Brilliance on a Wet Afternoon

I am yet to see a better directed film in my life. If you enjoyed the style with which Bryan Forbes directed this film, I would also recommend his other three black and white masterpieces: Whistle Down the Wind, his debut direction, King Rat, the best film of 1965, and The L-Shaped Room, which features the best performance of Leslie Caron's career.

I have only seen nine Bryan Forbes films myself, but this one stands out as his best directed. In addition to those mentioned already, the original version of The Stepford Wives was also directed by Forbes, and it has some excellent use of colour, sound and camerawork. The other four Forbes films that I have seen are nowhere near as well directed, but The Whisperers still has a lot of interest on a visual level, and in The Slipper and the Rose Forbes shows some skill in visualising a classic fairytale so that the places all seem quite real. The Raging Moon has two superb performances, but is not as well directed as one might of hoped for. Finally, The Wrong Box is little more than a fun comedy, but still enjoyable at that.

      A man can change the whole world with a bullet in the right place.

Excellent film - Stanley and Attenborough both should have won Oscars (supporting for him) and I also think KING RAT was the best film of '65.

Several months ago I bought this DVD without having seen the movie before, strictly based on what I'd read about Kim Stanley's performance...and then waited for a wet afternoon when I would be at home with free time to watch it. At last I got to view it under those conditions yesterday, as the Dallas area was being deluged with intense rain and flooding. It was a great day to be indoors, and this was a fine film to dive into, with thunder booming around the house. Stanley and Attenborough are fascinating to watch, as so much is going on that is nonverbal. I admired how the director got out of the way, and just let us watch the actors do their stuff. And what a treat to get a look at the streets of London (it was London, wasn't it?) in the early sixties.

The acting by the two leads is indeed outstanding of course, particularly the sensitivity they navigate the ebbs and flows of the dynamic of their increasingly twisted relationship - to the point where one is really able to believe Attenborough would actually do his wife´s bidding and murder the girl. Stanley´s performance may often come across as quite extravagant, but there´s a great deal of subtlety underneath as she manages to hide the true depths of her character´s derangement until exactly the right moment. And from then on, anything seems possible - and plausible, as her hubby really has no way back, either. It´s an astonishing tandem these two form, no less magnetic than Burton´s and Taylor´s volatile bullying of each other in the similarly themed Who´s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf.

And there´s no lack of sensitive hands in the direction department, either - from the very first scene with Attenborough walking down the street towards his home, the titular and almost ever-present moisture (and the sun frequently getting in a look from behind the clouds, reflecting on it), feels so palpable one can almost feel it. The camerawork is often somewhat jarring yet never flashy for the sake of it and some very unorthodox shot selection is weaved into overall visual tapestry with seamless brilliance throughout - shots off reflective surfaces or oddly low angles fall in place organically and while the world of SOAWA has a true ring of everyday reality to it, it´s also eerily if not conventionally photogenic with its vistas that often tend towards drab and forsaken (French New Wave undoubtedly has had a serious influence on editing, regarding both sound and image, but unlike, say, Godard´s mostly hollow trickery, it´s actually in service of something emotionally compelling. Love these aural bridges of intrusive noise between scenes, getting gradually louder & louder until they´re almost deafening, employed on several dramatic instances).

A special mention though must be made of the first, gracefully deliberate stretch of 30 or so minutes - that is, until the girl is safely kidnapped - which is among the most powerful opening acts of any film. The preliminary dialogue session between Stanley & Attenborough lasts quite a while, but it´s all so muted, so precisely written and delivered that it never gets to the point of actually feeling "talky", much less excessively so. In fact, one might argue that the tones of voices themselves communicate more about their household than the actual words spoken. It is obvious from moment one that their plans (whatever these are - it is one of the film´s smartest choices to only reveal the plot, the plan as it unravels, thereby rendering the story - nothing too remarkable in or of itself - genuinely suspenseful and sometimes even unpredictable as it keeps one guessing throughout) are doomed to failure which gives the thing an additional layer of emotional potency. It´s one downbeat yarn, conceived and played out without ever missing a beat - there are a few instances when things look in danger of bogging down & starting to drag... but soon enough the gear is shifted and the momentum reclaimed.

A great film. Back in the day, the 1960´s, British film industry really used to crank out impressive stuff with high water marks such as Peeping Tom, The Innocents, The Servant, this one here... guess Repulsion, Polanski´s more cosmopolitan affair grounded in England, should also count.




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