Recently I’ve been getting into the habit of renting old films that have something in common. Sometimes they share a common director, or a particular actor, or they just share a particular obsession, such as “time travelling star-crossed romances”. It’s amazing how many TTSCRs have been released, and even more amazing how awful and silly most of them are. I mean, if Sandra really wanted to find out whatever became of Keanu, couldn’t she just have Googled him? Oh, don’t even get me started…
Several months back I took in the films of Visconti (see The Leopard – it will change your life), and that led me to late-period Dirk Bogarde, which in turn led to Julie Christie (by virtue of their shared turn in Darling). And so it turned out that I somehow managed to watch Death in Venice and Don’t Look Now back to back, two films that both try really hard to convince you that it’s a very, very bad idea to go to Venice, if you value your life.
Fortunately, I had already been to Venice, and had managed to make it out alive and healthy, thank you. I highly recommend it. But I wouldn’t go swimming in the canals, if I were you.
Last month I raced through the career of Montgomery Clift, from the beautiful young man he was in A Place in the Son to the ruined and immobile countenance he tried valiantly to act through a mere eight years later, post-accident, in Suddenly, Last Summer. Although even the young and intact Mr. Clift may not have fared all that well, since Katherine Hepburn’s take-no-prisoners performance steals that film in a walk, while leaving no scenery unchewed.
Now I’m on to early Warren Beatty. Which led me to the oddest experience. First I saw him in his very first starring role in Splendor in the Grass (1961), opposite the impossibly luminous Natalie Wood as a beautiful young woman in love with him who literally goes crazy trying to sublimate her unconsumated sexual desire toward the sexy but inarticulate Mr. Beatty, and who therefore tries to end it all by throwing herself into a swirling waterfall. Lots of shots of swirling waterfalls.
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Then the very next day I saw Lilith (1964), in which the impossibly luminous Jean Seberg plays a beautiful young woman literally insane with sublimated sexual desire for the sexy but inarticulate Mr. Beatty, which leads her to contemplate throwing herself to her death into a swirling waterfall. Many more shots of swirling waterfalls.
Ok, what on earth is going on here? Did the mere presence of the virile (if inarticulate) young Mr. Beatty cause an entire generation of filmmakers to go mad? Or was it just something in the water?
If somebody can explain it to me, please do.
it is perhaps no coincidence that freud’s the interpretation of dreams was reprinted in 1961.
in it, he suggests (iirc) that water in a dream may represent sexual desire as sex is often accompanied by liquids.
it is possible the filmmakers were consciously or subconsciously following freud’s suggestion. freud was all the rage back then.
ah, water. how it makes me think of f–king [last word elided by admin].