Night Watch (1973)

Night Watch has the distinction of being the only horror movie Elizabeth Taylor made. And this 1973 British production is a reasonably successful effort.

It follows the psychological horror formula that had become familiar in the early 60s, in movies like Hammer’s psycho-thrillers of that era. But Night Watch adds a few new twists of its own.

Elizabeth Taylor is Ellen Wheeler. She is married to investment consultant John Wheeler (Laurence Harvey) although she is apparently wealthy in her own right. The marriage seems happy enough. John works fairly long hours but Ellen has her friend Sarah Cooke (Billie Whitelaw) to keep her company. Ellen is somewhat disapproving of Sarah’s mysterious affair with a married man. on the whole these seem like reasonably normal upper middle-class people. Until one night, in the middle of a severe storm, Ellen sees something in the window of the deserted house next door.

Ellen is sure she saw a murdered man with his throat cut. It was jut a glimpse as the shutters briefly blew open before blowing closed again but Ellen is convinced that she did indeed see a murdered man. The police are called but a search of the deserted house reveals nothing unusual or sinister. John is inclined to think that Ellen let her imagination play tricks on her, and the police share his view.

Ellen lost her first husband Carl in a car accident some years earlier. We do not find out the circumstances of the accident until late in the picture but Ellen has clearly never quite recovered from this tragedy.

Shortly afterwards Ellen sees another body in the derelict house, this time a woman’s body. The police are called again and again they find nothing. Ellen becomes increasingly distraught and John, by this time very concerned, calls in his psychiatrist friend tony (Tony Britton) to take a look at Ellen.

Ellen refuses to be shaken in her belief that she really did see those bodies. She is so persistent that they even dig up her neighbour Mr Appleby’s flower beds but they can still find absolutely no evidence to support Ellen’s story. Ellen rings Inspector Walker (Bill Dean) so many times that the police dismiss her as a harmless crank and no longer bother to respond to her phone calls. On Tony’s advice Ellen eventually agrees to admit herself to a private clinic in Switzerland but before she takes that plane flight the story reaches its climax.

As you might expect Elizabeth Taylor gives a wonderfully over-the-top performance. Taylor was never afraid to push her acting to extremes that would have been ridiculously histrionic in any other actress, but she was always able to get away with it. And she gets away with it here. Her performance is the key to the film’s success and she delivers the goods.

Laurence Harvey and Billie Whitelaw provide fine support. Robert Lang is amusing as Mr Appleby, a man who seems both absurd and vaguely sinister.

Brian G. Hutton directed only a handful of movies although these included another rather outrageous and very entertaining Elizabeth Taylor vehicle, Zee and Co (released in the US as X, Y and Zee). He does a very capable job with Night Watch. Screenwriter Tony Williamson had a prolific carer in British television, writing episodes for just about every crime/adventure series of the 60s and 70s. Twisted little stories were something he was very good at and his screenplay is economical and effective.

This movie has been released in the Warner Archive made-on-demand DVD series, in an excellent anamorphic transfer.

Night Watch is a fine example of the British psychological horror thriller and Elizabeth Taylor’s performance in her only horror outing is certainly an added inducement. Taylor proves that she can do horror very well indeed.

Shampoo (1975)

Shampoo is a 1975 sex comedy which was something of a personal project for Warren Beatty. He came up with the idea, he co-wrote the script with Robert Towne and he produced. It was a huge box-office hit. It’s intriguingly untypical of 1970s Hollywood movies, with definite hints of a European sensibility.

Right from the start the pacing is frenetic and the plotting is chaotic. But that’s intentional. It reflects the complete chaos of the life of the protagonist, George (Warren Beatty).

George is a very fashionable Beverly Hills hairdresser. Despite being a hairdresser he is very interested in women. Maybe too interested for his own good.

His ambition is to have his own beauty salon. He’s an excellent hairdresser and would have no difficulty attracting clients. Every rich fashionable woman in L.A. wants her hair done by George. The problem is that George is thirty-five going on sixteen. There’s no way he is responsible enough to have his own business. But self-awareness is not George’s strong suit.

His biggest problem is juggling all his women. He is currently sleeping with quite a few women. In fact lots of women.

He has a cute girlfriend Jill (Goldie Hawn). He’s also sleeping with a rich client, Felicia (Lee Grant). Felicia thinks she can persuade her rich tycoon husband Lester (Jack Warden) to advance George the money to open his own beauty shop. Fortunately Lester doesn’t know that George is sleeping with his wife.

Lester has a glamorous mistress, Jackie (Julie Christie. Fortunately Lester doesn’t know that Jackie is George’s ex-girlfriend. It’s even more fortunate that Lester doesn’t know that George is still sleeping with Jackie. It’s also probably lucky that Lester doesn’t know that George is sleeping with his daughter Lorna (Carrie Fisher). Felicia knows, and it seems to excite her.

George is so self-absorbed that he has no idea that he is self-absorbed. He knows his life is over-complicated but it’s never occurred to him that this may be his own fault. He is good-looking but he is so charmless and selfish that you wonder why women are attracted to him. Perhaps it’s the bad boy thing. Or the irresponsible naughty boy thing. Or they think they can change him.

This is the world of the rich and vacuous in L.A., decadent shallow people living shallow meaningless lives with enough money to shelter them from reality.

The movie begins on November 4, 1968, the day before the election that swept Nixon into office. There is presumably some political satire intended but what’s interesting is that it’s the achingly liberal wealthy middle-class elites who are being satirised. This is a Hollywood movie savaging the middle class rather than the working class or rural Americans who were usually Hollywood’s favoured targets.

