Burtons go Boom!

More Tennessee Williams mayhem, sorry - arthouse classic, or if you want, a Trash Masterpiece .... whatever, its certainly a cult movie now. (see THE ROMAN SPRING OF MRS STONE - below).

It must have seemed a good idea at the time for arty culty director Joseph Losey to team up with The Burtons in 1968, after the relative failure of his 1966 Bond spoof MODESTY BLAISE (perhaps MY cult movie...) and then ACCIDENT in '67 - the last of his with frequent players Dirk Bogarde and Stanley Baker.

BOOM! is now regarded as a camp Trash Classic in some quarters, and maybe it started that era of Burton and Taylor's decline at the box office - after their mid-60s artistic hits WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? and THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, after those popular items like THE VIPS. THE SANDPIPER IS a Trash Classic even if Minnelli gave it some surface style and gloss and Taylor looked marvellous, if a little dumpy. They must have thought they were being artistic doing another Tennessee Williams (but "What were they thinking?" - even though they were drinking a lot at the time...) - even if it was a failed play of his "The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore" which the ageing Tallulah Bankhead had done on stage with Tab Hunter as her younger Angel of Death - that would have been something to see! 

Here are some choice comments from various websites on this fascinating misfire ..... 

As serious art, BOOM! is a bomb. Yet, as a testimony, a very camp testimony, to the lives of Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Noel Coward, and Tennessee Williams, it is literally hysterical in its preoccupation with the emptiness of wealth, sex, and luxury.

 It is the incredible Miss Taylor who grounds this late 60's arthouse flop, and manages to transcend it's failing qualities, to make it a screen orgy of bad taste and over the top drama!

Taylor's role (like Vivien Leigh’s MRS STONE) is really that of an aging rich gay man who is trying to hang on to youth and the beauties that money attract. Burton's role is that of the hustler who is all that is left for the old queen to attract. But as with so many Williams works it all must be encrypted and coded so that the America of the late 50's and early 60's could handle his true intentions. 

Taylor plays ageing hedonist Flora “Sissy” Goforth, the much-married, drug-addicted, richest (and it’s been argued, the most irritating) woman in the world. From the windswept high solitude of her all-white villa on the edge of a cliff in Sardinia, the terminally ill Goforth is in denial about her imminent death, distracting herself by dictating her memoirs into a tape recorder, as she coughs up blood, and directing her diva’s wrath at her long-suffering servants in fractured Italian. She is visited by the enigmatic Christopher Flanders (played by Burton), a failed poet turned gigolo notorious on the international jet set as an ambiguous and parasitic Angel of Death who materialises whenever a wealthy woman is about to die. 
Burton is too old for the role that was written for a man in his twenties and Taylor is too young and too healthy looking to be the dying Sissy. As an elite high society gigolo Flanders surely should be a bronzed adonis, someone like Terence Stamp in Pasolini's TEOREMA, also 1968. Clad throughout in a samurai warrior's robe (complete with ceremonal sword) Burton look haggard and faded. It's he who looks like he is dying, instead of Taylor.

In theory BOOM! initially may have seemed promising. Taylor and Burton were show business royalty and the public was still entranced by their glitzy soap opera lifestyle. Taylor had triumphed in earlier film adaptations of Tennessee Williams plays like CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1958) and SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER (1959). Joseph Losey was a hip, art-y director of the moment, critically acclaimed for films like THE SERVANT (1963).

Taylor plays in full-throttle imperious, overripe, scenery-chewing diva mode, and shrieking like a harridan, Her Sissy Goforth is self-parodic, unhinged and drag queeny - maybe that was the only way to play it - no wonder John Waters says Taylor’s appearance and abrasive performance in this film were a beloved source of inspiration for Divine.

BOOM! is incredibly beautiful to look at, weirdly enjoyable and frequently mesmerising in a way only a truly trashy bad movie can be. Losey’s prowling camera and elegantly composed shots ensure it’s never dull to watch - especially when Noel Coward arrives as The Witch of Capri ! and Taylor wears that kabuki outfit with that spectacular head-dress ...

Like in SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER or NIGHT OF THE IGUANA or SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH that weird Williams poetry comes through the bizarre situations. The set must have been expensive too. Taylor and Losey went on the equally bizarre and culty SECRET CEREMONY, also filmed in 1968 in London. This too  was a notorious flop at the time - and this is where I  come in, as I saw Burton and Taylor with Losey and "The Sunday Times" esteemed film critic Dilys Powell discussing the film on stage at the 1970 CINEMA CITY exhibition at The Roundhouse in Chalk Farm in London. SECRET CEREMONY had been badly received, cut, and sold to television and they were outraged at its treatment. I can still picture Elizabeth, looking great in a patchwork gypsy-style dress and flashing that diamond ring. Burton and Losey seemed hangdog about it all ... 
Our affection for Elizabeth grew in her later years: all those diamonds, perfumes, her AIDS charity work, her varying weight and looks ... for me though her great era was that decade from 1954 (THE LAST TIME I SAW PARIS, GIANT, RAINTREE COUNTY, CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER and, yes, CLEOPATRA) when she and Marilyn were the twin deities of the era, as Sophia and Brigitte came to the fore.

The Burton era though was passing, were the public getting tired of their ritzy lifestyle and antics as they were forced to make more and worse films to maintain their lifestyle? - people were just not going to see them, together or separately, any more - and who could blame them with items like HAMMERSMITH IS OUT, BLUEBEARD, THE DRIVER'S SEAT, ASH WEDNESDAY .... ZEE & CO though was another genuine Trash Classic we will have to re-visit it soon.
Losey had another success, artistic and popular, with THE GO-BETWEEN in 1971 and was then mainly filming in Europe. He directed Burton again in his 1972 THE ASSASSINATION OF TROTSKY, which a lot of people, including me, didn't bother with at the time - despite it also featuring Alain Delon and Romy Schneider - or maybe it did not hang around long enough for us to see it. It was though deadly dull when I finally got the dvd a while back. 

Dirk in 1971

I came across a fascinating long interview with Dirk Bogarde by Gordon Gow in the May 1971 200th issue of one of my favourite magazines "Films and Filming", about the time Dirk was promoting Visconti's DEATH IN VENICE. (As I have recounted here before, I met him about 6 months before this interview, at the London BFI in November 1970 where he gave a very entertaining lecture and Q&A session, and he autographed the programme for me afterwards when I managed to have a quick conversation with him). 

Dirk always gave good interview and this one is choice. I must quote some extracts .... as he talks about Marilyn Monroe, and various films of his like THE SPANISH GARDENER, THE SERVANT, ACCIDENT and DEATH IN VENICE. He talks a lot about Visconti here, and was particularly fond of SENSO. 

"Marilyn had this intangible wistfulness … in BUS STOP she was magical. Do you remember the scene where she gets her tatty old train ripped off her by a man at a café table when she is doing her act? Do you remember her look of pain and rage and despair?

THE SPANISH GARDENER: “In those days they wouldn’t have anything to do with homosexuality. The whole premise of the original story was that a small boy, without any sexual knowledge, fell in love with the gardener because he had no love at all from his parents. He had no mother and a perfectly foul father. This sort of thing so often happens. The whole story tilted on the fact that the father became incurably jealous because he was sexually in love with the gardener. And of course that did not come through because then we were supposed to be making nice wholesome pictures. In the end nothing worked out, I wasn’t killed as the gardener was in the book. We made it all nice for the Odeon circuit. It was so absurd and shameful I did not go and see it, but the old aunties and uncles loved it." (In the book, a best-seller by A.J. Cronin, Jose the gardener is 19 - Bogarde was 35 at the time, and the character was not killed off as in the novel, as Rank created a false happy ending to send audiences home happy).   

