From "Lost Films of the Fifties" by Douglas Brode (an ideal companion to his essential "Films of the Fifties") a selection of stills from one of my favourite films, mentioned on here quite a bit (Mangano, Perkins, Clement, Sea Wall labels) THE SEA WALL or THIS ANGRY AGE
from 1958 - which I liked at the time, and finally saw again - in an
Italian copy - last year [thanks to my IMDB pal Timshelboy]. I also
wrote about the recent French remake of this Marguerite Duras story, LE BARRAGE CONTRE LE PACIFIQUE starring Isabelle Huppert [French label].
The '58 version though by Rene Clement for Dino De Laurentiis, starring
his wife Silvana Mangano, is one of the first international
co-productions made in Thailand, and remains a fascinating lost movie, scripted from the Duras novel by Irwin Shaw, with a Nino Rota score.
Here we have Silvana and a pre-PSYCHO Tony Perkins as the siblings, the great Jo Van Fleet [as good as in EAST OF EDEN or WILD RIVER] as their mother trying to protect their rice plantation from the sea, and Mangano with Richard Conte, and Nehemiah Persoff. I love the scenes with Perkins and Mangano dancing, and playing their rock'n'roll records on that beat-up record player. Alida Valli also appears as the woman who picks up Perkins in the cinema! Maybe one day a proper print will be available .... ditto, De Laurentiis's THE TEMPEST, another international co-production, by Lattuada with Mangano in '58 from the Pushkin novel set in the Russian steppes. I loved it when I was 12!
Update: I now have my third copy - the first was Italian only / then a friend sourced a black and white copy in English / last year I got a copy in colour and in English with French Sub-titles, copied from French television - and introduced by Alain Delon ! - he must have been commenting on a Rene Clement season ... perfect viewing then.
No comments:
Post a Comment