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It begins with the female consciousness impressionable and airborne, cf. Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much, an adolescent heiress (Pamela Franklin) out of the Paris airport and into the hands of kidnappers. The chauffeur (Marlon Brando) shanghais her to an isolated seaside villa, his accomplices are a jealous junkie (Rita Moreno) and a craggy sadist (Richard Boone) with a yen for looking up the captive's skirt. Not a sturdy caper, "it's turning sour, man. It's coming apart!" Even the sadsack mastermind (Jess Hahn) has no illusions for the outcome: "Once she puts the finger on us, I'd just like to have a little car fare, that's all." Nice bit of depraved captivation, Lionel White visualized by Hubert Cornfield for pure fragmented moodiness. The beach is overcast and windswept, the Champs-Élysées is a pair of banks facing each other, Godard's cinematographer is on hand to lend a touch of Nouvelle Vague hangover. Blond-wigged and snug in black turtleneck sweaters, Brando's nonchalant force contrasts with Boone's leathery seaminess under a Magritte derby. A gendarme (Gérard Buhr) repeatedly turns up, a figure of Gallic destiny or "a hick cop tryin' to get a little nookie"? The bare décors are concurrent with Chabrol's Les Biches, Cornfield's offbeat rhythms occasion an uncanny flow—the mirrored close-up of Moreno snorting cocaine dissolves to dangling phone receivers taped together, which dissolves to a chartered plane emerging from the gloom. The gag climax has the overly elaborate scheme boil down to a machine-gun at a bistro, the oneiric stinger reaches back to Lang's The Woman in the Window to posit a nymphet's cyclical fantasy. "I'm gonna give you a chance to think about it." With Jacques Marin, Hugues Wanner, and Al Lettieri.
--- Fernando F. Croce |