He is not especially fond of his work in THE SERVANT. “It amuses me. It was enormous fun to do – it was no effort. It was entirely technical to act. Harold Pinter had written it so unfailingly that you couldn’t put a foot wrong in it. I was surrounded with only the very best people, and it was as easy as falling off a log. But THE SERVANT will be a classic film for all time. I know – whatever happens to me – I will be in the archives because of THE SERVANT. In its entirety of course, its an important film. Especially now we know all about LSD – surprise, surprise. Apparanty audiences didn’t now about LSD when the film was first shown, and none of the critics did either, and the whole ending is LSD – the boy is on a trip. I’ve seen it again in America recently and it stands up, and it is absolutely chilling in German – more than that, it’s a towering picture. But from my point of view it cost me very little emotionally, because I’m nothing to do with the man I played in THE SERVANT so it was easy to become a North country bastard called Barrett and his compulsion to dominate." Shame he was not asked about Gabriel, his high camp arch-villain in Losey's 1966 MODESTY BLAISE ... (one of my essential movies). Left: a MODESTY publicity shot.

He says though that ACCIDENT is the best film Losey and Bogarde did together. “I was very aware of the emotions of the man in ACCIDENT and I was almost in a trance for about four months after I’d finished it. …. I put all the clothes and shoes that I wore for the character into a trunk and locked them up. I wore them later in JUSTINE and left them all behind me in Hollywood, so they may come up for sale in 20^th Century Fox’s lot. I got rid of them, you see, because the man I had been in ACCIDENT was dead and I didn’t want his clothes  - locked them away as you would with the clothes of anybody who has died in a sudden car crash. JUSTINE was much later and Pursewarden was a different man." (I saw and reviewed ACCIDENT again recently, scroll down or over the page..).

"Aschenbach in DEATH IN VENICE is the ultimate loser. He’s a dying man, he goes to Venice for the last months of his life. After years of rigorous and strict belief that beauty is created by man, he suddenly finds at dinner one night that God, quite alone by Himself, all up there in Heaven, has created a piece of beauty sitting across the soup plate … a youth of such beauty that Aschenbach can’t believe it. … Before he dies he sees that God was right and man was wrong. That God is in fact the creator of beauty … I do believe there is a higher power, and I don’t know any other word for it but God. I think our future is formed: whether you go and play golf on the moon or get squashed by a truck on a French bypass. Its all shaped."

Bogarde now lives in his house in France, at Grasse, eschewing the crowded beaches below and settling for a hose-down in his back garden. He is waiting for Alain Resnais to give him the word to start work on a film about the Marquis de Sade, but money has been difficult to raise. “I’ve got a very pleasant place to live in now. Sufficient money to exist for the rest of my life if I’m very careful. I can manage … DEATH IN VENICE could well be the finish for me. I don’t want to go back to the things I did before – the DOCTORS and all that rubbish. If DEATH IN VENICE fails, I’ll stay with it as a failure. If it’s a success, and my performance in it has worked, then perhaps it’s the film I’ve always been wanting to make – and I might someday go and do another somewhere, but I’m not anxious." 

Of course that Resnais film did not happen - Dirk as the Marquis de Sade would have been interesting! - , but he and Resnais did the wonderful PROVIDENCE in 1977, and by then he had began his series of memoirs and novels as he became a best-selling writer. 
His later books like "A Short Walk From Harrods" recount his later French years and his and partner Tony Forwood's return to London due to ill-health - where he died in 1999 aged 78. Interesting too to read about the LSD in THE SERVANT, It did seem that Tony (James Fox) was drugged at the end, but I did not imagine it could have been LSD! (We certainly knew about LSD in 1968 when we were seeing The Doors and Jefferson Airplane in concert and the 2001 film on acid, but hardly early in the decade). 
It was interesting too seeing THE SERVANT again on the big screen a couple of year ago, as I have recounted previously, at the Curzon Soho, to tie in with its Blu-ray release, with co-stars Fox, Sarah Miles and Wendy Craig present, to discuss the film and their memories of working with Dirk and Losey, both of whom I had seen (separately) back in 1970 when I was a mere 24. Left: Bogarde at the BFI in 1970.
LOTS more Bogarde at the labels ....  

