Black Widow (1987)

Black Widow is a 1987 neo-noir and it probably really is a neo-noir if you define neo-noir fairly loosely.

Debra Winger is Alexandra and she’s a Fed. She’s become intrigued by two cases of older very rich men with much younger wives. The two men both died suddenly apparently from a very very rare medical condition. It’s a real medical condition but its rarity makes the coincidence seem just a little odd. The autopsies offer no indications of foul play.

It strikes Alexandra that the two wives looked rather similar. In fact, very similar.

Then another older very rich man with a much younger wife dies suddenly. There are various other odd similarities between all three cases.

Alexandra is convinced that the three wives are all the same woman and that she has now murdered three husbands. Her superior officer thinks she’s go a bee in her bonnet about nothing. The three men appeared to have died of natural causes. Alexandra has zero evidence to back up her hunch.

The audience knows that Alexandra is right. It’s the same woman, played by Theresa Russell. Her real identity is elusive. Her name might be Catherine. For the sake of convenience I’ll refer to her as Catherine.

Alexandra pursues the case obsessively.

At first it’s a hunt. Finding the mystery woman isn’t particularly difficult. She’s now in Hawaii. Alexandra does after all have all the resources of the Justice department behind her. But finding the woman doesn’t help. There is still no actual evidence. It now becomes a cat-and-mouse game. Alexandra is the cat, Catherine is the mouse. It is of course possible that the mouse has teeth, and in such cases it can become unclear as to who is hunting whom.

One criticism levelled at this movie is that the audience knows too much too early but that’s standard suspense movie technique. This is a case where the detective also knows a great deal early on. But knowing the identity of the killer is irrelevant. Alexandra has to find proof. The interest in this movie is provided by the battle of wits between Alexandra and Catherine. Catherine is a very very clever murderess. But Alexandra is a very good very determined cop.

The other major point of interest is motivation. The first murder made Catherine a very rich woman. She has more money than she could spend in a dozen lifetimes. But she keeps killing. Alexandra would like to know why.

In Hawaii some major plot twists kick in and naturally I’m not going to give any hints about them.

There are some interesting supporting players. Nicol Williamson and Dennis Hopper are very good but the only characters who matter are the two women. Debra Winger is excellent but this movie belongs to Theresa Russell. She has the more showy more ambiguous more mysterious and more interesting role and she makes the most of it.

She is very sexy in a very classy way. And she’s fascinating and charming. It’s not difficult to see how Catherine has no trouble acquiring husbands.

In my view in a story such as this it’s a mistake to over-explain things. That’s the mistake Hitchcock made in Psycho. It ended up making Norman Bates less interesting and less scary. When we’re offered detailed diagnoses they always come across as unconvincing and contrived. We already had enough clues to form our own conclusions about Norman.

Black Widow does not make that mistake. Catherine might be motivated by greed but there might be something else. On several occasions she reacts in very odd ways, offering tantalising suggestions that she’s more complicated than she appears to be. There are a number of possible motivations. It could be over-compensation for something. It could be sexual. It could be feminine competition. We get vague hints, which allows us to amuse ourselves by speculating on the basis of those shadowy hints.

What really allows Theresa Russell to display her acting chops to the full is that she is playing the role of a woman who is herself playing various roles. To snare each husband she must adopt a different persona. We cannot be sure that we ever see the real Catherine. Maybe there no longer is a real Catherine.

To make things even more interesting, Alexandra has gone undercover. So she is playing a part as well. There are so many layers of ambiguity and role-playing in this movie and it’s possible that both women have become captives of the roles they’re playing. And the dynamic between these two women is fiendishly complex and Ron Bass’s screenplay avoids the more obvious pitfalls.

What’s even better is that Catherine displays occasional signs of vulnerability and she doesn’t seem as emotionally blank as you might expect from a ruthless murderess. When Catherine cries we almost believe that her emotion is real. And it’s possible that she almost believes it herself. Maybe it is real. Maybe there is real pain there. The fact that we don’t get a detailed diagnosis makes this the most interesting aspect to the film. She’s femme fatale but a complicated one.

The part is a gift for a great actress and Theresa Russell is a great actress and she’s at the top of her game here.

