1966 drama
Rating: 17/20 (Buster: no rating)
Plot: A pair of inept criminals limp to the beachfront castle home of a effeminate businessman and his hot French wife and abuse their telephone, eat their eggs, and kick their chickens.
There are spoilers, but they're all in the first paragraph.
Buster didn't catch the majority of this movie, but she did watch the final 20 minutes with me and said, "That's a really sad ending, but a good movie" as she watched Donald Pleasence sitting on a rock at the end. And she's right. Mostly because the entire movie kind of is like a wrestling match between this murky madcap humor and this hopeless tension, and while you sort of figure that things will work out eventually for at least one or two of the characters because movies that are comedic at all tend to work out in the end, it just doesn't. So Buster was very perceptive. She couldn't have understood all the underlying emotions these characters carried with them. Lionel Stander's carrying around this wounded pride, the loss of a friend, and likely a latent homosexuality. Pleasence seemingly carries the weight of every decision he's ever made, this powerlessness, a strange fatigue, and likely a latent homosexuality. And Francoise Dorleac has a restlessness, too much youth, and too much power.
Much of the greatness of this movie is in its gaps. And in its chickens. Lots of chickens in this, and I've always thought chickens looked better in black and white movies anyway. I loved one shot of a chicken running from a pushed car and another with a chicken poised on a window sill with another chicken walking in the background. It makes you wonder--did Polanski direct the chickens? The movie's beautifully shot with a beautiful beachside castle, a beautiful beach, and a beautiful Francoise Dorleac whose character thankfully sleeps naked. And I just love how the clouds look in this movie. The most technically-brilliant scene has to be a quietly-magical one-shot scene on a beach, an impressive display of timing and movement that might blow your mind if you're paying attention. Of course, it's been established that I'm a sucker for that sort of thing. But gunshots at a plane, Dorleac running off and returning with a skinny dip in between, and Pleasence eating sand and clouds? It's just so cool. But this is really a movie about the characters and their dynamics. The performances from the four leads are terrific even though I don't think you could call them great acting performances. I always love Pleasence, and he gets himself a character here that somehow manages to be simply drawn and complex at the same time. Dorleac has that 1960's goddess vibe, a sexy aloofness maybe, but there are subtleties to her work here, too. Lionel Stander's crook is the most explicitly comic character, but there's a gruff to the comedy, Stander growling every line like he's Fred Flintstone. And he gets some great lines, nearly-satirical gangster goofiness like "My name ain't George and I don't have horns. I could punch that pretty puss of yours like a pumpkin." And then, you've got the always-great Jack MacGowran, the kind of actor who could even be funny when he's lying there dead. He's part of a very funny visual gag featuring a car where he gets to say "Son of a bitch!" and "I've got a problem here!" It's also great so see character's rocking the Hitler mustache.
Sometimes, I wonder if Roman Polanski is my favorite director. Is he? It reminds me that I've still never seen The Pianist.
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