Reviews

My father, who has never been a fan of domestic cinema, always used to keep a skeptic and indifferent moaning attitude towards the Swedish films of this sort when aired on telly. When this particular gem was shown, however, during one of its many awkwardly staged sceneries, the sofa began to shake. I was something like twelve years old, and I grasped nada of this flick but thinking it was high intellectual stuff, I turned to my dad wondering what was happening. It appeared he was laughing so hard he could barely make a sound. I learned something by this, realizing that a highly pitched intellectual tone in a film not necessarily means it has qualities, nor artistically nor as a commentary of the human condition. I realized fully the meaning of pretentiousness. Thus was the state of Swedish films in the late 1970s, technically inadequate (maybe audible sound and intelligible dialog were deemed to prosaic to be considered in serious film-making), far-fetched Freudinism interpreted individually be those granted Swedish governmental funding, and utterly unwatchable today. No wonder Ingmar Bergman our escaped country in 1976.

Watch it and You realize what the summary of this comment refers to...

This is the first Argento movie I have seen. I've seen a lot of movies and thought I more or less marked out which genres and which cinematic approaches I was most fascinated by. Than all of a sudden one comes across something new, entirely new way of putting together the various components of filming techniques, that when otherwise used, too often become jaded clichés into something different. A true art experience. When the initial credits appear and the music starts You think You enter known and marked territory, with all the familiar clichés. As a film buff I am familiar with the Italian tradition of blending the nationality of their film cast so that every other actor need be dubbed, to me that's nothing new, however, the characters here are not international per se, they are a strange cocktail of very stylised but absurd personalities. The women are over stylized, made up un-contemporarily to become 40s film noir zombies in a 1970s Rome. They appear almost surreal and over-the-top stylised, almost like transvestites. This creates a peculiar atmosphere which slowly enhances the tension and viewer experience. Let me say this; I have never ever seen such a character like the one portrayed by Miss Nicolodi, neither on screen nor in reality. She is NOT our beloved Italian film sirene, no Loren, no Cardianale, no Monica Vitti, not by any means sexy as humans perceive it. She comes out as a cross between Carmen Miranda and Myrna Loy (the director has struggled to make her come out like a battle-of-the-sexes comedienne from 1940s). Her gestures with her hand is purely a self-developed style, alienated from any acting, her body moves live an entirely different time-space than her character and the rest of the film, and the rest of the universe. First I was flabbergasted, it distracted me from the plot, I couldn't decide whether this was genius or miscalculation and artistic failure to make her appear like this. Still it started to haunt me, and I was beginning to develop a fascination for this extraterrestrial character. She is the scariest thing I have ever seen on screen, and one of the most fascinating, because her character is obviously an extension of the artistic message the director wants to communicate. It is too elaborate to be coincidence; he appears to force not only her, but all his female characters in the film into a 1940s good girl movie babes or glamour queens. Speaking of blending, the settings of this film are a mixture of Latin-Roman and Gothic; we as spectators are presented into Hitchcockian environments, but set in the Roman campagna and Roman inner city. Even an Italian bourgeoisie villa, when abandoned and haunted by ghost, is as scary as the Anglo-Saxon Victorian hell nest. The steaming bathroom scene doesn't lack anything in cinematic poignancy as that of Hitchcooks Phsycho. The statuesque barflies in the 1940s cafe (familiarto a famous American artist whose name I forgot) reside just outside Hemings VERY stylised apartment. Can You be more inn and dolce vita than an English jazz pianist university teacher in Rome living in palazzo-like building with Bavarian physics as neighbours? And to top it all, the score, also at first annoying and misplaced, the Goblins, who are they? An Itialian Tolkien blues band with Led Zeppelin influences? OK, very good indeed, but as a score to a Gothic thriller, NO, and yet it starts to work after an hour of viewing. I know already I am going to watch this movie again and again, since I have been lucky to discovered yet another cinematic universe, the GIALLO thriller.

Interesting fact: In the year 2003 the state in US with the highest crime rate is Arizona, compared with New York, which only ranks no 44. A far cry from the situation laid out in Death Wish, where the main character, being an over-civilized middle age man living in the "toilet" New-York, visits the homely cozy Arizona and comes to terms with his reluctance towards fire arms. Today, he'd be safer staying in New-York than going to a modern-day frontier high crime Arizona. What irony time can produce! Bronson is Bronson here, one can say that the final image of Bronson is fully developed here. Some of the acting here though are wooden and plain ridiculous, but when the inner action man in Bronson, and in You as a spectator, takes over, the film delivers, and is highly effective. One can easily imagine the controversy it must have stirred being made in the progressive era of social awareness. Herb Alperts score is lush and enjoyable, and the cinematography is competent enough to generate an eerie feeling when the lonely vigilante is roaming the streets. And we cannot help keeping our fingers crossed for him.