But this is not really a political movie. It’s a social and sexual satire, and a social and sexual melodrama. It’s an intelligent sophisticated sex comedy. And as social and sexual satire it has real bite.

What Shampoo really takes aim at is deception. It’s not the sexual promiscuity of the various characters that does the damage, it’s the lies they tell.

Jack Warden pretty much steals the picture but Warren Beatty is very impressive. George is not an admirable person but Beatty brings him to life. We may still not like George but we start to see what makes him tick. Julie Christie and Goldie Hawn are excellent.

At the time Shampoo got an X rating. There’s some mild nudity and some mildly graphic simulated sex but mostly it got the X rating because it’s a very grown-up movie. It deals with grown-up subject matter in a grown-up way.

Even though it’s a product of mainstream Hollywood this movie has more of an affinity with sophisticated European sex comedies such as Pasquale Festa Campanile’s The Libertine (1968) than with the general run of mainstream Hollywood movies. Shampoo was a very unusual Hollywood movie at the time and it’s still unusual. It takes sexual relationships seriously and it dissects them mercilessly. But with sensitivity. These are people with chaotic personal lives. They play emotional and sexual games and they forget that people, both men and women, can get hurt.

Shampoo is also very funny.

The Criterion Blu-Ray looks good and includes a very good interview with Warren Beatty.

Night Moves (1975)

Night Moves is a 1975 private eye thriller. Whether it qualifies as a neo-noir remains to be seen but that label has been affixed to it at times.

Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) is a down-at-heel private eye. He’s not at the bottom of his profession but he’s a long way from the top. He gets by. He has a cute wife. He’s not what you would call a loser.

Or maybe it would be truer to say that he’s not a loser yet, but the potential is there.

He’s been hired by a faded middle-aged former starlet to find her missing teenaged daughter Delly (Melanie Griffith). Arlene Iverson (Janet Ward) was never more than a minor starlet. It’s clear that she was one of those Hollywood actresses who gave her best performances on the casting couch. She married a producer. More husbands followed.

Harry has troubles of his own. One of the disadvantages of being a private eye is that you notice things that you’d be better off not noticing and and you make connections you’d be better off not making. For example if your wife is having an affair you’re going to know about it. And Harry’s wife is definitely having an affair.

Harry is not at all happy about this. Harry is a guy who seems a bit on edge at the best of times. A bit inclined to fly off the handle.

Harry thinks he has a lead on the missing girl. She might be with her stepfather Tom Iverson (John Crawford) in Florida. He flies down to Florida. Tom has left the rat race. He does some charter boat and charter plane stuff. He’s really a glorified beach bum. He lives with his ex-hooker girlfriend Paula.

Delly is indeed there. She does not want to return to her mother whom she hates.

Delly looks like Miss Junior Femme Fatale 1975. She’s a nice girl but she’s wild and she’s far from innocent.

Then comes a plot twist right out of left field. Delly is doing some skin diving and finds a wrecked plane. With a body in it. Of course that has nothing to do with the case. It was obviously an accidental plane crash and there are plenty of light plane crashes.

The case is now solved. Harry can return to California. Maybe he can patch up his marriage. Perhaps he should give up the private eye business. He’s 40 and maybe his life needs to change direction. He needs to think. Then he receives a cryptic communication from Delly. And a piece of information about her. And yet another piece of information that suggests some interesting connections. Harry may be thinking of giving the game away but he still thinks like a private eye. Give him a puzzle and he’ll try to solve it. Especially if it involves someone of whom he is fond. Not a lover, just someone for whom he developed an odd affection. This case is not over after all.

I don’t think this is a neo-noir at all. It has some dark moments but a neo-noir requires more than that. It requires specific ingredients. Those ingredients are lacking here. Harry does not fit the mould of a noir protagonist.

There are four women all of whom could be dangerous but not one of them is a classic femme fatale. The first is disqualified because she’s so obvious that even the dumbest schmuck could see through her. The second is just selfish and shallow. The third has some femme fatale tendencies but Harry does not get seriously involved with her which disqualifies her as a femme fatale. The fourth has very definite femme fatale potential but Harry doesn’t get involved with her in any way, either emotionally or sexually. This movie is not structured like a neo-noir. It does not have a plot driven by lust. In fact the plot isn’t driven by anything in particular. There’s no obsessiveness. It’s just a PI who gets stubborn when faced by a puzzling case. The kind of plot you’d expect in a very average crime thriller.

It also lacks a neo-noir feel. The feel is more like a two-part episode of one of the popular TV PI series of the day such as Mannix or Harry O. Night Moves has no particular visual style. I don’t even see it as an homage to the great PI movies of the 40s. Night Moves is very very 70s, but not in a really interesting way.

All of the female characters are underwritten and Harry’s relationships with them are entirely undeveloped.

I have to be honest and state that I’ve seen three Arthur Penn movies and I’ve disliked all of them. I’m also not the biggest Gene Hackman fan. He’s appropriately cast here and he’s competent but no more. The best performance here comes from Melanie Griffith in her film debut. It’s a tricky role. She has to make Delly bratty, but not too bratty. She does a fine job. She actually understands subtlety.

Night Moves is nothing special, just a reasonably entertaining very straightforward PI thriller. A harmless time-killer. Worth a look but I wouldn’t make a huge effort to seek it out.