'60s British cinema: Dirk, Losey, Accident, again

Nice to see ACCIDENT on television again - thanks, Talking Pictures. Been a few years since I last saw it, though the dvd is filed away - we liked Losey's 1967 drama, scripted by Harold Pinter, a lot back then, it was almost the kind of movie we took for granted then, but it seems like an arthouse classic now. This is what I wrote on it here in 2013 :

Joseph Losey's ACCIDENT remains a key '60s movie for me - I well remember seeing it for the first time with my best pal Stan when it was on general release as a double feature - the supporting movie was JUST LIKE A WOMAN another forgotten '60s comedy, good cast though headed by Wendy Craig. ACCIDENT though was the culmination of those Bogarde-Losey films: THE SLEEPING TIGER in 1954 and that quartet which more or less defined the '60s: THE SERVANT, the too little see KING AND COUNTRY, the mod op-art delight MODESTY BLAISE (maybe my favourite cult movie with the divine triumvirate of Vitti, Bogarde & Stamp on that mad, mod op art island, with those witty asides as Dirk goes over the top as the supercamp villain Gabriel in the blonde wig... but I digress as usual). The Losey-Stanley Baker films are fascinating too, I particularly like the 1959 thriller BLIND DATE (Losey, Baker labels) and EVE and THE CRIMINAL ...

ACCIDENT, scripted by Harold Pinter, begins and ends with the sounds of a car crash, and we go back and forth to discover what really happened. There is that long marvellous central sequence depicting a languid lazy summer afternoon at the comfortably upper-middle class Oxford residence of professor Stephen (Bogarde) and his pregnant wife Rosalind, perfectly played by Vivien Merchant. Guests include William, one of the professor's pupils - a golden boy, aristocrat Michael York, and his girlfriend Anna an Austrian princess, Jacqueline Sassard.
An interloper is another rival professor Charley, Stanley Baker at his most aggressive. They shell the peas, go for walks, lie on the lawn, hands slowly touch, as we begin to see the tensions and undercurrents here... Stephen is having a kind of mid-life crisis and is attracted to Anna, the glacial girlfriend who is manipulating these men. She is sleeping with Charley but knows how Stephen feels about her. Rivalies between the men come to the surface over dinner as William falls drunk into his plate - Charley is also a tv presenter, he is good on tv - and taunts Stephen who also wants to be on tv, and in fact has an appointment with a producer, played by Pinter himself. We also see Charley's distraught wife Ann Firbank, watering flowers in the rain, while the pregnant Rosalind watches all - Stephen also has a date with an old girlfriend, silently played by Delphine Seyrig - we hear their disjointed conversation played over that restaurant scene. Her father is Losey regular, Alexander Knox. Upper class rituals are explored - rugby, punting on the river ....

 We know right away that William has been killed in the car crash, as Stephen takes the unconscious Anna out of the car and into his house. Who actually was driving ?
Do they sleep together too ? Does he take advantage of her dazed state? One thing that mars ACCIDENT for me is that Sassard is too blank a presence at the centre - she also had a big role in '68 as a similar object of desire in Chabrol's LES BICHES, though it was her last year in movies. (I also saw her when younger in FAIBLES FEMMES, a French comedy with the young Alain Delon, in 1959). Projector favourite Austrian Romy Schneider, who was originally cast, would have been ideal here, with that teasing, feline quality of hers and would have made so much more of the role. We never get to see or understand what Sassard is feeling or thinking. Baker and Bogarde of course are both pitch perfect, squaring up to each other again a decade after their Canadian adventure CAMPBELL'S KINGDOM, a perfect Rank Organisation movie in 1957. ACCIDENT would be their final film with Losey, who was next making films with the Burtons and going off to Europe (Losey label), as indeed would Dirk. ACCIDENT's reputation has grown over the years, though like Antonioni's BLOW-UP it is a polarising film, some people actively hate it, but like BLOW-UP and THE SERVANT it is for me a major '60s film, and one of Pinter's best scripts. Cinematography by Gerry Fisher, and music by Johnny Dankworth. 

