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The opening tour de force is an oneiric précis, flares in the gloom in an unbroken twirl worth more than all of Cabaret. Patriotic English tunes inside the music hall while German bombs are dropped outside, in the middle is the beloved soprano doubling as a chaste Mata Hari (Julie Andrews), "the girl in no man's land." The Great War is a fittingly monumental stage for the clash of ideology and emotion, the target is the Dawn Patrol ace (Rock Hudson) who woos her with gypsy violins and roomfuls of roses. Military secrets slip out during the interrupted ménage, meanwhile a pair of Gallic bumblers (Jacques Marin, André Maranne) tumble off rainy rooftops. "You've got to admit, seduction can be very funny if you stop to think about it." "You're not supposed to stop to think about it." A glittering compendium of Blake Edwards themes misunderstood as an Old Hollywood white elephant, a shrine to his leading lady and a meditation on performance and illusion. (Sternberg is the mainstay, Dishonored and Jet Pilot in particular.) Two sides of a feminine coin, the spy in the footlights, her rival is the burlesque queen (Gloria Paul) whose act she apes in a fit of jealousy. The glossy form reflects the protagonist's needful artifice, she's awarded the Légion d'Honneur as her Teutonic contact (Jeremy Kemp) joins a rendition of "La Marseillaise" and, later, "It's a Long Way to Tipperary." The ode to purity exploded into a striptease and the lavish track pierced by the sharp zoom, elements befitting the vision suspended between classicism and modernism. Everything leads back to the stage, the heroine illuminated and whole at last. "Would you settle for desperately?" "I'll settle for passionately." Edwards reworks the situation in The Tamarind Seed, and exorcises the experience in S.O.B. Cinematography by Russell Harlan. With Lance Percival, Michael Witney, Bernard Kay, Doreen Keogh, Carl Duering, and Vernon Dobtcheff.
--- Fernando F. Croce |