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Denied country and billing, Joseph Losey makes masterpieces anyway. "London... a winter's night..." "No slum brother," the young hood (Dirk Bogarde) stays at the home of the psychiatrist he tried to mug (Alexander Knox) for a therapeutic sojourn. While the doc passes his verdict on the lad's circle of pain ("Hate, guilt and fear"), his American wife (Alexis Smith) goes through a program of her own with the visitor, from contempt to obsession. The exile's comedy of displacement and abrasion, practically a second first film, cf. Godard's Sauve qui peut (la vie). Dissolving homes and psyches, Lacan and Glaucus, a print by Miró to befuddle the police inspector. The eponymous beast lurks "in the dark secret of every human personality," the bourgeois dungeon of mirrors and the sexed-up jazz dive are twin arenas of power plays. The crack-up after the hold-up, the misfit's breakthrough is of little use to the inflamed lady of the house, "a little late in the day for conscience." The film's beauty is in the way it keeps pushing beyond the pop-Freud resolution of the hero's troubles (and the gentility of Fifties British cinema) into a stormy parallel narrative of repressed female ardor, modulating from Knock on Any Door toward Senso. Smith's passionately crumbling patrician takes over, both as Losey's expat proxy ("I came from two homes thousands of miles apart, and I was a stranger in both of them") and the motor thrusting the story to its psychosexual climax. For the finish a baroque Ricci composition behind the mangled Esso billboard, just the signature of an artist willing to set up sledgehammer signs only to tear right through them. The Romantic Englishwoman is a virtual remake. With Hugh Griffith, Patricia McCarron, Maxine Audley, Glyn Houston, and Harry Towb. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |