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"Well, here we are." "Where?" "In the shit." The cracked-mirror Laurel & Hardy from Two Men and a Wardrobe are here gangsters on a parched road, a spoof of Pinter's The Dumb Waiter points the way to the fortress on top of a chicken coop. Rob Roy Castle on Holy Island was once Sir Walter Scott's abode, the current owner (Donald Pleasence) is peevish, aerodynamically bald, ulcerous, a pedestrian painter. His "froggy bitch" of a wife (Françoise Dorléac) enjoys little jeux d'humiliation and dresses him in frilly nightie just in time for the unexpected visitors. Into the snippy British-French connection stumbles the scratchy Yank with "very delicate skin" (Lionel Stander), his partner (Jack MacGowran) expires with a bullet in his belly and his eyes on constellations. "Something inexpressible... something unpleasant." The goon gulps down homemade vodka, and flinches: "Gosh, this stuff's moider!" In the ebb and flow of malicious power plays, the desert can suddenly get inundated, typical Roman Polanski terrain. The squawking seagull suspended mid-air, the airplane circling above, the busted car pushed up a hill and into another car... The seven-minute take at the beach has Pleasence lamenting some lost "romantic age" while Stander shoots the air and Dorléac splashes in the ocean, the camera reframes a composition from Knife in the Water before dissolving to a quizzical rooster (Buñuel's El Bruto). Pristine deep-focus absurdisms jolted by wide-angle twitches, absolute despair treated with something akin to jolliness, breakdown as mordant theater. Polanski's closing view finds the unshelled turtle weeping on a rock, a fair gesture in a world where God is a garbled capo on the phone ("You're on your own"). Bergman in Hour of the Wolf has the artist in smeary makeup, Peckinpah's Straw Dogs is a belligerent anagram. With Iain Quarrier, Robert Dorning, Marie Kean, and Jacqueline Bisset. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |