We'd planned to cover these two very different films in separate posts......
But since they both take place in Venice......
........and they're a perfect example of the phrase, "going from the ridiculous to the sublime"....we decided on the 2-for-1 deal.....
Let's start with the ridiculous 'The Venetian Affair' (1966), a cheapjack MGM quickie calculated to cash in on the still smokin' hot spy boom and the TV popularity of 'The Man From Uncle's' suave, Bond-ian hero, Robert Vaughn.
Taken from a Helen MacInnes espionage thriller, the film's ludicrous attempt to simplify MacInnes's convoluted plot renders it even more confusing. And the filmmaking here is in the bottom-of-the-barrel style of a rushed, shot-in-7-days TV episode.....deadly pacing and flat, functional camerawork.
No James Bond cavorting here.....Vaughn's forced to play one of these world-weary, disillusioned, reluctant spies......and he spends the entire film alternating between looking sharp and clean shaven or glooming around with a 3 day beard growth.....( we' d swear he sometimes manages to sport both appearances within the same shot.)
There are a few pluses here and there........Jerry Goldsmith's score (which you'll wish was in a better movie).....and the wildly disparate cast, a mixture of familiar character actors (Roger C.Carmel, Ed Asner) and an international contingent led by Elke Sommer, Luciana Paluzzi and Karl Boehm. Boris Karloff even pops up in a few scenes, functioning as the film's 'McGuffin'.
And we don't remember ever seeing an odder pairing than the tall goofy Carmel and firecracker Paluzzi as a pair of squabbling lovers.....
Don't get your hopes up. It's dreary and dumb all the way through, even with its pile up of corpses. And it manages to make the scenes shot in Venice look like the MGM backlot. Strictly for spy movie completists, a waste of time for everyone else. Zero stars (0)
Moving on to the sublime, Venice becomes an ominous nightmare landscape in director Nicolas Roeg's visually stunning thriller "Don't Look Now" (1973).
This one comes from a Daphne Du Maurier short story about a married couple struggling to hold themselves together after the tragic accidental drowning death of their young daughter.
Roeg, his cinematographer Anthony Richmond and editor Graeme Clifford transform this vaguely supernatural story into a visual feast, with sequences and shots that provide tantalizing clues to a storyline that seems to be heading toward something dark and terrible for the tormented couple played by Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie.
And does it ever.
We'll not reveal any plot points here.......if you've yet to see it, it's a film whose exquisite details should be savored as a first time discovery.
Alfred Hitchcock often spoke of striving for 'pure cinema', in which the storytelling and audience manipulation are achieved almost entirely by the skillful placement of the imagery. "Don't Look Now" still stands as one the greatest example of pure cinema we've ever seen.....
.....and that means a sublime 4 &1/2 stars from us. (****1/2).......and an automatic 'don't miss' on anyone's list.
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