Saturday Night Fever (1977)

I avoided Saturday Night Fever for years, assuming it was going to be a syrupy teen musical. That turned out to be a spectacularly wrong assumption. Saturday Night Fever is so far removed from that that it’s in a whole other galaxy. This is a grim, gritty, deeply pessimistic deep dive into despair, futility, alienation and nihilism.

Tony Manero (John Travolta) works in a hardware store. On weekends he goes to the 2001 disco. He’s the king of the dance floor there. But 2001 isn’t a glamorous night spot where you’ll run into A-list celebrities. It’s a third-rate dive in Brooklyn. It’s cheap and it’s tacky.

And Tony doesn’t have dreams of using his dancing as a gateway to fame and fortune. He doesn’t have the imagination for that. He’s a loser.

He hangs out with his buddies. They’re all losers.

He lives with his folks. His dad is a chronically unemployed construction worker. His mom prays all the time. Her only consolation is that Tony’s brother Frank is a priest. He’s almost a god to her.

Tony is hoping to win the dance competition at 2001. This is not exactly a big deal. The prize is a lousy five hundred bucks but that’s the total extent of Tony’s dreams.

He has a dancing partner, Annette (Donna Pescow). She’s madly in love with him. Tony dumps her when he sees Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney) dancing at 2001. He persuades Stephanie to be his new dancing partner.

Tony thinks Stephanie has class. He thinks that because he’s never met a woman with actual class. Stephanie does at least have ambitions but she’s as working class as Tony. Her middle-class affectations are merely absurd and tragic.

Stephanie dreams of success in Manhattan, perhaps in public relations. She probably won’t make it. She didn’t go to the right school, she didn’t go to college, she doesn’t have the right accent. She’s Brooklyn. She will always be Brooklyn. Maybe she will make an OK life for herself but she’s never going to have a penthouse apartment in Manhattan. Maybe she needs to set her sights a bit lower.

Maybe Tony needs to set his sights a bit higher.

The most powerful moment in the movie and the moment when Travolta really nails it is when Tony comes face to face with reality. He works in a hardware store. He’s a moderately good dancer. His chances of making it as a big-time dancer are zero. He’s just not good enough.

Annette needs to figure herself out as well. Her one real ambition is to go to bed with Tony.

This is also a gang movie. Tony’s gang is a bunch of losers and low-rent thugs. They get into fight with other gangs, who are losers as well. The other gang members are possibly even dumber than Tony.

There’s not a single characters in the movie who isn’t contemptible.

The guys treat the women with disrespect but they disrespect everybody and most crucially they have no respect for themselves.

There’s a subplot concerning Tony’s brother who has left the priesthood. It’s entirely pointless, it goes nowhere, it slows the movie and really it should have ended up on the cutting room floor. Subplots that go nowhere simply irritate viewers. It may have been included purely as an anti-Catholic element. The hostility to Catholicism here is pretty virulent.

This film is typical of a certain strand in Hollywood filmmaking - movies in which middle-class intellectuals express their seething hatred for America and for ordinary working-class Americans. It’s no coincidence that screenwriter Norman Wexler was Harvard-educated. Wexler also wrote the screenplay for Serpico, my least favourite 1970s Hollywood film.

This is a movie all about social class and the way different social classes inhabit different universes. Manhattan and Brooklyn are two different universes. Travel between those universes is not possible.

This is not a musical. There is dancing. Tony’s obsession with dancing is a major plot point. But it’s not a musical in the usual sense. There are no real big musical production numbers. The dancing sequences are rather unglamorous. Again, this seems to be a deliberate choice. This a story about Tony trying to figure out why his life is going nowhere, why he feels dissatisfied and empty. And trying to figure out if there is something he can do about it. The dancing really is incidental. Tony could have been a tennis player or a guitarist. It wouldn’t have mattered. What matters is that dancing is an escape from reality for him, and perhaps a way out.

What’s fascinating is that this is a visually very unattractive movie and this is clearly deliberate. Everything is grimy and seedy. You can almost smell the garbage rotting in the streets. There’s not a trace of glamour. There’s nothing glamorous about 2001. It’s just a dive. They have dancing and they have strippers as well. You can almost smell the stale liquor, the tobacco smoke, the sweat and the desperation.

This movie is a product of the New American Cinema and it has the miserable feel and scuzzy look often associated with that movement.

Saturday Night Fever is a deeply unpleasant movie about deeply unpleasant people. That was obviously the intention. It’s a good movie but it ain’t a feelgood movie. Recommended, if you know what to expect.

The Blu-Ray release is fine. I suspect this is a movie that was always supposed to look dark and depressing. The audio commentary by director John Badham isn’t really worth bothering with.

The Last Picture Show (1971)

The Last Picture Show was Peter Bogdanovich’s second feature film and it launched him, briefly, as a superstar director.

This is a coming-of-age movie set in a tiny rapidly declining Texas town named Anarene. It begins in 1951.

Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane Jackson (Jeff Bridges) are about to graduate from high school, along with Sonny’s girl Charlene and Duane’s girl Jacy (Cybill Shepherd). Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson) owns the pool hall, the cafe and movie theatre. There’s nothing else in Anarene worth owning. He’s a kind of mentor to Sonny and Duane.

In Anarene once you graduate from high school life is over. Duane eventually gets a job on an oil rig. That’s the most any male in Anarene can aspire to - well-paid manual labour. The girls have no aspirations. They will drift into marriage with losers.