Another strength of the movie is that Alexandra is not one of those female characters who could just as easily have been male. She is obsessed by this case because she knows that this is a killer that only a woman can catch, because only a woman knows what another woman is capable of.

Black Widow is a superb thriller. Very highly recommended.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964)

Paramount’s Robinson Crusoe on Mars is an offbeat science fiction movie from 1964. Cinematic science fiction in the pre-2001 era was remarkably varied. This movie really is an adaptation (albeit a pretty loose one) of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe.

An American spaceship reaches Mars where it has an unfortunate encounter with a meteorite. The two crew members, Colonel Dan McReady (Adam West) and Commander Christopher Draper (Paul Mantee), eject in their escape pods. Draper reaches the planet’s surface safely but McReady doesn’t make it. Draper is now stranded all alone on Mars. Well not quite all alone. Mona survived as well. Mona is the ship’s monkey.

Draper is an awkward fix. Even assuming that a rescue mission could find him it could take months or years for such a mission to be organised and he has no way of contacting Earth. He has enough water for two weeks but that won’t help him since he has enough air for just 60 hours. He’s doomed.

Of course we know he can’t really be doomed because in that case the movie would have a running time of about twenty minutes.

The movie’s solution to the air problem is ingenious and original.

His water supply problem is solved by Mona. She is pretty much the brains of the outfit.

Draper is only able to remain reasonably sane by talking to Mona. He talks a lot. Maybe there’s just a bit too much talking in this movie.

And then the evil spaceships arrive, bent on destruction. And he meets Friday (Victor Lundin). Friday is a slave who has escaped from the evil aliens. Solving the communication problem with Friday takes quite a while but it’s eventually solved and they become friends and allies. Luckily Mona likes Friday.

Draper, Friday and Mona set out on a trek for the polar ice cap but the attacks by the aliens continue. It becomes a battle for survival.

An interesting aspect to this movie is how much is left unexplained. Friday’s people have been enslaved by the evil aliens but where do Friday’s people come from and how did they come to be enslaved? Friday appears to be completely human but he’s certainly not from our solar system. The movie makes the interesting choice not to make Friday’s people native Martians. Perhaps by 1964 the notion of Mars having a native population was no longer considered plausible.

Where do the evil aliens come from? How alien are they are? What do they want? They appear to be conducting mining operations on Mars but we’re not given any details. Are they humanoid?

This unexplained elements are so glaring that one has to assume that this was a deliberate choice. The emphasis is on the the battle for survival of Draper’s party and the growing comradeship between Draper and Friday. Perhaps it was felt that too much focus on the evil aliens would make it a totally different kind of story - a fairly conventional space opera.

Friday is a mysterious figure, he is very taciturn and he never learn to speak more than rudimentary English so it’s hard to judge Victor Lundin’s performance.

Paul Mantee is OK but given that Draper is the only character we get to know at all the part really needed an actor with a lot more charisma. I can’t help thinking that this is the sort of part that would really have suited Charlton Heston but they probably couldn’t afford him.

Mona the monkey walks off with the acting honours - she should have had a better career!

The special effects are disappointing. Within a few short years 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes would raise the bar dramatically when it comes to science fiction movie visuals. Even by 1964 standards the spaceships seem hopelessly unconvincing and the visuals just don’t stand out. Given the state of knowledge about the surface of Mars in 1964 they’re not wildly unrealistic but they just don’t dazzle.

The movie was directed by Byron Haskin, a fine director with a good track record in both the science fiction and adventure genres including the superb The Naked Jungle (1954) and the brilliant 1953 The War of the Worlds.

The screenplay was co-written by Ib Melchior was scripted some wild crazy sci-fi movies such as Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962) and The Angry Red Planet (1959) and course Reptilicus (1961).

Robinson Crusoe on Mars failed to excite movie audiences and it was a flop. Its main problem was probably that it needed a substantially bigger budget.

It’s a slightly oddball movie and while it’s not a complete success it’s worth a look as an example of the sheer variety of pre-Star Wars science fiction.

