The Best House in London (Philip Saville, 1969)

Joanna Pettet and David Hemmings in The Best House in London 

Cast: David Hemmings, Joanna Pettet, George Sanders, Dany Robin, Warren Mitchell, John Bird, William Rushton, Bill Fraser, Maurice Denham, Wolfe Morris, Martita Hunt, Marie Rogers. Screenplay: Dennis Norden. Cinematography: Alex Thomson. Production design: Wilfred Singleton. Film editing: Peter Tanner. Music: Mischa Spoliansky.

Is there anything worse than a sex comedy that's neither sexy nor funny? Well, maybe a sex comedy predicated in part on the toxically masculine idea that sex workers choose their occupation because of the sex and not because they need work -- in short, that any woman would become a prostitute if it just meant having a lot of sex all the time. Philip Saville's The Best House in London endorses that notion. Joanna Pettet plays Josephine Pacefoot, a character based on, or rather parodying, the real-life Josephine Butler, a 19th-century English social reformer who, in addition to campaigning for women's rights, sought an end to human trafficking. In the movie, her campaign is ridiculed: The women she's trying to take off the streets and tech marketable skills are recalcitrant, constantly slipping back into prostitution as easier, more lucrative, and from the film's point of view more fun, with the result that the streets of Victorian London are crowded with hookers. This plays into the schemes of Walter Leybourne (David Hemmings), who persuades the British Home Secretary (John Bird) to allow him to establish an opulent bordello that will cater to the cream of English society and thereby ease the street traffic. The brothel is an enormous success and thereby becomes a target for Pacefoot's campaign, in which she is aided by Benjamin Oakes (also Hemmings), who is serving as a sort of publicist for her cause. The inevitable clash between the brothel and the reformer, and between the two characters played by Hemmings, forms the main plot. But that story is overlaid with subplots, one about the secret parentage of Leybourne and Oakes -- the justification for the double casting of Hemmings is that they are secretly half brothers -- and another, almost unrelated to the rest of the film, about Leybourne's assisting a pioneering aeronaut, Count Pandolfo (Warren Mitchell), in the construction of a giant dirigible. Meanwhile, the film is littered with cameo appearances of eminent Victorians: Dickens, Tennyson, Swinburne, Elizabeth Barrett, Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas, and fictional ones like Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. (One of the few successful jokes in the film comes as invitations to the brothel opening are being sent out; when Dr. Jekyll's name comes up, someone says they'd better send him two.) The movie is cavalier about chronology: It doesn't seem to matter, for example, that Lord Alfred Douglas was born in 1870, the year that Dickens died. Still, the messiness of the plotting and insouciance about history matter less in the end than the fact that most of the comedy falls flat, the sex is of the nudge-nudge, wink-wink order, and the underlying premise of the film is distasteful.

Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)

Back in the day we would discuss for hours the significance of Thomas (David Hemmings) fetching an invisible tennis ball after having photographed an invisible murder. Then later we scrutinized the thematic relationship of Blow-Up to Antonioni's great trilogy of L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), and L'Eclisse (1962). More recently, Blow-Up has figured large in discussions of the "male gaze." But lately it has become a historical artifact from a time and place half a century ago, the "swinging London" of the mid-1960s. And there I think it best belongs. What perhaps needs to be discussed is the tone of the film: Is it a document, or a celebration, or an exposé, or a satire? I think it is a bit of all of these, but mostly the tone is satiric. Thomas's aesthetic detachment, not to say voyeurism, makes him the perfect vehicle for an exploration of the era, from the grim flophouse he spends a night photographing to the drug-addled home of the wealthy, by way of a fashion shoot, a glimpse of what seems to be adulterous affair but may be a murder, a mini-orgy with some teenyboppers, a peek at two of his friends making love, and a performance in a rock club. All of it viewed with the impassive gaze of Thomas, Antonioni, and Carlo Di Palma's movie camera. Is it meant to be funny? Yes, sometimes, as when Thomas encounters the model Verushka at the party and says, "I thought you were supposed to be in Paris," and she replies, "I am in Paris." Or when we see the audience watching the performance of the Yardbirds in the club, showing no signs of enjoyment, but then going crazy when Jeff Beck smashes his guitar and flings it into the audience. Thomas escapes from the club with a piece of it, eludes the pursuing crowd, but throws it away when he realizes it's worthless. (A passerby picks it up, looks it it, and tosses it away.) It's a portrait of a cynical era in which people, as Oscar Wilde put it, know "the price of everything and the value of nothing." Hemmings, with his debauched choirboy* face, is the perfect protagonist, and Vanessa Redgrave, at the start of her career, is beautifully, magnificently enigmatic as the woman who may or may not have been involved in murder. I'm not sure it's a great film -- certainly not in comparison to Antonioni's trilogy -- but it will always be a fascinating one.

*Almost literally: Hemmings started as a boy soprano who was cast by Benjamin Britten in several works, most notably as Miles in the 1954 opera The Turn of the Screw. He can be heard on the recording made that year with Britten conducting.