A new go-between

THE GO-BETWEEN, 2015: Yes, it begins with that famous first line: "The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there" .... as the older Leo Colston (Jack Broadbent) returns to Norfolk 50 years after that fateful summer he spent there in 1900 as guest of the wealthy Maudsley family as 12-year old Leo is a school friend of their son. This of course is the famous L.P.Hartley novel originally filmed by Joseph Losey in 1971 - it was an award winner at Cannes, with a razor-sharp script by Harold Pinter and a score by Michel Legrand, as Losey and Pinter dissect once again the British class system. 

It is also a ravishing period piece, with Julie Christie as Marian, the wilful daughter of the family having a clandestine relationship with tenant farmer Ted Burgess (Alan Bates). Margaret Leighton is marvellous as her mother who is determined her daughter shall marry Lord Trimingham - Edward Fox. Young Leo, too infatuated with Marian to realise how shallow and manipulative she is,  soon gets caught up in their deceit as he becomes their go-between, carrying message back and forth .... It all comes to grief before too long, it seems everyone knows what is going on but it cannot be mentioned until the cold mother has had enough.  Left: Dominic Guard as Leo and Julie Christie as Marian in 1971.

This new BBC version looks great capturing that lazy hazy summer at the end of the Victorian era with croquet on the lawn, tea parties, the toffs playing cricket on the village green against the locals, and the suspicious mother keeping an eye on her daughter .... The new version (directed by Pete Travis and scripted by Adrian Hodges) plays like a retread of the Losey film but with subtle differences - the wealthy family are now portrayed in a more human light.  Young Leo is delightfully played by Jack Hollington, and Ben Batt (more naked swimming) is not quite the equal of Bates, while  Joanna Vanderham is a younger Marian. Above: Margaret Leighton and Lesley Manville as Mrs Maudsley.

Lesley Manville (so good in Mike Leigh's ANOTHER YEAR) is absolutely marvellous as the mother, certainly the equal of Margaret Leighton, and a shrewd piece of casting has Vanessa Redgrave as the older Marian confronting Broadbent - as her father Michael Redgrave played the older Leo in the Losey film, which brings it to a nice conclusion. That final sequence worked better though in the Losey film. In all much better than the BBC's by all accounts tepid and dismal retelling of LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER which I did not bother with, all part of their current new versions of classic British literature, and now for the final series of DOWNTON ABBEY. Right: Vanessa Redgrave and Jim Broadbent.

Alain Delon: "a bit of alright" says Edith ...

We have not done a piece on Alain for a while, but there are lots on him here, as per the label .....

I mentioned before that Engish film magazine "Films and Filming" I used to get, and work for, and have now got all the 1950s issues (it began in Oct 1954 and folded in 1980, as per a forthcoming piece on all that), each issue featured a column on a "Person of Promise" and I have covered some already (Lee Remick, Stephen Boyd, Belinda Lee, James Garner, Carol Lynley, Shirley Eaton, Shirley McLaine etc). Their May 1959 issue (one of the rare ones I got just now) features that interesting young French actor Alain Delon, then making a name for himself. Its rather delicious:

Alain Delon is 23. Edith Piaf, the nightclub entertainer, described him recently with these words: "Une belle petite eule", which roughly translated means "He's a bit of alright". From the colloquial to the rather more sublime comes this quote on young M. Delon from the actor Bernard Blier: "He has balance, a calm and wholesome insolence, respect for professional tradition, scorn for upstart authority and a taste for a violent, short, intense life".  (Well, they were wrong on that count, Delon is 80 this November) .

All of which goes to show that French Cinema has a virile youngster who appeals to women and men alike, to the professional artist and the audience who have come to watch him.

Alain is at pains to assure those who want to pigeon-hole him into a convenient type that he is not, and has no intention of becoming, the "French James Dean". Whether he likes it or not Alain has the same appeal that endeared the late Dean to the bosoms of his fans.

Born in a suburb of Paris, Alain showed little interest in a career in show business during his teens. At 17 he enlisted in the forces and was sent to Indo-China to fight in the sweltering jungle in the war against the rebels. After two years of this murderous campaign he was released. 

It was at this time that Yves Allegret was looking for a young actor to play in QUAND LA FEMME S'EN MELE (When a Woman Interferes). Yves passed the news along to his director brother Marc who starred the actor in his second film SOIS BELLE ET TAIS TOI (Blonde for Danger) opposite Henri Vidal and Mylene Demongeot. At this time he was offered work in the USA but declined. His first starring role came with CHRISTINE opposite Romy Schneider. He also appeared in FAIBLES FEMMES (WOMEN ARE WEAK) in 1959, with Demongeot and two new young actresses Jacqueline Sassard and Francoise Pascal. In FAIBLES FEMMES Delon plays a Don Juan who seduces three girls in turn and they plot their revenge ... 

His hobbies are horse-racing and .... sports cars. Is M. Delon treading the same path as James Dean? It would seem so. 

FAIBLES FEMMES was one of the first French films I saw, when young in Ireland, and I loved that European glamour and decadence, served up in spades of course in Rene Clement's PLEIN SOLEIL (PURPLE NOON) later that year, from Patricia Highsmith but with a twist, as -per my comments on that. Delon soon became the go-to actor after those prestige films with Visconti (ROCCO, THE LEOPARD) and Antonioni (L'ECLISSE). That great European career followed (Melville's LE SAMURAI, BORSALINO with Belmondo etc) and Delon's playboy life made the headlines too, as well as his various romances, including with Romy. Its always a pleasure seeing him with Claudia, Romy, Monica, Marie Laforet and the others, or playing gangsters with Gabin or Montand (MELODIE EN SOUS SOL, SICILIAN CLAN, CERCLE ROUGE etc.. I must get around to his one with Simone Signoret soon...

It all began when fellow actor Jean-Claude Brialy took him to the Cannes Film Festival in 1957, where among others he met were Hollywood agent Henry Willson, and British photograher John Barrington, who took some interesting shots of the young actor (in bed, left).  He was soon on the cover (first of many) in "Films and Filming's" 1961 French issue, in PLEIN SOLEIL. and of course did some Hollywod films. He seems to have aged quite well and working until recently, as per the commentary on the recent PLEIN SOLEIL Blu-ray.  Above: Delon by Barrington in 1957, right, with Belmondo in recent years.

Modesty, again.

More 1966 - to complement the documentary on BLOW-UP locations, below, from yesterday, here is the trailer for Losey's misunderstood op-art pop-art spy spoof MODESTY BLAISE (which some consider dated now), a key movie for me when I was 20 in 1966 and had discovered Monica Vitti in those early '60s Antonioni films - 
Monica was actually a comedienne which she returned to successfully during the '60s and '70s - as per my other posts on her. Add in Dirk Bogarde being screamingly camp as arch-villain Gabriel with the blonde wig and those sunglasses, and Terry Stamp as that bit of rough Willie Garvin and all those wonderful moments, a lot of which are captured here. 
I was at the premiere in Leicester Square and saw Bogarde with Rosella Falk (Mrs Fothergill!) on his arm - Monica was not there, but was at the premiere of DARLING with Dirk and Julie Christie in 1965 (above), when they were filming MODESTY. We love this Losey with the Dankworth score, and the full movie is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BpC0NatYqU

All those directors !

Following on from the lists of actors and actresses we like, here is the Directors list .... its bigger than I imagined ! 

Michelangelo Antonioni  (right)

Alfred Hitchcock 

Howard Hawks 

Ingmar Bergman
David Lean
Michael Powell
Martin Scorsese

John Huston 

William Wyler 

Billy Wilder 

Joe Mankiewicz 

George Cukor 

Vincente Minnelli 
Josef Von Sternberg 

Orson Welles 

THE REST OF THE PANTHEON: 

Frank Borzage, Preston Sturges, John Ford, Frank Capra, Michael Curtiz, George Stevens, Fred Zinnemann, Alan J Pakula, Sidney Lumet, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Robert Altman, Michael Mann, Terrence Malick, Charles Walters.

OF THEIR TIME ('50s/'60s): 

Elia Kazan, Stanley Kramer, Douglas Sirk, Frank Tashlin, Otto Preminger, Nicholas Ray, Anthony Mann, Robert Rossen, Martin Ritt, Stanley Donen, John Frankenheimer, Richard Brooks, Jean Negulesco, John Sturges, Blake Edwards, Richard Quine, George Roy Hill, Robert Wise, Robert Mulligan, Richard Fleisher. 

CURRENT DIRECTORS: 

Mike Leigh, Francois Ozon, Pedro Almodovar, Nicholas Winding Refn, Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, Quentin Tarantino, Todd Haynes, Bill Condon, Ang Lee, Paul Schrader.

BRITISH: 

John Schlesinger, Joseph Losey*, Richard Lester*, John Boorman, Nicholas Roeg, Ridley Scott, Carol Reed, Clive Donner, Desmond Davis, Tony Richardson, Basil Dearden, J. Lee Thompson, Philip Leacock, Alexander McKendrick, Lewis Gilbert, Ronald Neame [* honorary Brits]  Right: Losey directs MODESTY BLAISE.

EUROPEAN (after Antonioni): 

Federico Fellini, Vittorio de Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Jacques Demy, Agnes Varda, Louis Malle, Jean-Pierre Melville, Mauro Bolognini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Max Ophuls, Luis Bunuel, Wim Wenders, Francois Truffaut, Rene Clement, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Claude Lelouch, Roger Vadim, Claude Sautet, Julian Duviver, Robert Hossein, Henri Verneuil.
Left and right: Agnes Varda and Jacques Demy.

WORLD CINEMA:

Ozu, Mizoguchi, Ray, Kurosawa, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, Wong Kar-wai, Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Hitch & Cary

Love is not the sweetest thing !

A trio of mesmerising star turn impersonations:  Derek Jacobi as painter Francis Bacon; Michael Douglas as Liberace; Helena Bonham-Carter almost as Elizabeth Taylor .....

I had been putting off seeing LOVE IS THE DEVIL and BEHIND THE CANDELABRA for some time, as I felt one may be too grim, and the other too camp - but they make up an astonishing double bill with a similar story arc: naive young man gets taken up by older artist who turns out to be a monster who tosses him aside when he has tired of him ... both stories capture facets of British and American gay life in the '60s and '70s and into the '80s perfectly .

In the 1960s, British painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992) surprises a burglar and invites him to share his bed. The burglar, a working class man named George Dyer, 30 years Bacon's junior, accepts. Bacon finds Dyer's amorality and innocence attractive, introducing him to his Soho pals. In their sex life, Dyer dominates, Bacon is the masochist. Dyer's bouts with depression, his drinking and pill popping, and his satanic nightmares strain the relationship, as does his pain with Bacon's casual infidelities. Bacon paints, talks with wit, and, as Dyer spins out of control, begins to find him tiresome. Could Bacon care less?

or as I said, on IMDB the other week: 

LOVE IS THE DEVIL, 1998. More artistic temperament in spades in this study of the painter Francis Bacon, and the man in his life, George Dyer, a small time crook. Again the casting is the thing: Derek Jacobi is uncanny as Bacon – as mesmerising as he was in I CLAUDIUS, while a pre-Bond Daniel Craig seems just right as the working class man out of his depth with Bacon’s Soho drinking pals who include Tilda Swinton - young David Hockney is depicted here too. John Maybury’s film  - I see it as a filmic version of Munch's "the Scream" - though cannot depict any of Bacon’s art but the film suggests their nightmare quality. The destructive relationship between painter and muse is caught as Dyer falls into alcoholism and pill popping, before his suicide. Grim is the word, at least Frear’s film on Joe Orton, another gay maverick artist, PRICK UP YOUR EARS had a lot of humour among the increasingly grim dramatics. 

John Maybury's film astonishes on many levels, capturing the selfish artist and the untidy (putting it mildly) studio, and all that drinking at the Colony and other drinking clubs. Jacobi is astonishing, whether cleaning his teeth with Vim detergent, putting shoe polish in his hair and applying mascara and powder before he heads off for an afternoon on the razzle, as Dyer sinks deeper into misery and booze and pills - Craig, as he was in LAYER CAKE and THE MOTHER and ENDURING LOVE is as solid as he was as Bond, James Bond.

BEHIND THE CANDELABRA, 2013: Before Elvis, before Elton John, Madonna and Lady Gaga, there was Liberace, pianist and flamboyant star of stage and television. Scott Thorson, a young bisexual man raised in foster homes, is introduced to Liberace and quickly finds himself in a sexual and romantic relationship with the legendary pianist. Swaddled in wealth and excess, Scott and Liberace have a sx-year  affair, one that eventually Scott begins to find suffocating. Kept away from the outside world by the flashily effeminate yet deeply closeted Liberace, and submitting to extreme makeovers and even plastic surgery at the behest of his lover, Scott eventually rebels. When Liberace finds himself a new lover, Scott is tossed on the street. He then seeks legal redress for what he feels he has lost. But throughout, the bond between the young man and the star never completely tears ...

Another terrific HBO movie (see THE NORMAL HEART, gay interest label) this Liberace movie is played for laughs as well as dramatics as ageing predatory older man ensnares rather naive young man. Scott (as depicted by Matt Damon) does not seem quite on the make, but is soon revelling in the glitz and glamour of the Liberace lifestyle. It is a shock to see Lee without his wig, as he and Scott get more involved, with Scott too having plastic surgery to look more like Lee, who talks of adopting him. 

Both actors turn in mesmerising performances, plus I did not recognise Dan Ackroyd or Scott Bakula (who delivers the zinger line to Scott: "Right now you are Judy at the Sid Luft obsese era"), while Debbie Reynolds was initially unrecognisable as Lee's mother, and Rob Lowe is the hilarious plastic surgeon. The tackier side of American showbiz is nicely depicted too. It is everything that Soderbergh's MAGIC MIKE should have been (see Mike label) ... while Damon has maybe his best role since THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY and Douglas is truly extraordindary as the great faker and master showman. Left: Soderbergh with Douglas. Liberace's 1955 film SINCERELY YOURS is reviewed at Liberace label. Also, its hardly unfair to depict Liberace like this, after all he had the nerve to sue - and win! - that British paper for casting aspersions on his masculinity! Douglas and Reynolds knew Liberace and his mother, so I imagine their portrayals are spot on. 

More camp showbiz excess is provided by BURTON AND TAYLOR, the BBC's 2013 biopic on the 1983 final teaming of the Great Lovers, who were selling themselves to the public, on stage in a doomed revival of Coward's PRIVATE LIVES. It was a last throw of the dice for Taylor to get Burton back into her orbit, even though he was poised to marry again. Helena (aided by great make-up, wigs, and those purple and lilac outfits) captures the capricious great star, forever late for rehearsals and seemingly not taking it seriously, to the annoyance of Burton and their director, but she delivers when she has to. She is also never far from the drinks trolley .... 

as Burton tries to avoid the booze and do the work. Bonham-Carter is fine as Taylor, but Dominic West suggests nothing of Burton's looks or voice to me, but does radiate a powerful presence, as he becomes horrified at the circus their play has become as the public come to see The Burtons ...

I saw The Burtons up close in 1970 at that Cinema City exhibition in London, as I have detailed previously - Taylor label - where they were with director Joseph Losey and critic Dilys Powell (left) as they were annoyed their SECRET CEREMONY film was a flop and being re-edited and sold to television. Eliizabeth looked marvellous in a gypsy type dress as she flashed that diamond, while Burton was in ranting mood in a safari suit!  The BBC film direted by Richard Laxton, captures a lot of their charisma and is jolly good fun.