The crack staff here at Mid Century Cinema has managed to procure some very exciting rarities (exciting, that is, if you travel in certain uber-nerd circles)—an impossible-to-find feature that we’ve been extremely eager to get our hands on for some time, The Stranger Within a Woman, directed by Mikio Naruse, along with some tantalizing obscurities by MCC favorites Claude Chabrol and Ingmar Bergman, feeding our completist fetish.
We have seen, I think, every major feature film directed by Ingmar Bergman (that depends on how you code the vexingly elusive In the Presence of a Clown), but the impossibly prolific Iggy B, who also fashioned a hall-of-fame worthy career as a theater director, on top of all that found the time to direct more than a dozen movies for television. And we want to see every one of those as well—and were thus quite excited to secure a copy of A Dream Play (1963), which arrived with some promise. Coming on the heels of his ambitious “godless trilogy” and featuring regular player Ingrid Thulin, this made-for-TV effort followed Bergman’s theatrical production of August Strindberg’s legendary play, which was a sensation in its time. Written in 1902 and first performed in 1907, Strindberg’s expressionistic fever-dream was material that Bergman clearly felt a close connection to; he would direct A Dream Play on the stage again in 1970, 1977 (in Germany), and 1986.
The Swedish auteur was reportedly dissatisfied with this attempt to bring the play to the (small) screen, and although he was often a poor judge of his own work, it is no stretch to agree with him here. The film boasts an attractive production design, and there’s not really anything wrong with it—but it’s hard to find much that’s right with it. Which is perhaps too harsh, but ultimately there is nothing really compelling about this enterprise. The overwhelming majority of Bergman films – even the minor ones – tend to reward repeated screenings, but I’m unlikely to come back to this one. Still, one more off the list! (And Iggy did a TV movie of another Strindberg play in 1960, Storm, which sounds like a more promising fit into his ouverte. So if you have a friend with a copy . . .)
Speaking of Bergman, although Mikio Naruse, one of the grand masters in the history of cinema, who directed an astonishing ninety films from 1930 to 1967 with his own distinguished voice and vision – among them some much-lauded masterpieces – his Stranger Within a Woman (1966) comes across as somewhat, well, Bergmanesque in its shooting style. But that’s not why we were so avidly seeking it out. Stranger is based on The Thin Line (1951), the debut novel by writer and political activist Edward Selim Atiyah, which was acclaimed in the New York Times as an “extraordinarily effective . . . probing psychological drama” that heralded the arrival of “an impressive new novelistic talent.” Actually, your indefatigable servants here at MCC tracked down a copy of the book, which turns put to be . . . pretty good. But more to the point – much more to the point – The Thin Line was also the source material for Claude Chabrol’s Just Before Nightfall – a film we revere.
So we just, you know, had to know, what Naruse did with the same material – after all, we put Nightfall on our Sight and Sound Ballot of the ten greatest films of all time. It is something of a relief to report that while The Stranger Within a Woman is a very good movie, it is not in the same league as Nightfall. And more important (to me), the two films are quite different, which was also welcome news, as it would have been disappointing to learn that Claude had just lifted the best of his marvelous film from elsewhere. But despite the fact that the two adaptations each hit the same touchstone plot points of the novel: murder, guilt, serial confession, minor parallel intrigue at work, and resolution, there is actually very little overlap between them. Naruse does bring one subplot more clearly to life and purpose, but his three principal characters are less interesting (both individually and in their relationships), our protagonist here seems more self-indulgent than tormented, the police, subtly deployed in Nightfall are absent here, two extended road trips (wisely avoided by Chabrol) meander, and, perhaps piling on (it is, to repeat, a good movie) Stranger is infused with a hint of judgmental misogyny notably withheld in both The Thin Line and Just before Nightfall.
Not that it’s a competition, but The Stranger Within a Woman is more than an order of magnitude better than the two Chabrol rarities that round out today’s bootleg series. Le Tigre se Parfume a la Dynamite (1965), anticipates the far superior, gloriously camp TV show Batman which would premiere two months later—complete with ridiculous fight sequences and damsels in distress. Le Tigre is an undistinguished sequel to the undistinguished feature Codename Tiger (1964), two weak James Bond spoofs (think Matt Helm without Dean Martin), both co-written by star Roger Hanin, and watching it now raises the musical question, why was Chabrol making such movies? (Into this mix you can add 1965’s similarly disposed Blue Panther.) The answer is, as Andrew Sarris well observed, after a string of flops, Chabrol’s financing dried up, and he “was forced to accept commissioned projects to keep his hand in.”
That excuse does not well explain Death Rite (1975). We saw this in a faded, dubbed, Portuguese print, but that was the least of this movie’s problems. Shot on location in Tunisia (one suspects financing drove that decision), the film features the great Jean Rochefort, the well-regarded Franco Nero (that’s Mr. Vanessa Redgrave to you), and Gert (Goldfinger) Fröbe. What is this movie about? It’s about 94 minutes long. Okay, that’s a tired joke, but I’m not actually sure what the movie is about, though I insist that the use of balloons here is somehow supposed to gesture at Chabrol’s very fine The Rupture (1970), though I have no theory of how or why.
Nevertheless, I’m delighted to have seen Death Rite (perhaps tied with The Twist, from the following year, for Worst. Chabrol. Ever.), because that screening leaves only Le Cheval d’Orgueil (1980), which Vincent Canby described as “an oddball if totally sincere footnote to the Chabrol career,” as Claude’s only feature we have yet to see—although, like Bergman, the prolific director left behind a large trove of TV movies. Some of them have proven to be pretty good. The chase continues.
