Film directors with their shirts and trousers off: Joseph Losey

Because YOU demanded it! Joseph Losey in upsetting shorts. A man entirely composed of babies’ bottoms. And other Mystery Science Theater 3000 quips.

From the filming of BOOM! As attested to by the presence of Richard Burton and Noel Coward on the right of frame.

Losey is gesturing downwards, out of shot, possibly towards his broken toe, fractured when he became overexcited during one of his elaborate camera moves and the dolly ran over his foot.

Richard Lester told me that he agreed to supervise the dub of BOOM! because Losey had another film starting immediately (I guess that would be SECRET CEREMONY — both came out in ’68). He thought it would be a few days’ work and it turned into weeks and weeks because of the Burtons’ incessant tardiness. He’s still cross about it. I imagine the decision to throw out Johnny Dakworth’s (doubtless excellent) score and substitute John Barry’s also dragged out the process.

On a somewhat related note: I picked up Richard Condon’s 1967 novel The Ecstasy Business, in which Tynan Bryson, “the sexiest, the most famous, the richest Welsh superstar in the American film industry” embarks on a super-production with his two-times ex-wife, Caterina Largo, “the sexiest, the most famous, the richest screen queen,” and somebody is trying to kill him. It looks fairly amusing, with the Burton substitute also given some of Brando’s more demented attributes, and the obvious roman a clef satirical angle also includes a master of suspense, Albert McCobb. A Scottish master of suspense.

Wha

Picked up Faber & Faber’s published screenplay for The Heat of the Day, written by Harold Pinter, based on Elizabeth Bowen’s novel, filmed by Granada Television in the UK. The script is excellent — love Pinter — but my favourite line was on page 20. The character Harrison is being cryptic and menacing. He will be played by Michael Gambon, she by Patricia Hodge. The teleplay airs in 1990.

HARRISON

[…] if you and I could arrange things between us, things . . . might be arranged.

STELLA

Oh, for Christ’s sake, get to the point! What the hell are you talking about.

Silence.

Well said, Stella! What absolutely everybody would want to say if they could climb into a Pinter scene. Also note the very deliberate omission of the question mark, which makes the line dismissive rather than inquisitive.

The line isn’t in the novel — I own a copy, having bought it because I love Darkness Falls from the Air by Nigel Balchin and I read an article that lumped the two together. But I haven’t actually read it, I keep meaning to. But I checked the early chapters and found the Harrison-Stella scene. All the dialogue is different, but it all sounds amazingly Pinteresque. Comedy of menace. But since Pinter had to condense, he’s thrown out all the specific words and just kept the tone.

Here’s a bit of Bowen:

Harrison uttered a deprecating laugh. He then said: ‘Ever mentioned my name?’

‘You mean, has he mentioned your name to me?’

‘No; have you mentioned my name to him?’

‘I’ve no idea; I may have; really I don’t remember.’ She paused and ground out her cigarette. ‘Look here,’ she said, ‘you asked yourself here this evening — it would not be too much to say that you forced your way in — because, you said, it was urgent that you should tell me something. Just exactly what have you come to say?’

‘As a matter of fact, that is what I’ve been getting round to. Now we’ve got there, I hardly know how to put it.’

She, on her side, could not have sat looking blanker. It was a trick of Harrison’s to drop rather than raise his voice for emphasis: he thus now said ultra-softly: ‘You should be a bit more careful whom you know.’

‘In general?’ Stella returned, in a tone which by contrast was high and cool.

He had, as though under instruction, kept his eyes on the photograph. ‘Actually, I did rather mean in particular.’

And on like that for pages, marvelous pages. Insinuation and deflection. Pure Pinter, avant la lettre, and at greater length than a TV play could allow.