So I finally have gotten to see this film again after 22 years. It is interesting in so many ways I don't know where to begin; First thing: It stars one of the most beautiful and sexiest woman ever on the big screen; no one less then la Taylor. But she has some serious problems with portraying the lead role of Fran Walker, she is very badly cast as a young, single, chorus girls, as so many of the previous commentators have mentioned. The audience at this period was used to see la Taylor plump and alcoholic, playing characters that were badly faded beauties in their late 40s or even 50s; Martha in Wolf and Sissy Goforth in Boom. Here, she is supposed to be not many years older than the young girl la Taylor portrayed in the late 1940s, contemporary to the "old" movies the character Fran Walker watches. This is indeed one of her last "babe"-parts in movies. And her male co-star, is played by a then an up- and coming actor who is five years younger, even more highlights the miscasting. With face covering hairdos, soft focus close-shots, and clever cinematography things get somewhat plausible and under control. She must have crash-diet, and stopped half-way, she has slender legs, but not a dancer's sturdy legs, moves youngish and feminine (she's eating her pizza like a shy princess), but she is still somewhat top-heavy and double-chinned, maybe because of the heavy medication she was on at the time, as described in Burton's memoirs. Or maybe because of the strange fluffy dresses she wears that make her body look like "an apple balanced atop of two toothpicks" to quote a contemporary reviewer. In some scenes though, especially when filmed from a distance, she does still manage to look petite and delicious. And even though it is absurd to think of Taylor as a struggling working-class girl who needs to count every dollar and dime to balance the payments, she really tries hard here to convince us, and sometimes she actually succeeds. Or is it that the film is cleverly cut? We never really know, since Taylor's larger-than-life image interferes and blurs our judgment on her true talent as an actress. Still, she surprises by transcending a low-key and insecure appearance, which I guess was the intention of the original play writer Gilroy.

Second thing: Her co-star is the charming Warren Beatty, who here has some very effective scenes in which he makes his character Joe Grady very much authentic and believable. He resembles a combination of both (as one commentator pointed out before) Frank Sinatra's wit and style and Brad Pitt's Irish charming bad-boyishness. In contrast to Taylor, he is in my opinion very well cast. I sometimes wonder what it would be like, to be Warren Beatty, in Paris in autumn 1968, fresh from the huge success of "Bonnie and Clyde". According to the gossip that Taylor picked up, and reached the ears and notes of Burton, Warren was courted by so many beautiful Parisian women that Taylor hardly got a look of him off the set. Still some years to go before being "outed" by Carly Simon as being "So Vain", here in Paris he was evidently everybody's darling.

Third interesting point: The last star needed the presence of her beloved husband (and unfortunately heavy boozing partner) in order to be able to cope with this film, or anything else for that matter. Mr Burton was at this time busy shooting a farce with Rex Harrison, "Staircase", in Paris, which by the way was set in a grayish London. Maybe the married celebrity couple both needed the Parisian location to evade the US/UK taxes? Hence, a movie whose main plot is nothing less than one of the most American themes one can think of (quest for the big break), had to be shot in…Paris! Nowadays the stars of Hollywood earn enormous amount of money, but they can hardly make any demands such as those of la Taylor, and get through with it. It is therefore a pure pleasure to watch the streets and buildings, knowing at least some of them, are entirely build for la Taylor in Paris (if we don't count some scenes that had to be made in Las Vegas very quickly in early Spring of 1969).

Four: The score of Maurice Jarre. Great late 1960s early 1970s feel to it, jazzy and bluesy, in a stylish blend, the very definition of Easy listening.

Fifth: A lushly filmed Hollywood picture like this needs elements that make it "touch the ground". We, as an audience, must still be led to believe that the story enfolded before us could be real. Bathroom and bedroom scenes that are not obviously over-sty. Warren's character IS supposed to be a fly-guy dreamer, who painfully lands in reality after excesses at the casinos. The fairytale needs to touch the audience in-between all its awe and amaze, and technically Stevens and the editor have managed the task.

Sixth and last point I come to think of: In spite of this extravaganza, which is not apparent on the screen if one is not aware of that we are looking at a mini-Vegas built in Paris, this movie apparently flopped painfully when it premiered in 1970. It is since forgotten, overlooked, and its print doomed to deteriorate slowly somewhere in the 20th century Fox archives (in Burbank?). But is the plot of the film dated? I think not. Today, whenever the X-and Y-generation have problems of sorts to deal with, like for instance gambling, we are inclined to make it a pathology that must be treated with therapies and counseling. Couldn't this film be re-dusted as a lecture in how painful and destructive addictions to gambling really is? It deserves it. In spite of all the "half-ways" of this film it is cute and sympathetic lesson in love.