Lilith (1964)

Lilith, released in 1964 and written, produced and directed by Robert Rossen, is one of those movies that has fallen through the cracks. Despite being extremely interesting it doesn’t attract much attention. That might partly be because it’s difficult to classify. It’s set in a mental hospital but it’s not a Social Problem Movie and it doesn’t have a political axe to grind. It’s not a horror movie and it’s not a psychological thriller. It is a romance, of sorts.

After leaving the army Vincent Bruce (Warren Beatty) returns to his home town and gets a job in the Poplar Lodge mental hospital. He is a trainee occupational therapist. Vincent has a reasonable degree of self-awareness. He knows that people attracted to this sort of work often have some personal motivation. In his case it has to do with a family member.

Vincent has a flair for the job and he’s keen. It looks like he’s going to do very well.

This is not a state hospital. This is an exclusive private clinic. The families of the patients pay huge amounts of money to have their loved loved ones cared for there. There are no high walls, no locked wards and there’s almost no security. The patients are high-functioning schizophrenics. They’re crazy but harmless.

The problem for Vincent is Lilith (Jean Seberg). She’s a patient. She’s very high-functioning, or at least she appears to be. She can give the impression of being a perfectly normal bright cheerful vivacious young woman. She is however entirely disconnected from reality. She is also intelligent and manipulative and very pretty. And very crazy.

Vincent isn’t stupid. He knows she is trying to seduce him. He knows this is a dangerous situation. But he’s inexperienced. And she’s so cute and adorable. He knows he can fix her. His love can fix her.

He really does believe that he is reaching her. There are warning signs which he ignores.

A complication is Stephen Evshevsky (Peter Fonda). He’s a patient too. He’s very neurotic, understands nothing about women and is hopelessly in love with Lilith.

There’s another female patient who adds another complication to the situation.

We know this is all probably not going to end well but this is not a horror movie or a psychological thriller so if and when disaster strikes it won’t necessarily involve violence and mayhem.

Lilith pleased neither critics nor the public on its release and is now totally forgotten. It’s just not even close to being a typical mainstream Hollywood movie. It’s an eccentric arthouse movie that feels very European. It’s a movie about people who are detached from reality and that’s how the movie feels. There’s no firm reality to grab hold of. It flirts with realism and then veers into full-blown surrealism. And even the moments of realism have a disturbing not-real edge. Lilith thinks that people keep lying to her. She doesn’t trust anything that anyone says to her. Vincent doesn’t trust anything that Lilith says to him. And we can’t trust anything we see in this movie. Which is not a flaw in the movie.

But it is the sort of thing that was always going to alienate mainstream critics and audiences.

And as the story unfolds reality becomes more and more shadowy and unreal.

And while it deals with a woman who is mad it does not approach this subject in a manner that would be approved by feminist orthodoxy. Its lack of interest in ideological axe-grinding is certainly the reason it continues to be ignored.

It’s a movie that is interested in the mechanics of madness - the way reality just keeps slipping away and the ways in which truth gets confused with lies and lies get mistaken for truth. We cannot trust what we see and we cannot trust our emotions.

In this movie there is certainly a link between madness and sex but again this is not handled in a politically correct manner.

And it has the sort of ending guaranteed to further exasperate mainstream viewers.

Seberg considered this to be her best performance. She really is both dazzling and very very unsettling. Warren Beatty is excellent, giving a performance in which his habitual self-confidence is inexorably eroded. It’s a subtle complex performance. I have never liked Peter Fonda as an actor but in this film he’s delightfully neurotic.

It’s amusing that some reviewers complain that the movie is muddled and implausible. It’s a movie about insanity! We are seeing everything from the point of view of characters whose grip on reality is so tenuous as to be virtually non-existent. By the time you get to the ending you understand why nothing you have seen quite adds up.

It’s also incredibly amusing that some reviewers think it’s unrealistic that a metal hospital would be run in such an unprofessional way. These dear sweet innocent children have clearly never had any dealings with actual mental hospitals.

Lilith is a superb movie, daringly out of step with mainstream tastes at the time and still awaiting intelligent re-evaluation. Very highly recommended.

I've also reviewed the source novel, J.R. Salamanca's Lilith.

Madame Bovary (1949)

Madame Bovary is a 1949 MGM adaptation, directed by Vincente Minnelli, of Gustave Flaubert’s 1857 novel.