Except Jacy. She at least has some dim notion that getting the hell out of Anarene would be a good idea. She knows that all she has going for her is that she’s pretty and men want to get into her pants. She’s a wannabe femme fatale but she doesn’t have the imagination to set her sights high enough and she isn’t smart enough and devious enough. She’s aiming to land a guy from Wichita Falls. To Jacy Wichita Falls is the Big City of a girl’s dreams, but the rich folks from Wichita Falls are only marginally less hopeless than the folks of Anarene.

Sonny dumps Charlene because after a year of going steady she won’t even let him put his hand up her skirt. He drifts into a futile affair with the middle-aged (Ruth Popper), the wife of the high school’s football coach. Nothing works out for any of the characters and they all end up more miserable than they were at the start. That’s the movie.

I can see what Bogdanovich is trying to do - showing us the futile squalid lives of losers in a loser town. He certainly succeeds. At times I do however get the feeling that this is one of those movies in which urban intellectuals express their fear and loathing of rural America. I definitely get the feeling that Bogdanovich despises his characters. Perhaps I’m being unfair. Perhaps he was aiming for Tragedy. This could have been a good setup for a film noir but that’s not what Bogdanovich is shooting for. My suspicion is that he’s aiming for an art film.

Bogdanovich has made some aesthetic choices that are clearly very deliberate. It’s not just that the movie is shot in black-and-white. It’s shot in such a way as to drain the life out of everything. The landscape looks like a post nuclear apocalyptic wasteland. Robert Surtees was a great cinematographer so the lifeless feel was obviously not a mistake - it was deliberate.

The town looks like it’s waiting to die. The pool hall, cafe and movie theatre are the social and cultural hubs of the town. There’s nothing else. The pool hall looks completely derelict. The cafe and movie theatre look semi-derelict. The hero drives an ancient beat-up pickup truck.

The boys dress like losers.

The women are all dowdy. Not because they’re unattractive but because they have allowed themselves to look dowdy. They look defeated. Even Jacy, the closest thing the town has to a glamour babe, is totally lacking in glamour. This was Cybill Shepherd at the peak of her hotness. Jacy is a very pretty girl but she has no idea how to make the most of herself. She doesn’t know how to do her hair or makeup. She doesn’t know how to dress. And this is 1951, a time when women’s fashions were very glamorous.

It has a similar feel to those British kitchen sink dramas of the early 60s in which the working class protagonists learn that there is no hope and nothing to look forward to. There’s no point in thinking about sex - that will just lead to degradation and misery. No point thinking about love - the only person likely to fall in love with you is another loser. The best thing you can do is just throw yourself under a bus and get it over with. This movie takes the same approach to small town America. The luckiest character in the movie is the guy who gets squashed by a cattle truck. His suffering is at least over.

Not a single character in this movie gets even the smallest amount of joy from sex.

I strongly suspect that this movie was a box office hit because it quickly gained the reputation of being a dirty movie. Cybill Shepherd cavorting nude in a swimming pool! I also suspect that that’s why critics doted on it. They approved of its open treatment of sex. It made critics feel like they were watching a European at film (you know, those subtitled movies where the actresses take their clothes off). At the time American movies were very tentatively exploring the possibility of dealing with sex in a grown-up way.

And The Last Picture Show was definitely raunchy by 1971 standards - lots of nudity, frontal nudity, sex scenes, open discussion of sex. It’s interesting to compare it to Klute, a Hollywood movie released in the very same year that also deals with subject matter. Klute seems very tame by comparison. A brief blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpse of Jane Fonda’s nipples and that’s about it. So it’s easy to see why The Last Picture Show attracted interest from the public and from critics.

Timothy Bottoms gives the dullest performance in the history of cinema. The other cast members do their best. Cybill Shepherd is by far the best thing in the movie.

I find it difficult to stay interested in a movie that includes not a single characters I can care about. I can be captivated by a movie featuring only unsympathetic characters if they’re rotten in interesting ways.

I can see why critics adored this movie. It’s miserable, nihilistic and filled with loathing for small town America. Critics like that kind of thing. In 1971 it was just what they had been hoping for. This is Serious Filmmaking. I intensely disliked every minute of it.

The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978)

The Eyes of Laura Mars is an important movie for several reasons. The obvious one is that it was scripted by John Carpenter. Carpenter was making a name for himself as a screenwriter at that time. His directing career would soon take off as well. In a very brief period he would write the screenplay for The Eyes of Laura Mars, would write and direct the TV-movie Someone’s Watching Me and then write and direct Halloween. But The Eyes of Laura Mars was his first real experience working for a major studio on a major production.

The script had apparently been floating around for a while and a lot of writers aside from Carpenter were involved at some stage. Which means it may not be fair to blame Carpenter for some of the deficiencies in the script.

Irvin Kershner was offered the directing job. He was an experienced director although not perhaps a terribly distinguished one. He has the distinction of having directed the worst Bond movie of the pre-Daniel Craig era, the trainwreck that was Never Say Never Again. Would The Eyes of Laura Mars have been better with Carpenter directing? Perhaps.

The Eyes of Laura Mars is also interesting because it has a slight giallo feel.

This movie is also important because although it was made in 1978 it has very slight hints of the 80s. It’s like a proto-80s movie. In some ways it’s very 70s. New York City as a garbage dump, a world of violence, sleaze and squalor. But Laura Mars is rich and famous. Her world is a world of glamour, style, high fashion and money.

And it’s a suspense thriller with hints of the supernatural (or at least the paranormal), something you see in a few European movies of the 60s and 70s but don’t expect in a Hollywood movie.

