouldering dark eyes and a mouth that is overpoweringly sexy in its cool, cruel perversity. His sister (Claudine Auger) is a tramp who strips in the bar for money and even (or so it is hinted in one scene) performs live sex shows in the side. Whatever money she makes goes to her no-good lover/pimp and she is distinctly unreceptive when her big brother lectures her on her morals. “You pay for a woman,” she tells him. “I pay for a man. The only difference is that men are a lot more expensive.” To be fair there is a certain logic to that and the script hints that brother and sister are (or at least have been) incestuously involved. Just in case we miss the point, the young lady is given the name of Elektra.

The sister is also – as her name suggests – a vengeful and vindictive little minx who tumbles rather more quickly to Ingrid’s secret double life than her husband or her lover seem to do. She muscles her way into a job as Ingrid’s personal maid, seeing this as a means to scheme and blackmail her way to a better life. Would it be giving away too much to say she sets out to seduce the husband’s gay lover? Games of Desire has enough plot to fill several seasons of your average afternoon soap opera. The fact it all gets telescoped into a mere 90 minutes makes the melodrama even more deliciously overheated than it was to begin with. If you fear you might get lost amid its multiple twists and turns, just remember that nothing that is even the least bit credible has any chance of ever happening. All the rest should follow very neatly from there.

The dialogue is wondrously overripe and studded with the sort of non sequiturs that might well pass for Art if only they were directed by Bergman. “Did you know that Siamese cats are monogamous?” asks the psychoanalyst apropos of nothing. When Thulin gets a tad overwrought and takes to driving her car along a perilous winding road, Auger reminds her: “It takes an expert to drive a car over a cliff and get out in time.” Has neither of these women ever seen Deborah Kerr in Bonjour, Tristesse (1958) and whatever happened to plots with coherent motivation? Games of Desire is the sort of rampantly insane melodrama that actresses in the studio era used to go on suspension to avoid making. But much like Greta Garbo, Ingrid Thulin not only has the power to turn Trash into Art. She even dazzles us to a point where we can no longer tell which is which.

David Melville

Dordogne Among the Dead Men

More J. Lee Thompson — EYE OF THE DEVIL was originally to be called DAY OF THE ARROW and then THIRTEEN, which would seem to have jinxed it. They started shooting on September 13th, also.

Sid Furie was originally slated to direct, and a few distinctive “Sid Furie shots” appear, but these seem to have been shot by Thompson and the resemblance is a matter of fashion. Not many directors shoot down through lampshades, it must be said. Within a year or two directors got all self-conscious about this kind of self-consciousness. The minute they found themselves crouching behind a potted fern, viewfinder nosing through the leaves, they would say to themselves, Oh God no, not a Sid Furie shot!

After Furie, Michael Anderson was attached, but got ill early in the shoot. Or did he? There are a number of questions hanging over this one. Did he fall or was he pushed?

So it became a Thompson film, starring Kim Novak, and then two weeks before the end of filming, Novak was out. The official story was that she’d injured her back in a fall, but everyone stressed the fact that she’d be fine, but she couldn’t work for a few months and so the film would have to be restarted with a replacement.

But David Hemmings, who makes an early appearance, indiscreetly reveals in his very readable memoir that Novak departed after rowing with producer Martin Ransohoff at a press conference. Hemmings reports that he can no longer recall what Ransohoff said to offend Novak, nor if she was justified in her outrage, but he had an indelible memory of Novak stubbing her cigarette into his one good eye…

Nothing that horrifying happens in the film, which is nominally a scary movie…

Anyway, that’s Novak out, but co-star David Niven comes to the rescue, roping in Deborah Kerr, making the film a kind of Powell & Pressburger affair since Flora Robson also appears.

It’s a kind of WICKER MAN/ROSEMARY’S BABY plot, but much less gripping and more guessable than either, and the horror at its heart is strangely uninteresting. But the film itself is sort of fascinating.

Thompson is treating it as an exercise du style, pulling in a lot of nouvelle vague influence — the opening blur of flashforwards, which has no real reason to exist, is certainly modernist and flashy — then MARIENBAD seems to be the order of the day. Thompson tracks incessantly and cuts before his movements finish, which pre-Resnais was considered filmically ungrammatical, though obviously this was always false (exceptions existed for cutting from a shot tracking with a character, to their POV, for instance, as seen so often in Hitchcock).

The direct cutting approach, unfortunately, lops all the tension out of the film. No sooner has the thought of a character going somewhere scary been planted, than we cut to them arriving, or already there. And yet MARIENBAD itself is quite a spooky film. Maybe because it combines sudden jumps in time (which promote nervousness) with funereal creep. This movie’s had all the creep excised.

It has Donald Pleasence doing his whispery bit, but the eeriest presences in it are Hemmings and Sharon Tate, as a twisted brother and sister. One’s first response to Tate is that she’s surely dubbed. Publicity at the time suggested she took lots of voice lessons to acquire a posh English accent and a deeper voice — but, as we know, the publicity people on this film were not always completely truthful.

In a way, it doesn’t much matter if Tate’s using her own voice — certainly there’s a lot of (pretty good) post-synching going on — the combination of the plummy purr and her striking beauty and stillness is quite uncanny. A slight feeling that her voice isn’t coming from her body but from somewhere beyond adds to the character’s sinister presence/absence.

Critics complained about her immobile face, evidence that the weekly film reviewer’s job is to notice anything fresh or interesting an actor does, and then condemn it. They trashed Anjelica Huston on first sight also.

This vertiginous sequence, part of the evil games Tate’s character indulges in, is genuinely alarming, partly because real child endangerment seems to be occurring. Sure, the shots are framed so that someone can always be hanging onto the kid, and ropes and harnesses may be involved, but it still seems dodgy.

Elsewhere, Niven gets some terrific stuff acting hypnotized — a mode of Niv we’ve never seen before. And there’s a relatively early example of a downbeat ending — not only does evil triumph, but it’s going to carry on perpetuating itself and triumphing down the generations. If the film had come out when it was new it would have perhaps had more impact, but it seems to have crept out incrementally over the course of about three years.

I’d love to see the outtakes — Michael Anderson’s stuff, Kim Novak’s. And I wonder if the MARIENBAD approach was established by Furie at the planning stage (it seems like something he might come up with) or Anderson (if Thompson were taking over early in the shoot it seems he’d want to match what had been filmed) or Thompson, who certainly went to town with it. “He’s given this film everything,” attested Niven.

EYE OF THE DEVIL stars Sister Clodagh; Sir Charles Lytton; Ernst Stavro Blofeld; Devon Miles; Queen Elizabeth I; Caligula; Sarah Shagal; Dildano; Sgt. Wilson; Lady of Lyonesse; Tsarevitch Alexei; Bunny Lake; and Vivian Darkbloom.