Despite the Production Code Hollywood was well aware that what audiences wanted was sex and sin. They could not offer them those things so they perfected the art of the tease. In this case they’ve even added a framing story covering Flaubert’s trial for obscenity. This is a movie based on a novel so wicked that even in France it was labeled obscene! That’s a surefire way to get bums on seats.

There’s also voiceover narration supposedly by Flaubert. Along with the framing story this has an odd distancing effect since he is not telling us about something that happened, but merely about imaginary events from his novel. The framing story is a disastrously stupid idea, making the audience feel less involved and less interested.

With Madame Bovary the problem was just how far could the tease go without arousing the ire of the Production Code Authority? Unless certain things are made clear (namely the heroine’s adultery) the story won’t make sense, but they have to be made clear without being brought right out into the open. In this case a discarded hat tells us that hanky-panky has taken place.

This is the story of Emma (Jennifer Jones), who marries a humble country doctor, Charles Bovary (Van Heflin). Emma has spent her girlhood immersed in a world of dreams - dreams of adventure, excitement and romance. She does not cope well with the reality of life as the wife of an obscure village doctor.

She has a serious flirtation with a young law clerk. Things get more dangerous when she and her husband are invited to the Marquis D’Andervilliers’ ball. She meets Rodolphe Boulanger (Louis Jourdan). He is impossibly dashing and handsome. He is the dream lover she always wanted.

The ball is an opportunity for Minnelli to give us a bit of a master class in film directing. Couples are whirling on the dance floor. Emma and Rodolphe are whirling, whirling, whirling. Emma doesn’t know it but her life is now whirling as well, like a mad dance. It gets more and frenzied and then there are the windows - I won’t spoil it by telling you what happens with the windows but it’s a brilliant moment of madness. This is a ball from a nightmare and it’s the highlight of the movie.

If you’re going to do a melodrama you must not hold back. You have to go for broke. Minnelli knew this.

Jennifer Jones also knew this (as anyone who has seen Duel in the Sun can attest). So did Louis Jourdan. And Van Heflin is absolutely perfectly cast as the bewildered husband.

Emma Bovary is certainly a very bad girl. Her husband cannot sweep her off her feet and she needs to be swept off her feet but he is a good man and a good husband. There are no mitigating circumstances there for her betrayal. And we must be sceptical as to whether he loves Rodolphe - she is in love with a dream and with the dream life she thinks he can offer her. There are lots of mirror shots, suggesting that Emma is somehow outside of real life. Which she is. She is in her fairy tale world of dashing princes.

The Emma Bovary of this movie is not a femme fatale. She’s not clever enough or focused enough. She gets herself into trouble not so much through scheming and duplicity but rather through recklessness and stupidity. She has the mind of a naïve selfish little girl but the sexual allure of a very grown-up temptress. All her schemes are childish. She is doomed by her inability to understand that fairy tales and romantic fantasies lead to disaster when they run up against reality.

It was presumably the Production Code that led to the decision to make Emma a woman driven by greed rather than lust. It’s a movie that needed to be a bit more sleazy but MGM obviously were not prepared to take such a risk.

My big issue is that the character of Rodolphe doesn’t ring true, and the Emma-Rodolphe relationship doesn’t ring true. I can’t help suspecting that changes had to be made to the script and that this might have cued the problems. Unfortunately it mens that a crucial late scene comes across as odd and puzzling.

The film was a major box-office flop and it has never been deemed worthy of critical reevaluation. It’s a flawed but interesting melodrama, better than its reputation would suggest. Recommended.

Written on the Wind (1956)

Written on the Wind is my favourite of the 1950s Douglas Sirk melodramas and in this one the melodrama is as overcooked as any fan could desire.

Lucy Moore (Lauren Bacall) is a classy sophisticated glamorous woman who meets two men. One is Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack), the son of oil tycoon Jasper Hadley. Kyle will one day be one of the world’s richest men. The other is Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson). Mitch is Kyle’s best friend and works for him. Mitch falls for Lucy but Kyle is determined to make her his. Mitch backs off - big mistake.

