The Sea Wall, once again ....

Next summer repeat - a look back at our 1958 favourite, THE SEA WALL or THIS ANGRY AGE.

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.