Laura Mars (Faye Dunaway) is a very famous very successful photographer. It appears that she works in both the worlds of fashion photography and art photography. She’s a celebrity. And she’s controversial. Her photographs depict both high fashion and savage violence.

While doing a fashion shoot she has a vision. It has happened once before. A vision of murder. On the first occasion the murder actually did take place. And now it’s happened again.

The idea of someone seeing visions of murders before they happen was far from original. It is however given a few twists here. The visions are linked to her photography. If a photographer is a voyeur then she’s a voyeur of murder, but a kind of psychic voyeur of murder.

She finds out from cop Lieutenant John Neville (Tommy Lee Jones) that many of her earlier photographs bear uncanny similarities to police crime scene photos, photos that no-one outside the police department has seen. She may have been having these visions of future murders for quite some time without being aware of it.

What really freaks her out is that her interest in violent subject matter is a comparatively recent thing and she can’t explain why she suddenly developed this interest. It was just something that she felt compelled to do.

Laura will have further visions and there will be further murders.

Laura herself is not a suspect but it’s obvious that the murders have some kind of connection to her.

I have mixed feelings about Faye Dunaway but that may not be her fault. Apart from Chinatown she had a knack for being in movies that I really disliked. I don’t think of her as a bad actress. She’s pretty good here.

The movie does have a few definite weaknesses. The paranormal element could have been really interesting but is not developed fully. The screenplay really does have that “subjected to numerous rewrites” feel, because in fact it really did go through countless rewrites. The various thematic elements in the story, potentially interesting in themselves, just don’t quite come together as a coherent whole.

There is a clue early on that makes the identity of the killer very very obvious.

Perhaps the best thing about this movie is that the Laura Mars photographs were done by the great Helmut Newton. They’re superb. The two most successful and striking scenes are the fashion shoot scenes.

This movie has a few problems but don’t be put off by that. It’s an exceptionally interesting film that just doesn’t feel like a 1978 Hollywood movie. The giallo influence is very obvious and the world of high fashion figures in many notable gialli. The voyeurism theme is handled extremely well. I liked the way Laura is a voyeur but not just in the obvious ways (which she’s intelligent enough to be aware of) but in ways of which he’s not consciously aware. She is is some ways a passive voyeur - the images control her rather than her being in control of the images. And that’s disturbing for a photographer. Photographers manipulate reality but Laura is herself being manipulated.

The Eyes of Laura Mars is well worth seeing. Highly recommended.

Daisy Miller (1974)

Peter Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller came out in 1974 and pretty much wrecked his career. He had just had three major hits one after the other, What’s Up Doc?, The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon. He was seen as a bit of a bumptious upstart. He compounded his sins by casting his new girlfriend Cybill Shepherd in the lead role. And Daisy Miller was a very ambitious rather cerebral rather arty movie. Critics were only too happy to plunge their knives into him.

This movie also damaged Cybill Shepherd’s carer. Critics savaged her performance. One can’t help feeling that many critics were excessively hard on her merely because she was Bogdanovich’s girlfriend - it was a case of guilt by association (in much the same way as the trashing of Geena Davis’s career was collateral damage when critics went after Renny Harlin for Cutthroat Island).

In the case of Cybill Shepherd in Daisy Miller it was also a classic case of an actress giving exactly the performance her director wanted from her and then being savaged by critics for her trouble.

It’s easy to see why Daisy Miller bombed at the box office. It was out of step with public tastes in 1974. It’s also a movie that requires at least a very vague understanding of the social mores of the past. And it’s a movie that requires the audience to be fully engaged - it’s a subtle movie with some very subtle touches and those subtle touches are very important. And it is an art movie. It was just not a movie that was going to please a mass audience.

This is a story about misunderstandings and misjudgments and misinterpretations, all of which can add up and lead to very unfortunate consequences.

Daisy Miller (Cybill Shepherd) is a young girl from a nouveau riche American family doing the Grand Tour in Europe. In Switzerland she meets Frederick Winterbourne (Barry Brown). He’s American as well but he was educated in Europe. He understands the rules of respectable society. That doesn’t mean he’s respectable. We learn that he has just had an affair with a woman named Olga. But Frederick knows how to appear respectable and that’s what matters.

Daisy knows nothing of such social rules. She has not enjoyed the benefits of a good education. She simply ignores the rules. As a result she gives the impression of being vulgar and, even worse, she gives the impression that she might not be respectable. The crux of the story is whether Daisy really is innocent or not. Frederick fears that she may not be. In any case even though he is falling in love with her he is not going to take the risk of becoming entangled with a woman who is not respectable, or appears not to be respectable.

Daisy is obviously falling in love with Frederick but Frederick fails to understand this, as he fails to understand so many things.

This is a story of Americans in Europe, with American and European social mores being hopelessly incompatible, but it’s a bit more complicated that. It’s vital to bear in mind always that Daisy’s family are nouveau riche Americans. Blue-bloods, upper-class Americans, could adapt much more easily to European mores. But Daisy’s family have zero comprehension of the social mores of late 19th century Europe. They have no idea why they shock people.

Winterbourne’s family are Americans who have become totally acclimatised to European society. They are perfectly at ease in European society. They understand the social rules and they follow them. They have become so Europeanised that they no longer understand Americans like Daisy.

While some viewers might think the dialogue is anachronistic it was in fact mostly lifted directly from the 1879 Henry James novella. Some viewers might also think that some of Daisy’s behaviour is anachronistic but the movie follows the James story very very closely. Bogdanovich did not make this stuff up and Henry James did not make it up either. Henry James, as a 19th century American who lived in Europe, would have been very familiar with the social mores of the time among Europeans, among upper-class Americans and among nouveau riche Americans. Daisy Miller is not a fantasy creation. Such girls certainly existed.

It needs to be emphasised that both James and Bogdanovich are sympathetic to Daisy. She is certainly vulgar and uncultured but she’s honest and open. Winterbourne is a less sympathetic character. He is imprisoned by his prejudices which causes him to hopelessly misinterpret Daisy’s behaviour. He is also imprisoned by his fear of scandal. He loves Daisy but to marry her would be a huge social risk. But Winterbourne is not a villain. In his own way he is a tragic figure.

Cybill Shepherd understood exactly the performance the part required. She’s terrific. She's just right. Barry Brown is equally perfect as Winterbourne.

The visual approach of the movie is both subtle and ambitious. Bogdanovich pulls off some stunningly complex long takes with mirrors everywhere and he’s not being gimmicky. Seeing Daisy reflected in mirrors works - Winterbourne is never really able to see Daisy just as she is. He sees her reflected though his prejudices and his misinterpretations. But Bogdanovich is never showy for the sake of being showy.

Henry James has never been the easiest of writers to adapt to film. His fondness for irony and ambiguity are not easy to translate to the screen. Daisy Miller is not, as some critics have claimed, just a bold attempt that failed to come off. It does come off. It’s not a partial success. It’s a success. It’s a wonderful movie and it’s very highly recommended.

The Kino Lorber Blu-Ray looks great and Bogdanovich’s audio commentary is very worthwhile. There’s also an interview with Cybill Shepherd. Both Bogdanovich and Shepherd remained extremely proud of this movie, and rightly so.

Scorpio (1973)

When people talk of 1970s paranoia movies they often neglect to mention Michael Winner’s Scorpio but as well as being a spy thriller it has as much paranoia as the heart could desire.

At the beginning of Scorpio we are introduced to Jean Laurier (Alain Delon). He’s a hitman known as Scorpio. He’s a freelancer but he does a lot of jobs for a particularly sinister organisation. No, not the Mob. They at least have some ethics. He does jobs for a much more sinister outfit who have no ethics at all - the CIA. Scorpio often works with a CIA agent named Cross (Burt Lancaster).

Scorpio opens with the CIA assassinating a Middle East political leader. He’s an American ally but the US Government feels he would be a more useful asset dead. The assassin was Scorpio, working with Cross.

Scorpio had another mission which he failed to carry out. Now the CIA wants that job done. This begins a whole complicated series of events involving possible betrayals and possible double-crosses and lies and manipulations and conflicted loyalties.

Cross is now running. He’s been marked for death by the CIA but Cross is a very clever agent. Catching him and killing him will be immensely difficult and dangerous. You’d need someone as good as Cross. Scorpio is as good as Cross. Maybe.

But there are plenty of twists, and plenty of unanswered questions. Why does the CIA want Cross dead? What is the exact nature of the relationship between Cross and KGB agent Zharkov? They are friends, but strange friendships sometimes do exist between spies on opposite sides. It doesn’t mean Cross has sold out to the KGB, but it might mean that.

Another major unanswered question involves Scorpio’s motivations and intentions. Scorpio is not CIA. He’s a freelancer. Can the CIA trust Scorpio? Can Scorpio trust the CIA. None of the players in this game know if they can trust anyone, and the CIA don’t know if they can trust any of the players, even the guys who are supposedly working for them.

This is not a James Bond-style spy movie. It’s much closer in mood and spirit to the dark cynical pessimistic world of spy movies based on books by writers like John le Carré and Len Deighton - movies like The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and The Ipcress File. The main difference is that Scorpio does also include some great action set-pieces.

It’s interesting that Scorpio loves cats, which I assume is a nod to the first great movie about a hitman, This Gun For Hire (1942).

Casting Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon as the two spies was an interesting decision. Two actors with plenty of star power and charisma but sharply contrasting styles. Lancaster had a tendency to give flamboyant larger-than-life performances. Delon was always super-cool, giving very controlled subtle minimalist performances. Both actors were good at playing dangerous men but they did so in totally different ways. They complement each other perfectly.

Winner is a much reviled director. I suspect he’s mostly reviled because people disapprove so strongly of his monster 1974 hit Death Wish (and they invariably disapprove of Death Wish without actually understanding it). My impression is that a lot of people approach a Winner film in such a prejudiced state of mind that they decide it’s junk before they’ve even watched it.

Scorpio has some very definite affinities with Winner’s excellent 1972 The Mechanic (1972). In both movies there’s an older hitman acting as mentor to a younger assassin. In both cases the relationship is complex. Both movies deal with betrayal. In The Mechanic there’s a single level of betrayal whereas in Scorpio it’s like peeling an onion - you just keep finding new layers of duplicity and betrayal. There are double-crosses and triple-crosses and quadruple-crosses.

To try to pick holes in the plot is to miss the point. To criticise the movie on the grounds that the character’s motivations are insufficiently developed is also to miss the point.

As far as this movie is concerned the world of espionage is a world of meaningless futility.

It is all pointless. It’s just a game. There is no actual objective to the game. The only objective is to strengthen your own position by weakening someone else’s. It’s like a football match in which no player cares whether his team wins or loses.

