This film is good. The Beatniks it portrays were ( I wasn't there in San Francisco ) a rather dreary lot; at least the ones growing old in Paris that I met. A few were in the gay closet, and the rest either posed or wrote, and the rest is history. As for the film it gave them a glamour, and I have no idea how successful the film was. It is compromised in many ways by a too conventional ending, but most films were even the ' great ' ones out of Hollywood. So why do I find it good ? The dialogue for those who like T.V dialogue is maybe over the top, but the actors give a good delivery of the lines. Despite the relentlessly dull George Peppard he tries hard, and the superb performance of Leslie Caron almost literally drags him into life. She can do shifts of emotion in a split second from anger to cold scorn, then back to her joy of living, and this ' lost ' film is made excellent by her. Roddy McDowell is brilliant as the sexually ambiguous butterfly in the Jazz caverns of the city, and he can dance away with a rose in his hand as well as being profound and serious. Scott Marlowe is given too little to do, and his ferocity is not given full rein ( personally he would have been better in the Peppard role ) but sadly Peppard brought the middlebrows in. It is watchable, and very moving and Caron makes it so, as a troubled young woman who has had too many men and too many visits to the psychiatric ward. This is a long way away from the roles she is famous for. And all for the better. She is a complex actor and was made to play the 'girl ' in too many films, when in fact she could prove herself to be as good as Jeanne Moreau or Simone Signoret, blending a lack of traditional beauty but beauty that surpasses the usual definition of the word. Then there is Janice Rule and she is equally disenchanted with life, but like all survivors of emotional disasters she moves on. Any one who can find a copy of this film watch it more than once, as it is addictive, and please put the ' facts ' about the Beatniks aside.
Review of The Subterraneans
