We unfortunately saw a cropped version of Losey's rare 1959 thriller on TPTV, thus only half of Hardy Kruger's head is sometimes visible. It's rather good. Kruger arrives at a lady's apartment, followed soon after by the police - Gordon Jackson, then Stanley Baker and John Van Eyssen (both also in Losey's next film The Criminal). It appears the woman he is there to meet is murdered and they think the Dutchman did it. But as we've seen him arrive, we know he didn't... or do we? There's enough in Ben Barzman and Millard Lampell's BAFTA-nominated screenplay to keep you guessing, whilst it backtracks to show a slightly weird relationship progressing between artist Kruger and bored housewife Micheline Presle.
There's a slight foreshadowing in this of The Servant, in the social difference between down to earth Welshman Baker and more upper class Van Eyssen, who's connected to a Lord who has some peripheral connection to the case (old boys' network sticking together) and also in the way that much of the action - initially at any rate - is confined to a single, tastefully furnished dwelling. Also the opening, almost a version of Kafka, in which a man is accused of a crime that isn't even specified, must have suited Losey, who was booted out of his own country as part of the McCarthy Witch Hunt. Plays also slightly on the fact that the Kruger character is 'foreign', an 'artist', 'different' (an American in England).
Considering it was only a year after John Mills and Slyia Syms were censored for rolling around in the desert in Ice Cold in Alex, it features a quite risqué sex scene, for its time.
Losey's in the good company of Powell/Pressburger alumni Christopher Challis and Reginald Mills. Robert Flemying's in it as well. And Jack MacGowran.
Micheline Presle will be 100 in August. She has been working steadily, mainly in France, since the 1930s.
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