Its back: Two For The Road

Bliss to have TWO FOR THE ROAD out on dual-format Blu-Ray - it looks even more marvellous. This is what I wrote on it back in 2012:

A return visit to one of 1967's enchantments: Stanley Donen's TWO FOR THE ROAD, with Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney making a great romantic team (off camera too it seems...), as they play out Frederick Raphael's witty script. This would be a marvellous Valentine Day treat.

After Hepburn's '50s romances with those older men like Bogart, Fonda, Astaire, Cooper she stepped into the new world of the swinging '60s for this trenchant comedy of marital manners. Ahead of its time in telling the story of her troubled marriage to architect Albert Finney in a non-linear fashion, the film embraces scenes from 12 years of road trips to the South of France. For once, Audrey got to play the bitter aftermath of youthful romance, as a woman who swears when angry and even cheats on her husband. In a big departure for the star, director Stanley Donen (working with Audrey again after FUNNY FACE and CHARADE) made her forego her usual couture wardobes by Givenchy in favor of the latest from such mod designers as Mary Quant and Paco Rabanne. The new look brought Hepburn into a more modern era and contributed to one of her best, and edgiest, performances, as we go back and forth through the years and in those different cars and time periods, right up to the mod swinging 1967 era, as captured by Schlesinger's DARLING and Antonioni's BLOW-UP.

Eleanor Bron and William Daniels are sterling support as the American friends they travel with one year, with their insufferable child, and young Jacqueline Bisset is there as well. It is still a witty charming treat as Raphael, who also scripted DARLING, reworks the fractured romance. Audrey had just done that other '60s treat, the delightful - if rarther overlong HOW TO STEAL A MILLION with that other English heart-throb of the era Peter O'Toole, set in Paris once again - at least half of Hepburn's movies have a French or Parisian setting, so this was of the same but more bittersweet. After this and WAIT UNTIL DARK Hepburn would be away from the screen until that lovely return in Lester's ROBIN AND MARIAN in 1976, when she enchanted us all over again ...

I could rhapsodise about Eleanor Bron at length here and in Donen's BEDAZZLED the next year in 1968 with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore - I love her deadpan Wimpy waitress with the eye-shadow, and of course she was also ideal with The Beatles in HELP and in Ken Russell's WOMEN IN LOVE. I used to see her cycling around town frequently here in London, and she was once shopping next to me at Sainsbury's supermarket in Marylebone.

The Beatles HELP! on Blu-ray ....

From 1964 (below) to '65: HELP! just out on Blu-ray is exactly the same as on dvd - same graphics, artwork, booklet, and the same extras as on the 2007 dvd (see Beatles label), just in the different package size. I wish I had checked my dvd before I ordered the Blu-ray. There is the same introduction by Richard Lester and the same appreciation by Martin Scorsese ... it is just an exact duplicate apart from being in Blu-ray.
 
I am only a recent convert to Blu-ray, and have not bothered to re-buy too many films in the new format (ok, HELP! is the sixth so far .... at least the Blu-rays of films like 2001, THE SERVANT, BILLY LIAR have new material, interviews etc.) and I won't be shelling out for too many if they are just putting out the same stuff with nothing new. Its brilliant but lazy marketing to put out exactly the same stuff, not even new graphics, for the Blu-ray people to buy again. Chutzpah or what !  
(Left: Films& Filming August 65 issue on the new pop films, I wonder why I cut a picture out of the cover ....).

I was actually going to write about Scorsese's appreciation of the film, but its not new, he did it back in 2007. Just how many others has Marty introduced? I already have his for editions of JOHNNY GUITAR and EL CID, and I have an an audio commentary he did on BLACK NARCISSUS with Michael Powell.. He makes good points though bracketing Lester with Antonioni and Resnais as an important '60s director "inventing new narrative techniques and re-defining the vocabulary of cinema as he went along - everyone was experimenting around this time, Antonioni with BLOW-UP, Truffaut with FAHRENHEIT 451, Fellini and Godard with every movie - HELP! was just as exciting".

I will just be pleased to revel in the surreal comedy (the boys pulling up to the four houses which open into one inside, as Dandy Nichols says how unchanged they are; the brilliant farce of Spinetti, Cargill, Kinner, McKern and the delicious Eleanor Bron, and the great songs shot like first pop videos
- in the Alps for "Ticket to Ride" and the Bahamas for "Another Girl". If you were a teenager then, and I was 19, to be able to see them in colour on the large screen was bliss. George's "I Need You" was always sheer perfection for me. So now its in Blu-ray even if everything else in the package is just the same. 

A year after THE LEATHER BOYS, below, that grim black and white look at 1964, England suddenly burst into colour with HELP! everywhere ... as it was now the new mod era. Leather boys and rockers were suddenly old hat ... it had started of course with A HARD DAY'S NIGHT in '64, suddenly zaniness and the new music were in. Before that British pop movies were those Cliff Richard spectaculars or Billy Fury in the oddity PLAY IT COOL, courtesy of Michael Winner. Richard Lester though upped the ante with the Beatles and THE KNACK ... 
Next: more 1965 magazines ...

'60s double bill: Bedazzled by Petulia

I had not seen PETULIA since the '60s and always meant to return to it, so finally I have .... this 1968 comedy drama set in San Francisco is probably the perfect late '60s film, capturing that time and place as perfectly as Antonioni's BLOW-UP sums up the mid-60s in London. And then there is Julie Christie, as mesmerising as ever .... Richard Lester's film fragments the story ("Me and the arch kook Petulia"), Nicolas Roeg shoots it all and John Barry did the score, and we get snippets of Janis Joplin and her band .... how '60s is that ? (Roeg also photographed Christie's FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD, FARENHEIT 451 and later directed her in his DON'T LOOK NOW).

 
Sparkling San Franciscan socialite Petulia (Julie Christie) wants an affair. She’s been married six months and hasn’t had one yet. Lucky surgeon and soon-to-be-single Archie (George C Scott) catches her eye and their tentative romance begins. Beneath Petulia’s charming kookiness it becomes clear that her new husband (Richard Chamberlain) is physically abusive.

A film set in late '60s San Francisco is bound to be visually vivid, and PETULIA  is a marvellous-looking movie that makes great use of colour. There are psychedelic light shows accompanying musical appearances by The Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin, striking vistas of Bay Area locations and Alcatraz, and the candy-coloured mod fashions of the era.  PETULIA depicts the messy complexity of relationships, one nice scene being where Scott and Petulia encounter each other on those streetcars going in different directions. He is taking his kids to see the penguins, she follows and sits wordlessly as they meet and touch and she departs again .... then there is that long scene between Scott and ex-wife Shirley Knight (doing wonders here, as she did in Lester's 1974 high seas thriller JUGGERNAUT with a role that barely exists on paper) where frustrations spill over .... Chamberlain is cast against type here as the husband who batters his wife to a pulp, so why does she stay with him?

There are plentiful examples of Lester's penchant for absurdist humor, caustic irony, and the sad/funny details of human interaction, and his razor-sharp editing. There is a lot of jumping around in time as we learn the story of Petulia and her abusive husband and the little Mexican boy very slowly over the course of the film.

Lester's '60s movies really are as essential as the decade's Losey, Schlesigner or Richardson movies, and I love his '70s capers too - the MUSKETEERS, ROYAL FLASH etc, as per reviews here (Lester label).

Pauline Kael though did not like it at all, as covered in her essay "Trash, Art and the Movies" (in her GOING STEADY collection), where she has "rarely seen a more disagreeable, a more dislikeable (or bloodier) movie" and its commercial success "represents a triumph of publicity". "PETULIA is the come-dressed-as-the-sick-soul-of-America-party" and the film is his (Lester's) "hate letter to America" (much the same I imagine as Antonioni's ZABRISKIE POINT was a year or two later). "Probably the director who made 3 celebrations of youth and freedom (A HARD DAY'S NIGHT, HELP!, THE KNACK) is now desperate to expand his range and become a "serious" director..." She does agree though that "Julie Christie is extraordinary to look at"  ....  For me though it is a great '60s American film like the recently-reviewed here THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR, THE GROUP, THE STERILE CUCKOO, PRETTY POISON or LAST SUMMER and Coppola's delightful YOU'RE A BIG BOY NOW.

BEDAZZLED, 1967 - more '60s high jinks and delirious comedy. Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore were possibly the finest comedians the UK has ever produced before Monty Python .... we loved their satirical tv shows (in black and white) then, Cook also had a (large) hand in the comic magazine "Private Eye" that was essential then too (I remember going to their offices to purchase a red enamel cofee pot, a trendy item to have then, and pinning the "Private Eye" covers on the kitchen wall). So it was marvellous to see them on the big screen in Cinemascope and Colour for 20th Century Fox and directed by Stanley Donen (on a roll then, after his '60s hits like CHARADE, ARABESQUE and TWO FOR THE ROAD - he came a cropper though with his next after this, the dreadful STAIRCASE... ). Not only is BEDAZZLED a brilliant modern version of Faust, but it's also a hilarious satire on the '60s. 

Dudley Moore plays Stanley Moon, a short order cook and a loser who works in a Wimpey Bar (before McDonalds came along). The fabulous Eleanor Bron plays Margaret Spencer, a waitress at the fast food restaurant where Stanley works. Stanley's spent six years trying to work up the courage to ask Margaret out, but just can't seem to manage to do so. Peter Cook plays the Devil, or George Spiggott. George has taken an interest in Stanley after his failed suicide attempt. George offers Stanley the standard Seven-Wishes-For- Your-Soul contact and Stanley reluctantly agrees. The problem with the wishes is that Stanley is never specific enough and something always goes wrong to prevent Stanley from having Margaret all to himself, as either an intellectual, then as a rock star, then as a wealthy industrialist etc. 

As each fails, he becomes more aware of how empty his life had been and how much more he has to live for. He also meets the seven deadly sins who try and advise him.We get Raquel Welch as Lust, and Barry Humphries as Envy. Bron is wonderful here (as she was in HELP! and in Donen's TWO FOR THE ROAD as that obnoxious American tourist) as the heavily made-up waitress intoning her hamburger orders "heavy on the onions". The London scene of the time is nicely depicted, even from the top of the GPO Post Office Tower, and the final segment with the leaping nuns will have you helpless with laughter ... Cook is a very petty devil, sending pigeons to drop their droppings on businessmen, scratching vinyl records and pulling the last page out of Agatha Christie novels, his magic words are "Julie Andrews" ! Dudley is great here, before his later less funny films. There was of course that remake, but I didn't bother with it, it just would not have the same funny memories for me. 

Soon: '60s thrillers like Lumet's downbeat THE DEADLY AFFAIR, Ken Russell's flashy BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN ...and some early '60s dramas: THE MARK, THE THIRD SECRET, THE INSPECTOR (LISA).

Two For The Road, 1967

A return visit to one of 1967's enchantments: Stanley Donen's TWO FOR THE ROAD, with Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney making a great romantic team (off camera too it seems...), as they play out Frederick Raphael's witty script.

After Hepburn's '50s romances with those older men like Bogart, Fonda, Astaire she stepped into the new world of the swinging '60s for this trenchant comedy of marital manners. Ahead of its time in telling the story of her troubled marriage to architect Albert Finney in a non-linear fashion, the film embraces scenes from 12 years of road trips to the South of France. For once, Audrey got to play the bitter aftermath of youthful romance, as a woman who swears when angry and even cheats on her husband. In a big departure for the star, director Stanley Donen (working with Audrey again after FUNNY FACE and CHARADE) made her forego her usual couture wardobes by Givenchy in favor of the latest from such mod designers as Mary Quant and Paco Rabanne. The new look brought Hepburn into a more modern era and contributed to one of her best, and edgiest, performances, as we go back and forth through the years and in those different cars and time periods, right up to the mod swinging 1967 era, as captured by Schlesinger's DARLING and Antonioni's BLOW-UP.

Eleanor Bron and William Daniels are sterling support as the American friends they travel with one year, with their insufferable child, and young Jacqueline Bisset is there as well. It is still a witty charming treat as Raphael, who also scripted DARLING, reworks the fractured romance. Audrey had just done that other '60s treat, the delightful - if rarther overlong HOW TO STEAL A MILLION with that other English heart-throb of the era Peter O'Toole, set in Paris once again - at least half of Hepburn's movies have a French or Parisian setting, so this was of the same but more bittersweet. After this and WAIT UNTIL DARK Hepburn would be away from the screen until that lovely return in Lester's ROBIN AND MARIAN in 1976, when she enchanted us all over again ...

I could rhapsodise about Eleanor Bron at length here and in Donen's BEDAZZLED the next year in 1968 with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore - I love her deadpan Wimpy waitress with the eyeshadow, and of couse she was also ideal with The Beatles in HELP and in Ken Russell's WOMEN IN LOVE. I used to see her cycling around town frequently here in London, and she was once shopping next to me at Sainsbury's supermarket in Marylebone....more on BEDAZZLED in due course...