So I suppose I have to read the novel, and I ought to watch the TV play. But now that I’ve read this I’m more inclined to watch BETRAYAL and TURTLE DIARIES, also scripted by Pinter, and read his script for The Proust Film, which I also bought — Joseph Losey’s unmade, untitled Proust project. Instead of which I’m reading Connie Willis’ Blackout and All Clear, also set in WWII, and just watched EICHMANN, with Thomas Kretschmann, written by Snoo Wilson of all people and directed by Robert VAMPIRE CIRCUS Young. But I don’t have anything to say about it.

Lipstick on your Killer

IL ROSSETTO (THE LIPSTICK, 1960) is Damiano Damiani’s first film as director. While Elio Petri’s debut, L’ASSASSINO, seems like a near-remake of Joseph Losey’s BLIND DATE, DD seems to have chosen as his model another British picture, J. Lee Thompson’s TIGER BAY. But he’s changed things more.

His lead is teenager Laura Vivaldi, who has a precocious crush on handsome Pierre Brice. He’s much older and only shows an interest in her when it turns out she can put him at the scene of a recent murder. Now he starts doting on her, while working out what he has to do to keep her quiet…

Vivaldi is great — maybe not the thespian genius Hayley Mills was as a kid, but very affecting and credible. Her mom is played by Bella Darvi, so we know there’s going to be trouble there. Brice’s REAL girlfriend is Georgia Moll, miscast by Mankiewicz as a Vietnamese character in THE QUIET AMERICAN (why didn’t somebody point JLM to Dany Carrel?). And the police inspector who starts honing in on Brice, using young Vivaldi as a wedge to crack him, is Pietro Germi, who did quite a bit of acting alongside his celebrated directing career.

Germi is one of the film’s most interesting creations — structurally, he’s Columbo-like (enter late, slowly take over), but less sympathetic. Damiani is not, I think, enamoured of the cops. Germi has a picture of his own daughter on his desk. He’s very kindly toward Vivaldi and he believes her story. It turns out she’s just the age his own daughter would have been.

When a more cynical cop undermines Germi’s faith in his star witness — and the thing that does it is the fact that she’s known to have experimented with lipstick — the hussy! — he turns against her. Things get very dark indeed, and social critique almost takes over from detective drama. It’s a perfect balance, actually.

Two possible criticisms — the movie could make a great advertisment for suicide attempting as a means to resolve adolescent troubles, which could seem irresponsible — and the resolution of the mother-daughter plot is not too satisfying since Darvi plays the mom’s bad qualities much more convincingly than the good ones — she’s been wrapped up in her own soap opera affairs as a married man’s mistress, and doesn’t seem to earn her happy ending. But really these issues don’t seem as troublesome as they ought to be.

Damiani’s direction is assured and simple, sustaining his beautifully crafted melodrama.

I also took a look at GODDESS OF LOVE (1958), in the wonder of Ferraniacolor and Totalscope — an unusual peplum-thing scripted by Damiani. He did a bunch of these for veteran director Victor Tourjansky, but this one departs from the usual playbook. There are no bulging biceps, and despite some marching armies in the second act, the film is mostly intimate, and genuinely interested in its love story, structured around the sculpting of the Aphrodite of Knidos.

You learn absolutely nothing important or accurate about this significant work of art except that it was chiselled by a bloke called Praxiteles (Massimo Girotti), but Damiani’s feminist side is apparent — Belinda Lee, a voluptuous lass from Devon, is tyrannized from all sides because of her beauty — it’s like THE RED SHOES, only clunky on every level. Praxiteles wants her as model (but secretly is smitten), a wounded Macedonian he shelters (Lithuanian sideboard Jacques Sernas, Il Divo in LA DOLCE VITA) is in simply manly love with her, and the entire Greek army lusts after her for the way she knocks the shape out of a tunic.

Damiani is guilty of some bad radio writing — “Let’s run away from here through this door!” but his story is actually compelling. Tourjansky, once a wild stylist in France in the 20s, has settled into his “mature” period — asleep at the wheel. You don’t need to watch it. But it’s interesting to see DD already mastering story and making something a little more interesting than it needs to be.