The purpose of the CIA is to increase the power and influence of the CIA at the expense of other agencies such as the FBI (the CIA guys in this movie regard the FBI as a dangerous enemy.) The characters are all aiming to advance their own interests. The CIA chief McLeod (John Colicos) aims to maintain his position and perhaps move up another run on the ladder. The objective is his subordinate Filchock (J.D. Cannon) is to take over McLeod’s job. Scorpio is an outsider. He’s just a contractor. He wants to become an insider. Then he too will have power. Cross was an idealist once but now he has no idea what his aims are, other than survival. He is amused by the fact that his KGB opposite number, Zharkov, still has beliefs.

What’s interesting is that nobody knows or cares what the case is about. Some secrets were exchanged. Nobody cares what they were. They’re just poker chips.

The CIA are definitely the bad guys but they’re not so much evil as just totally amoral. The characters have no clear motivations because they believe in nothing but the game.

Scorpio is not a meaningless movie. It’s an intelligent provocative movie about the meaningless empty world of espionage. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Winner’s best-known movies, Death Wish (1974) and The Mechanic (1972). You can see certain common themes running through both these movies and through Scorpio as well.

The Beguiled (1971)

The Beguiled, directed by Don Siegel and starring Clint Eastwood, was released in 1971. It’s not at all what you might expect from either Siegel or Eastwood. It’s set during the American Civil War but it’s neither a western nor a war picture. It’s more of a gothic melodrama.

The setting is an estate in the South. Corporal John McBurney (Eastwood) is a Union soldier lying wounded and dying. He is found by a little girl named Amy. Amy cannot bear to leave him there. She drags him back home. Home for Amy is Miss Farnsworth’s school for girls.

(Geraldine Page) is horrified. He’s a Yankee. She wants to turn him over to the Confederate authorities so he will be sent to a prison camp. She is persuaded by the other ladies that she cannot possibly do that in his present condition. Miss Farnsworth and her girls decide to nurse him back to health.

All the men are off at the war. There are only women at Miss Farnsworth’s mansion now.

McBurney is a youngish good-looking very masculine man and as you might expect his presence sets feminine hearts a-flutter. Three of the women find his presence particularly disturbing. Martha Farnsworth is one. The second is young teacher Edwina. Edwina is still young but seems to be settling into a life as a dedicated spinster teacher. Until McBurney awakens her female emotions. The third is one of the pupils, Carol (Jo Ann Harris). Carol is man-crazy. Tensions rise and jealousies begin to fester.

McBurney is in a bad way and he’s helpless. The women’s suspicions of him start to subside. Romantic complications ensue with Miss Farnsworth, with Edwina and with Carol. Suspicions flare up again. Jealousies blaze ever more brightly.

And then the movie takes a perverse turn and becomes steadily more perverse. There are dangerous games being played here and they get way out of control.

One of the pleasing things about his movie is that it resists the temptation to bludgeon the viewer with political messaging. The women are all Southerners. Some are kind and selfless. Some are spoilt and selfish. Some are embittered by life. In other words, people are the same everywhere - some are good, some are bad, most are in-between. There’s a very mild anti-war message to the extent that war makes people afraid and brutalises them. McBurney assumes that household slave Hallie (Mae Mercer) will welcome him as a deliverer but she doesn’t. She likes him but she insists that he’s no more free than she is. That seems to be one of this film’s major themes. We’re all prisoners. McBurney wasn’t free when he was a soldier. Now he’s literally a prisoner of these women. And the women are prisoners of their fears and desires, and in the case of Edwina and Miss Farnsworth, of their pasts.

The Civil War setting is irrelevant, aside from the fact that it provides a convenient explanation for this being an entirely female household with not even a male servant, it explains why outsiders are shunned, it explains why the women must keep McBurney’s presence a secret and why he cannot risk leaving. Any wartime setting would have worked just as well.

There’s plenty of complexity to these characters. Martha Farnsworth is a hard woman with a bitterness stemming from her past but underneath there’s still some humanity.

We’re told that McBurney is a Quaker and was a medic with his regiment, and that therefore he has never actually borne arms against the Confederacy. He doesn’t seem the slightest bit like a Quaker. He’s a nice guy but we wonder how truthful and trustworthy he is. He seems keen to seduce Edwina. He seems keen to seduce Carol as well. And maybe Martha, given half a chance. For a godly Quaker he sure does like chasing skirt.

There are fascinating power dynamics that have nothing to do with gender. The power shifts are caused by circumstances and because the various characters have their own psychological reasons for either gaining in self-confidence and power, or losing self-confidence and power.

It’s interesting to compare Eastwood’s excellent performance here to his equally excellent performance in Play Misty For Me in the same year. In both cases he plays a man brimming with self-confidence and convinced that he knows how to handle women. In both cases he finds out that he’s wrong. He is in fact hopelessly out of his depth and confronted with women who do not behave the way he expects them to.

This is a movie with no political axe to grind. It’s a story of loyalty and betrayal, deceit and manipulation, and jealousy. It certainly does deal with female sexual desire and emotional longing but there’s no political aspect to it. These are just complex people driven by contradictory emotions. Miss Farnsworth and Edwina are desperate for love but confused as to what to do about it. Carol just wants to get laid.

These are not particularly admirable people but mostly they have reasons for their actions.

What I love is that there is so much ambiguity and the fact that the ambiguities remain unresolved is a strength. We never find out exactly what McBurney’s story is. We don’t know what his intentions are because he doesn’t know - he’s just playing it by ear. There’s a very slight hint of an attraction between Miss Farnsworth and Edwina but the two women may not even be aware of it. They’re both desperate for love, and for sex, but they don’t understand their own motivations clearly. Amy’s feelings toward McBurney are confused.

This was a labour of love for both Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood. Eastwood read the source novel, became obsessed by it and gave it to Siegel to read. Siegel became equally obsessed. This was a movie they just had to make. They were both very proud of it. It was a box-office flop. Siegel felt very strongly that Universal spectacularly mishandled its release. To the extent that Universal promoted it at all they promoted it as a shoot ‘em up Clint Eastwood action war picture which was bizarrely inappropriate.

It has a certain gothic look and ambience. So many candlelight scenes, and a sense of gothic doom.

The Beguiled is an excellent complex, subtle, multi-layered film. Very highly recommended.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray offers an excellent transfer and there are quite a few extras.

Endless Night (1972)

Endless Night is a 1972 British thriller written and directed by Sidney Gilliat and with an intriguing cast headed by Hayley Mills, Hywel Bennett and Britt Ekland.

Gilliat and Frank Launder had been an immensely successful writing, directing and producing team (they wrote The Lady Vanishes for Alfred Hitchcock).

The movie is based on a 1967 Agatha Christie thriller. Yes, this is an actual thriller. Agatha Christie did write several thrillers and Endless Night was the best of them. It was her last truly great book.

Mike Rogers is a rental car driver although that is just the latest in a series of jobs. Mike is a very nice young man but he’s a bit of a dreamer. Mike has a fantasy - to build his dream house overlooking the sea. He has already chosen the spot, known as Gypsy’s Acre. The land would cost a lot of money, the house would cost a fortune and Mike is penniless. It’s just a dream.

Doing a driving job on the Continent he meets the renowned architect Rudolf Santonix (Per Oscarsson). Santonix is only in early middle age but he is running out of time. He has severe health problems and may only have a few years left. Mike shows him photos of the site at Gypsy’s Acre. It becomes a kind of dream for Santonix as well. This is a site worthy of him. He could design a house for that site, a house that would be his final masterpiece. But since such a house would be immensely expensive and Mike has no money it’s just a dream.

And then Mike meets a cute American girl, Ellie Thomsen (Hayley Mills). They take a shine to each other. What Mike doesn’t know is that Ellie is one of the richest women in the world.

It can’t possibly work out. Penniless hire car drivers like Mike don’t marry fabulously rich heiresses. But they do get married.

That’s when the plot twists start to kick in and the atmosphere becomes increasingly foreboding, and will soon become sinister. We know something bad is going to happen but we don’t know what it will be.

There are lots of potentially sinister characters. There’s the weird old woman muttering stuff about doom. There’s Greta (Britt Ekland). She’s Ellie’s best friend and was formerly her paid companion. Everyone warns Mike about Greta. There’s Ellie’s family, and a nasty money-grubbing snobbish bunch they are. Reuben (Peter Bowles) is married to Ellie’s aunt and he’s clearly a bad ’un. There’s Ellie’s aunt Cora (Lois Maxwell) who oozes spitefulness. There’s also the family lawyer, Andrew Lippincott (George Sanders). He’s charming but he’s a lawyer and much too clever to be trustworthy.

Both Mike and Ellie are dreamers. Santonix is a dreamer. The film has a slight fairy-tale vibe (and Ellie describes herself several times as Cinderella). My feeling is that you’ll appreciate this movie more if you think of it as having a subtle fairy tale quality. Ellie is the beautiful princess. Mike is the handsome but penniless coachman who wins her heart. The house is an enchanted castle, created by the wizard Santonix. Greta is a witch (the beautiful glamorous witches are the ones you have to watch out for). She might be a good witch or a bad witch. The crazy old lady could also be a good witch or a bad witch. Reuben is the adventurer who hoped to marry the princess. Cora is the evil stepmother. Andrew Lippincott is the old king’s courtier who might want the throne himself.

I have no idea if Gilliat had any of this in mind but there is a faint whiff of unreality to this movie. A slight storybook feel. It’s a long long way from fashionable 70s gritty realism. In fact the overall feel reminds me a little of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951) which also has that ambiguity, that sense of being not quite reality. This is a movie that has more of a 1940s or 1950s feel than an early 70s feel. Although it does have a slight affinity with Roddy McDowall’s extraordinary The Ballad of Tam Lin (1970).

While these people live in a futuristic modernist house there are constant evocations of the past such as Mike’s love of beautiful old things, and the fact that Ellie is a singer but she sings 18th century songs. There are also subtle little otherwordly hints - when we first see Ellie she looks like a fairy dancing in a field, there’s the way the old lady keeps just appearing from nowhere. These are very subtle hints but to me they reinforce the idea that reality might not be all it seems to be.

There’s also a subtle dream-like quality to this movie. Again it’s a very slight undermining of reality.

This is a deceptive movie. It’s much smarter and more complex than it initially appears to be but you don’t know how smart it is until the end. It was promoted as an ingenious whodunit, which it isn’t. The mystery plot is very simple, very straightforward and very obvious. The mystery plot is not the point of the movie but you don’t know that until the end.

Hywel Bennett is outstanding. There were certain roles that he just did better than anyone else could have done. This is one of those roles. Hayley Mills is very good although she has a less showy part. Britt Ekland is very good indeed. This movie is stacked with fine British character actors and they’re all good.

Endless Night is intriguing, stylish, enigmatic and clever. Highly recommended.

And it looks great on Blu-Ray.