I agree with one previous comment that this film could have been so much better. There were in the production of the film evidently good working ideas, like illustrating the performances of LZ by fantasy sections representing their personalities in a fashion. Not a bad idea at all, but why was it so poorly translated into the film and not very well crafted. Especially the sequences with Jimmy Page look terribly awkward, and he was the one with perhaps the most vivid imagination in the band! The scene with Jimmy Page climbing the hill to reach the mystery wizard is pure home-video quality in lightning, scenery, effects, everything; whereas at other time the cinematography is somewhat better, and are in better pace with the mood of the music. And the idea that the band members are assembled in one days notice match poorly with the subsequent scene where the band members stumble out of their plane, looking as if they toured for 500 days in a row (which they almost actually had in reality when this Madison Square Garden performance was shot). Could it be that the moviemakers had to deal with musicians' egos instead of actor's egos? On the plus side is of course the music and a chance to see the touching interaction between Plant and Page, the two front figures and exhibitionists of the band, with the solid and heavy back-up of the more down-to-earth Jones and Bonham. Interesting is also to see the feared rock n roll manager in person himself behind the scene, Peter Grant, dogging everyone around. He is not ACTING, my goodness. But he did probably have point in this movie being the most expensive home video ever made.

This obscure movie, which has been so unfairly panned by the critics of its time, actually manages to deliver what I believe was the intention, a disintegrating world of a psychotic woman. As viewers, we are somewhere in the middle of two layers of realities, the one being the compulsive psyche of the main character, Lise, portrayed by Liz Taylor, and the other one being the absurd and incoherent events in her surroundings. I quite like this film, I had expected a B-movie with second rate production values, but I was at least partly mistaken, the cinematography is effective in painting the psychotic state of mind, example; Lise turning to her right, framed in the left side of the screen, when addressing someone. Another scene, where Lise is attempting to get in touch with a woman she befriended just recently, who may be stuck in the lavatory from some illness, we see Lise at the same time completely absorbed by her own mirror image, disconnected from any real emotional concern over the lady that might be in peril. Maybe some think these are cheap means of making a weird and psychotic setting, still the movie makes the viewer access the process of disintegration of Lise. Furthermore, some scenes are chillingly before its time regarding terror events and crimes; terror do pop up everywhere these days, and maybe a modern day public can better identify themselves with a confused and disintegrating persona as Lise. We can barely understand our own feelings and our driving forces - how can we then understand the complexity of the human society in terms of terror and conflicts?

OK - I know some say Liz is a lazy actress; still the end-result in most part of this film is a credible portrayal of an originally good middle-class girl turned into a glamor girl on the slide (Gloria Wandrous)! I particularly like the interaction between her and Eddie who portrays Gloria's loyal "confident". Eddie Fisher was her then real life husband, hence the naturalness of the acting between them, perhaps. There are flaws in the old-fashioned approach to moral issues on family values and relationships, but filter the 1950s away from the dialogue and you will find a gripping story of a love destined for disaster. You know it, and the main characters know it (Gloria and Liggett), still you cannot help being drawn in into their desperate hope, the last straw that will save their empty shallow lives.

This movie starts off in a solid professional albeit old-fashion style. Fragments of very competent acting make some of the characters believable in spite of the somewhat constructed tale. The more unsatisfying, not to say sad, is it then, that at the very point in the film when the main character in the form of the high society lawyer is supposed to make a moral chose, the whole movie kills itself by turning into a melodramatic American style trial melodrama. Paul Newman's overacting is a shame, and make you twist in the chair of embarrassment. He should not be proud of this. But maybe the star didn't have much choice, since his character is supposed to save his old friend from a death sentence (?) by a contrived experimental set-up of alcoholic sniff tests. Shameful ending.

This story is supposed to be very engaging and seríous, and the subject and dilemma (sexual addicition) may very well be just one. However, the way the characters are portrayed here is quite strange and too often become ridiculous - perhaps from trying too tell too much in too little time. I suppose the intention is to explain the background of the sex addicts and the way they can be treated (in very much a US-style therapy manner), but it all becomes too shallow and 1-dimensional, almost like a 40s comic book series. And the lie-detector scenes - these could be an insult to anyone intelligence! Albeit the ludicrous dialogue the film is packed with a very much sympathetic intention and that´s why this is such a cute little piece of melodrama.