![]() ![]() Yet the talent to please is by no means a contemptible one. ![]() ![]() Two other Bogarde vehicles of the period, the 1957 Canadian-set outdoor adventure “Campbell’s Kingdom” (1957) and the 1964 spy spoof “Hot Enough for June” (retitled “Agent 8 ¾” for the American market), have been released by VCI in both Blu-ray and standard versions.Īll eight of these films were directed by Ralph Thomas, one of Britain’s most commercially potent filmmakers, and the subject, then as now, of seemingly no interest whatever from England’s critical establishment. A huge commercial success, it inspired six sequels, now available from VCI Entertainment. Set in a Technicolor London devoid of any trace of wartime drama or devastation, it offered a clean break with the malaise that had largely conquered British cinema (to its advantage) in the immediate postwar years. Known as the Idol of the Odeons (after the Odeon Cinemas chain owned by the Rank Organization, which also produced most of Bogarde’s early films), the young actor projected a very British kind of self-effacing dreaminess - a sort of pocket-size Rock Hudson.īogarde became a star in the 1954 “Doctor in the House,” a modest comedy about the misadventures of a band of medical students. (Olive Films, DVD $24.95, not rated)īefore he became the international symbol of European decadence in art house films like Joseph Losey’s “Accident,” Luchino Visconti’s “Damned” and Liliana Cavani’s “Night Porter,” Dirk Bogarde sustained an entirely different career as a boyishly handsome leading man in the British cinema of the 1950s. ![]() A minimalist solo piano score by Van Cleve further underlines the unexpected gravity of this microbudgeted black-and-white film, one of those little marvels of the American cinema that exists at the intersection of exploitation and art. The Colossus, a Rodin sculpture weighed down by his mighty head, wears robes out of a Comédie-Française production of Racine, and the pacing is as cadenced and deliberate as the robot’s underwater stroll down the East River, on his way to meet his fate at the United Nations building in Manhattan. Lourié, a Frenchman best known as a production designer (his résumé ranged from Jean Renoir’s “Rules of the Game” to Clint Eastwood’s “Bronco Billy”), stages the film less as a horror show than as a classical tragedy. But once the walkout begins (a worker in a railroad engine factory commits suicide, forcing his comrades into consciousness of their own oppression), Eisenstein seems more interested in the cartoonish antics of the undercover agents (with nicknames like the Fox and the Owl) dispatched by corpulent capitalists to break up the strike than he does in the inner dynamics of the workers’ movement.Įisenstein was still formulating his complex theories of montage when he made “Strike,” but if the film offers few examples of his “dialectical” collision of shots to create new ideas, it does suggest a director with a very distinctive approach to cutting film. Set in an unidentified city in prerevolutionary Russia, “Strike” begins with a quote from Lenin, suggesting that the film’s intent is to provide a handbook on labor organization for the surging masses. Made under the influence of the circuslike Proletcult Theater, where Eisenstein had worked as a set and costume designer, “Strike” is a less focused and looser study in propaganda than the relentlessly Pavlovian “Potemkin,” a film that takes time out for comedy, acrobatics and spectacle. SERGEI EISENSTEIN’S first feature, “Strike” (1925), doesn’t demonstrate the seamless formal mastery that would define his second and more celebrated film, “Battleship Potemkin,” released the same year, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. ![]()
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