We quickly learn about these two men. Kyle is extremely rich but he’s a loser. He always has been. He’s never actually been any good at anything. That’s because he’s a lazy, irresponsible, self-indulgent drunk. Mitch is good at everything because he’s responsible, hard-working, smart and sober. Kyle is rich and Mitch is just an employee but Kyle has always been jealous of Mitch. And he knows that his father would have preferred to have Mitch as a son.

Kyle makes a crude attempt to buy Lucy. She is outraged and lets him know that she’s not that sort of girl. But she marries him anyway. She’s in love with him. Maybe she thinks she can fix him. Whether those oil billions helped her to fall in love with him is something that might occur to some viewers.

Mitch has been noble but he can’t stop loving Lucy.

There’s an extra complication and it’s a big one - Kyle’s kid sister Marylee Hadley (Dorothy Malone). She has always been in love with Mitch, but Mitch, Kyle and Marylee were all brought up together and Mitch still thinks of Marylee as a kid sister.

Marylee decided long ago that if she couldn’t have Mitch she would get her revenge by letting every man in the town have her. She’s the town tramp.

Then the marriage between Kyle and Lucy hits an unexpected snag and the emotional meltdowns begin. 

Rock Hudson is good but he has the most thankless role - Mitch is a more or less functional stable grown-up human being which doesn’t give Hudson much scope for bravura acting. 

Lauren Bacall has a tricky role. Lucy doesn’t have obvious characters flaws except that her decision to marry Kyle was a spectacular error of judgment. Lucy is perhaps just a bit underwritten - we’d like to know more about her motivations. Did she marry Kyle out of pity? Did she have visions of saving him? These things are at least hinted at.

You can if you want to see this movie as a critique of capitalism but if you do you’ll miss all the most interesting things about it. There are a few obvious swipes at obsessions with respectability but they’re not very interesting. What makes this movie great is the full-blown melodrama with all the emotions and interpersonal conflicts and character flaws exaggerated to an extreme degree.

Kyle’s self-pity is on an epic scale and clearly indicates a massive lack of confidence in his masculinity. Early on we see him provoke a fistfight and he loses and it’s obviously just the latest in a series of fights that he’s lost. His crude attempt to impress Lucy with his wealth is another sign of his insecurity about his masculinity. He doesn’t think he can win a glamorous sophisticated classy woman like Lucy without flaunting his wealth. After a year of marriage he finds out that Lucy hasn’t yet fallen pregnant because he has a low sperm count. He naturally assumes that this means he isn’t satisfying her sexually when in fact it’s obvious that she finds him a totally satisfying husband in every way. He wasn’t impotent but now he has undoubtedly talked himself into actually being impotent. His self-pity takes off into the stratosphere. This allows Robert Stack to overact outrageously and he does.

Marylee has a similar problem. She has spent years unsuccessfully trying to seduce Mitch  but it’s a no-go so she feels inadequate as a woman. Giving herself to countless losers she picks up in bars just makes her feel even more inadequate as a woman. Her nymphomania is on a scale that could keep a whole team of psychiatrists busy.

She is the catalyst for the major disasters. She’s a bad girl and a wild girl but as we discover at a crucial moment, not truly evil. She’s in her mid 30s but she’s still just a little girl. She wants Mitch and if she can’t have him she’s like a little girl whose daddy won’t buy her a pony. Her manipulativeness is childish and obvious. But she knows how to use sex as a weapon, and the family fear of scandal. Dorothy Malone dominates this movie. Malone overacts outrageously and deliciously. This is an actress who knows how to do melodrama.

I love melodrama for many of the same reasons I love film noir. They don’t depict reality but a heightened exaggerated version of reality. The shadows in film noir are deeper than the ones in real life, the nights are darker, the punks are lousier, the dames are more rotten and the greed and lust are more extreme and the sense of doom is more palpable. It’s an artificial world.


And melodrama exists in an artificial world. This is especially so of Sirkian melodrama. In Written on the Wind the rich are super-rich. They live in huge mansions. When Kyle wants to impress Lucy he turns her hotel room into what looks like a seraglio. Mitch is impossibly handsome. No real person could could collapse into a state of self-pitying hysteria to the extent that Kyle does. No real woman could be as much of a clichéd cheap tramp as Marylee. The characters’ emotional responses are insanely excessive. Everything is absurdly overheated. Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone chew scenery the way you’ve never seen scenery chewed. Even the cars are ludicrously wild - Kyle’s 1953 Allard J2X and Marylee’s 1955 Woodill Wildfire look like cars that comic-book characters would drive. Sirk uses matte paintings and he wants them to look like matte paintings. We have left the real world and entered Melodrama World.

