Friday, Aug. 27, 1965

Darkness in Brittany

Rapture is hardly the word for this penumbral play of love against loneliness. But whatever the name, the film will boost the artistic stock of English Director John Guillermin, whose feature films have covered such varied terrain as The Day They Robbed the Bank of England, Waltz of the Toreadors and Guns at Batasi. And it will clinch the reputation of France's 15-year-old Patricia Gozzi, whose first big role was in the warmly praised Sundays and Cybele (TIME, Dec. 7, 1962). The three years have deepened her mobile beauty and candid eyes, and have added a new range that enables her to bring off an astonishingly subtle and convincing leap to maturity after one of the movie's climactic scenes.

In a big, brooding farmhouse on the coast of Brittany, surf roaring and crashing against the rocks below, lives a fierce-eyed, craggy recluse (Melvyn Douglas) -once a prominent judge in Paris, and now a bitter misanthrope who spends most of his time bombarding his onetime friends with mimeographed diatribes about justice. With him live Agnes, his "strange" daughter (Gozzi), and Karen, a sexy slattern of a maid (Gunnel Lindblom, a recruit from the stable of Swedish Director Ingmar Bergman).

Agnes makes a scarecrow out of her father's old black suit, and when an escaped criminal (Dean Stockwell) puts on the scarecrow's clothes and collapses from a wound, the lonely threesome discover three compelling reasons to shelter him from the police. To the irascible old judge, he is a potential audience; to Karen, he is a potential bedmate; to Agnes, he is her mystical scarecrow come to life. In the unfolding of the story, each eventually gets something of his wish.

The actors serve their roles superbly, easily overcoming the initial incongruity of diverse accents that is inherent in the new international style of casting.* Stockwell, if a little too prettily dimpled for his own good, is a sensitive fugitive and lover; Lindblom is as undomesticated a domestic as a young sailor on the lam could wish. Melvyn Douglas, one of Hollywood's smoothest eyebrow-archers in the drawing-room comedies of the '30s, began a promising new career as Hud's grizzled old man, is even better now. But Rapture really belongs to the blazing Miss Gozzi, who begins as the same frightened, fantasy-struck child Cybele was, and graduates to a woman's love through joy, homicidal rage and searing pain, hardly making a move that does not register on the heart.

* Inspired not by international understanding but by cold cash at the box office. Stringing a film with talent from three different national markets -the U.S., France, Sweden -is like fishing with three hooks instead of one.

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