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"Quicksand" is the conjugal image, "relax. Sink into it." Vortex of a cluttered living room, arena for acrid sharpshooters, proscenium for awkward double dates. "Cyclops" and "Swampy," Elizabeth Taylor obliterating space with blowzy hostility as Richard Burton mines a delicate vein of loathing. University president's daughter, forgetful movie buff and "a devil with language," mated in bile to the squashed professor. "My arm's gotten tired whipping you." The faculty cocktail party is extended at home, "blondie and his mouse" (George Segal, Sandy Dennis) drop by for a drink and stay as horrified witnesses. "It gets pretty bouncy around here sometimes." Edward Albee's homegrown Strindberg flashily mounted by Mike Nichols, just the derisive tempest to foretell New Hollywood. (The razzing misremembrance of Beyond the Forest is indicative of the perspective.) "Blue games for the guests," the hostess relishes her husband's mortification while he reaches for a toy rifle to mock-execute her with a Lautréamont umbrella. Indoors she swells across the screen boasting of the unseen son, outdoors he sits on a swing in profil perdu and regales his colleague with a shattered memory. "Truth and illusion. Who knows the difference, toots?" Jazzy agitation in deep focus is the spécialité de la maison, shock cuts teleport the quartet from a cramped Chrysler to an after-hours saloon for an overhead view of Dennis spinning interpretatively. Flickering signs and neon arrows, a street lamp glaring between close-up visages as war of the sexes is declared, "total!" Losey's The Servant is a staging mainstay, with a nod to Kazan's A Streetcar Named Desire ("Flores para los muertos"). Ritualized laceration crashes into dawn—the harsh stripping down of a celebrity couple, or the slick dressing up of raw nerves? "There's irony there, but I'm not drunk enough to figure it out." Cassavetes has the great revision (Faces), Polanski the rich lampoon (Bitter Moon). Cinematography by Haskell Wexler. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |