Friday, November 09, 2007
DECADENCE WILL GET YOU EVERY TIME
Today's NYTimes Best 1176 Film was Joseph Losey's
Script by Harold Pinter, starring Dirk Bogarde and James Fox with Sylvia Miles.
Read the Bosley Crowther review at the link—written at the time the film opened. It was entered in the first NY Film Festival.
It is take on how shocking this film must have been in 1963.
Especially if you were British.
It is still breathtaking in its depiction of the decline of an upper class playboy at the hands of his servant and the servant's "sister".
Crowther is barely aware of Pinter. So is the world, I trust. He was just beginning his career. A Nobel Prize in the offing.
The film breathes like Pinter.
He and Losey made three films together.
Losey has a great film vocabulary.
The black and white guys just knew how to do it better.
There is nothing to like about what happens in this film. It is pure evil. And one cannot quit watching.
Jolly well done!
I will give it a 4 out of Netflix5.
Labels: best films