If you’re looking for messages here you’re missing the point. Any messages in this movie are embarrassingly trite. It’s the style and the overblown quality and the sheer glorious excessiveness that matter. They are the content. They’re all the content it needs to make it a masterpiece.

Written on the Wind is very highly recommended.

Internal Affairs (1990)

Internal Affairs is a 1990 neo-noir which had enormous potential but suffers from some flaws and some clumsy writing.

Raymond Avilla (Andy Garcia) is a cop who has just been assigned to IAD (Internal Affairs). He’s going to be partnered with Amy Wallace (Laurie Metcalf). They’re investigating an officer, Van Stretch (William Baldwin), who is clearly an out-of-control coke addict.

The two IAD cops begin to suspect that the cop they should be investigating is Dennis Peck (Richard Gere). He seems to be the spider at the centre of a web of corruption.

Usually a cop under investigation by IAD has the odds stacked against him but Peck is not only crooked he’s also smart and ruthless. And Raymond Avilla is as dumb as a rock.

Avilla and Wallace have plenty of evidence against Stretch but what they want is for him to testify against Peck in return for immunity. Stretch won’t do it.

Their case is going nowhere which seems strange since they have a mountain of evidence against Peck and that’s one of the movie’s implausibilities.

The IAD cops slowly become aware that Peck may be involved in murder as well as corruption. There’s a link to Steven and Tova Arrocas and a hit that he may have organised for them.

There are plot twists which rely heavily on Avilla’s stupidity - his inability to predict that Peck’s actions even when it’s obvious what he is likely to do.

There’s not just a battle of wills but a battle of nerves between Avilla and Peck. Peck has the edge because he’s a whole lot smarter.

The IAD cops hope to get useful information from Stretch’s wife and her refusal to co-operate is another case of the IAD cops missing something very obvious.

Peck is playing mind games with Avilla, trying to convince Avilla that his wife is being unfaithful.

This is one of those cop thrillers in which the cop hero’s family gets caught up in the action.

The problem is come crude ideological messaging. Every male character is either evil or stupid. The straight female characters are all helpless victims of Evil Men. The only good person in the entire story is Amy Wallace and she’s a lesbian. It’s taken for granted that she is therefore virtuous and wise and brave and noble. Unfortunately she is so perfect that she ends up having no personality at all.

Peck’s character is established as cold, calculating, smart and ruthless but then towards the end he starts doing out-of-character stupid things, mainly because that’s the only way to set up the very contrived ending.

There are however some really interesting aspects to the story. Apart from Peck there are three significant male characters, Steven Arrocas, Van Stretch and Raymond Avilla. All three are sexually inadequate. It is clear that they are incapable of satisfying their wives sexually. What’s interesting is that their sexual inadequacy seems to be linked to moral weakness and a general inability to take charge of their lives. And all three are aware that Denis Peck’s claims that he could satisfy their wives sexually are well-founded. Whatever moral failings he may have it’s clear that Peck does not lack sexual potency.

And while the idea that if a wife isn’t sexually satisfied by her husband she will go looking for a man who can satisfy her might be cynical it’s something that has been known to happen.

Peck is able to taunt Raymond Avilla and convince him that his wife Kathleen is playing around behind his back, with Peck. The taunts hit home because Raymond knows they’re plausible. Raymond’s sexual inadequacy makes him vulnerable and that vulnerability makes him a less effective cop.

And the three sexually inadequate men are rather creepy. Peck might be evil but he isn’t creepy and pathetic.

The casting is significant. John Kapelos as Steven Arrocas is a loser trying to be a big man but still living in his father’s shadow. William Baldwin as Van Stretch is a neurotic contemptible mess whose violence comes from weakness. Baldwin makes him slimy and clammy. Andy Garcia plays Raymond Avilla as a man afflicted by doubts and self-pity. These are weak men played by actors who effectively capture the characters’ essential weakness.

By contrast Richard Gere as Peck exudes confidence and charisma and has women lining up to sleep with him. He’s the total alpha male.

Internal Affairs has some real problems but it is perhaps more interesting than it set out to to be. Recommended.

La Femme et Le Pantin (1958)

Julien Duvivier’s La femme et le pantin was an adaptation of the 1898 novel of the same name by Pierre Louÿs (translated into English as The Woman and the Puppet). The novel is one of the masterpieces of decadent fiction. Duvivier’s film has had several English titles including The Female and A Woman Like Satan.

The novel was filmed by Josef von Sternberg in 1935 as The Devil is a Woman with Marlene Dietrich starring. It’s one of the greatest movies ever made (I’d put it in the top five) so attempting another adaptation was extraordinarily bold. And while Brigitte Bardot is an excellent actress there’s no way anyone could ever surpass Dietrich’s performance. The von Sternberg movie, like all his important movies, is a flamboyant and brilliant exercise in style.

In passing it’s worth noting that The Devil is a Woman was released in France as La femme et le pantin.

Eva Marchand (Brigitte Bardot) is a young French girl living in Seville in Spain with her father. He is a once-famous novelist with a slightly shameful past and he is now more or less in exile.

Eva is a dancer and a good one. She could earn good money if she accepted the offer to work in the nightclub owned by Arabadjian (Darío Moreno), especially if she worked upstairs where the girls do the erotic dancing. The problem is that Eva is a virgin and Arabadjian doesn’t employ virgins.

Eva has a boyfriend, Albert. Or at least that’s what Albert imagines, and he assumes that she will marry him, but it’s mostly wishful thinking.

Then she meets Don Matteo Diaz (Antonio Vilar). He is very aristocratic and very rich. He’s also married. That’s no obstacle - Don Matteo’s wife Maria Teresa (Espanita Cortez) allows him to have affairs. Her only concern in this case is that Eva might hurt him.

Eva is, as I have said, a virgin. He has indicated to Albert that she will lo him to take her virginity, but only if he’s a very very good boy. She makes the same offer to Don Mateo. Albert allows her to toy with him because he’s a nonentity. Don Mateo is however a proud caballero and it’s surprising that he allows her to string him along but he is obsessed and he is prepared to allow her to humiliate him.

Of course sooner or later the crisis will come.

We have to decide if Eva has any actual feelings for either man or whether she’s just enjoying playing them both for fools. The title obviously suggests that we’re supposed to see her as a scheming puppeteer.

My problem was that having seen von Sternberg’s movie multiple times it was almost impossible not to make comparisons. While I have a great admiration for Bardot (and anyone who thinks she wasn’t a fine serious actress hasn’t seen her in La Vérité) it has to be admitted that Dietrich had the ability to project feminine cruelty, and feminine pleasure in cruelty, in a way that Bardot can’t quite match.

Bardot was a different kind of actress and she’s playing the role her way. She’s enjoyable to watch but she fails to nail the character the way Dietrich did.

I think that the contemporary setting was a mistake. The proud caballero Don Mateo doesn’t feel quite at home in the late 1950s and the extent of his humiliation might have has more impact in an earlier time setting. And many of Eva’s games involve dangling the prospect of taking her virginity in front of both men as if it’s a treat for a well-behaved puppy. This doesn’t quite fly in 1958.

Duvivier can’t match von Sternberg’s visual tour-de-force but it is a gorgeous movie shot in sumptuous colour. And the brawl scene is superb, with the camera rocking back and forth as if it’s caught in the middle of the flying fists.

There are some unnecessary and distracting subplots that just go nowhere, especially the one concerning Eva’s father.

What we have here is a talented director, but he’s the wrong director for this movie. And a very talented lead actress, but she’s the wrong actress for this movie. I can’t help thinking that Roger Vadim might have had a better feel for the material. And maybe this is a crazy idea but it might have been been better done a few years later with Jane Fonda. Her French was sufficiently fluent to allow her to act in that language without any problems and she might have added just a bit more of an edge.

This movie doesn’t quite come off and watching it just convinced me even more of the genius of von Sternberg and Dietrich.