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Joseph Losey has little patience for whodunits, right away he uncloaks the culprit and proceeds to instead paint the world around him. The structure is a tightly wound clock set to the gallows, "the last 24 hours can be hell." The young prisoner (Alec McCowen) has already embraced numbness, his father (Michael Redgrave) is a failed writer just out of the sanatorium for alcoholism—they sit across from each other in prison, and the glass divider becomes a mirror that separates and blurs them. The desperate search for a shred of "undeniable doubt" gives a tour of London's vital depths (Cocteau doodles adorning a burlesque joint, plus a glimpse of the very young Joan Plowright) and corrupted heights (a mirrored elevator leading to the perfumed cage of a penthouse). Barristers, reformists and priests cannot save the boy, the way out rests with the choleric industrialist (Leo McKern) who stares down the camera à la Goya's Toro Bravo. Faulkner's "time slain by clocks" is the ruthless visual motif, the wristwatch that mentally transports the novelist back to the asylum, the infernal tick-tock that soothes a tippling matron, Big Ben itself as the ultimate Tower of Babel. Having internalized society's traumas and compromises, the characters entrap each other, quiver for freedom or control, and pass out only to awaken in unknown territory. "Big decisions, terrible decisions," a whole system's aggression funneled into McKern's roaring Mercedes run at the racetrack, Redgrave can barely confront him in a hilarious lampoon of a corrida. (Another Losey joke: Ann Todd's stiff-upper-lip gentility amid the bellowing.) "Well. Now there are no secrets at all." An hour and a half of absolute metaphysical raging, straddling noir, protest and abstraction for the benefit of Oshima's Death by Hanging. With Paul Daneman, Peter Cushing, Renée Houston, Lois Maxwell, Richard Wordsworth, and George Devine. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |