So Long at the Fair (Antony Darnborough, Terence Fisher, 1950)

Jean Simmons and Dirk Bogarde in So Long at the Fair

Cast: Jean Simmons, Dirk Bogarde, David Tomlinson, Honor Blackman, Felix Aylmer, Cathleen Nesbitt, Betty Warren, Marcel Poncin, Austin Trevor, André Morell, Zena Marshall, Eugene Deckers. Screenplay: Hugh Mills, Anthony Thorne, based on a novel by Thorne. Cinematography: Reginald H. Wyer. Art direction: Cedric Dawe, George Provis. Film editing: Gordon Hales. Music: Benjamin Frankel. 

They might have called it The Gentleman Vanishes. Jean Simmons and David Tomlinson play Vicky and Johnny Barton, sister and brother, whose travels around Europe take them to Paris for the 1889 Paris Exposition, the event that saw the opening of the Eiffel Tower. After seeing a bit of the city on their first night there, Vicky retires to her hotel room while Johnny, feeling tired, stays downstairs to have a nightcap. In the morning, Johnny has vanished. Not only that, the room where he was staying has vanished too. The hotel staff denies that he was ever there, and moreover asserts that the room where he was staying, No. 19, has never existed: The only room 19 is a bathroom. The manager of the hotel, Mme. Hervé (Cathleen Nesbitt), whom we saw check the Bartons in the night before, insists that only Vicky checked in and shows her the registry that only she signed. And so begins Vicky's harrowing attempt not only to find her brother but also to prove that she's not insane. So Long at the Fair is a mostly engaging variation on the gaslighting theme that evokes the similar, though less complex, disappearance of Miss Froy in Alfred Hitchcock's 1938 The Lady Vanishes, though it's not in the same league as Hitchcock's classic. This version is a little too complicated for its own good: It's hard to ignore the many implausibilities of the scheme that's revealed at the end, and the accidental death of a witness who might have prematurely exposed the scheme feels like a contrivance to keep the plot going. But there's still enough fun in trying to figure things out, and the performances are good. Simmons gives full expression to both Vicky's bewilderment and her determination as she deals with uncomprehending authorities, and Dirk Bogarde is handsomely dashing as the expatriate artist who comes to her aid. 

The Night Porter (Liliana Cavani, 1974)

Charlotte Rampling and Dirk Bogarde in The Night Porter

Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Charlotte Rampling, Philippe Leroy, Gabriele Ferzetti, Giuseppe Addobbati, Isa Miranda, Nino Bignamini, Marino Masé, Amadei Amodio. Screenplay: Liliana Cavani, Italo Moscati, Barbara Alberti, Amedeo Pagani. Cinematography: Alfio Contini. Art direction: Nedo Azzini, Jean Marie Simon. Film editing: Franco Arcalli. Music: Daniele Paris.

I don't mind if a movie is offensive as long as what it makes me think and feel is more significant than what offends me. But Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter, celebrated and damned for its offensive central story, the doomed love affair of a former SS officer and the concentration camp survivor whom he loved and abused, doesn't have enough substance to its characters to make its offensiveness meaningful or even credible. Despite performances of deep conviction by Dirk Bogarde as Max and Charlotte Rampling as Lucia, we still know them by their labels: ex-Nazi and masochistic victim. We can only infer why they were drawn together in the camp and why they remain drawn together years later, when he has become a night porter in a Viennese hotel that's a hotbed of decadent characters and she has married a celebrated orchestra conductor. What causes Lucia to give up this apparently successful marriage to degrade herself with this creep? And what's with this assortment of ex-Nazis who are destroying old records and eliminating witnesses to their wartime crimes -- other than, of course, a plot device that puts the lives of Max and Lucia in jeopardy. Why is there a long sequence about the ballet dancer who used to perform shirtless for the SS and now seems to be restricted to private performances for Max, who works the lights for the performances? Is it to evoke the homoerotic element of Nazism, itself a wrongheaded and offensive trope? Nothing in The Night Porter holds up to very close scrutiny. And yet it's a hypnotically watchable film that dares you to take it seriously as it unrolls, but just left me feeling jaded and unsatisfied when it was over.

Victim (Basil Dearden, 1961)

Victim (Basil Dearden, 1961)

Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Sylvia Syms, Dennis Price, Anthony Nicholls, Peter Copley, Norman Bird, Peter McEnery, Donald Churchill, Derren Nesbitt, John Barrie. Screenplay: Janet Green, John McCormick. Cinematography: Otto Heller. Art direction: Alex Vetchinsky. Film editing: John D. Guthridge. Music: Philip Green. 

Darling (John Schlesinger, 1965)

Diana Scott: Julie Christie
Robert Gold: Dirk Bogarde
Miles Brand: Laurence Harvey
Prince Cesare della Romita: José Luis de Vilallonga
Malcolm: Roland Curram

Director: John Schlesinger
Screenplay: Frederic Raphael
Cinematography: Kenneth Higgins
Art direction: Ray Simm
Film editing: Jim Clark
Costume design: Julie Harris
Music: John Dankworth

When Darling was first released, the marriage of its protagonist, Diana Scott, to a minor European royal was taken to be a sly reference to the marriage of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco. Today, it looks a lot more like a strikingly prophetic vision of the future awaiting Diana Spencer, then only 4 years old, who would find that marrying a prince entails not only a lot of unwelcome attention but also a good deal of boredom. Boredom is the keynote of Darling, as well as its undoing. There were filmmakers like Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Alain Resnais who could portray the existential ennui of the glamorous upper classes without boring their audiences as well, but John Schlesinger wasn't one of them. Julie Christie gives her considerable all as Diana Scott, a pretty young model whose lack of inner substance is her undoing, and she won an Oscar for her pains. But her performance isn't enough to save the film from tedium. As written by Frederic Raphael, who also won an Oscar, there's not enough to Diana to keep us interested in her fate. Instead, the filmmakers fall back on thudding irony, like Diana's being hyped as "The Happiness Girl" when we know that she's cruelly unhappy. The blame falls on the media exploiters, of course, the producers and journalists and ad-men who could hardly care less about the person they're exploiting. But they're an easy target, and for the blame to land we need to feel that there's more to Diana than meets the eye, that she's a victim of something more than her own aimlessness. Unfortunately, we never get a sense that there's unexplored potential to the character.

Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti, 1971)

Dirk Bogarde in Death in Venice

I have nothing against slowness in movies if it leads to a satisfactorily immersive experience, but Death in Venice is just languorous, taking its own weary way toward the conclusion promised in the film's title. Watching it patiently has some rewards: Dirk Bogarde's fine performance as Gustave von Aschenbach; the sometimes opulent, sometimes melancholy views of Venice provided by Pasqualino De Santis's cinematography; the handsome sets by Ferdinandino Scarfiotti and costumes by Piero Tosi; loving glimpses of Silvana Mangano as Tadzio's mother; and great gulps of Mahler's third and fifth symphonies on the soundtrack. But the screenplay by Visconti and Nicola Badalucco carries no intellectual or emotional weight. Thomas Mann's novella is meant to be savored and reflected upon, but film inevitably carries us along with our expectations of action, and there is little enough of it going on anywhere but in Aschenbach's head to provide Visconti with something to shoot. He resorts to flashbacks: to the illness that causes Aschenbach to take his fatal trip, to the happy days of Aschenbach's marriage (Marisa Berenson plays his wife) and the devastating death of their child, to a visit to a prostitute who plays Beethoven's Für Elise on the piano, to the storm of cheers and boos at the performance of Aschenbach's composition (actually an excerpt from the Mahler third symphony) and an argument with a friend (Mark Burns) about his music. Tadzio (Björn Andrésen) clearly represents something that has been lost from (or never present in) Aschenbach's life, But Visconti never makes Aschenbach's obsession with Tadzio either psychologically or thematically convincing. In the end we're left with little more than Aschenbach as the aging gay man doomed to a lonely death -- a too-familiar trope.