ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT FILM: THE LADY KILLER

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31061, 17 May 1966, Page 13

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT FILM: THE LADY KILLER

This review of Joseph Losey’s film. “Modesty Blaise,” a British entry in the Cannes festival, is reprinted by arrangement from “The Times,” London. There has long seemed to be one obvious answer to all Britain’s problems at international film festivals: give up the search for films to enter which wear their cultural pretensions on their sleeve, and hit them instead with James Bond, or the Beatles, or both, relying on the surprise of sheer entertainment value to sweep the board.

At last the advice is being taken: Cannes this year got in full force, if not exactly James Bond, at least the best possible substitute, a film : based on Peter O'Donnell’s no-holds-barred strip-cartoon, with Monica Vitti manysplendoured as the Mata Hari of the Space Age. The original strip, of course. is self-conscious: tutored by psychologists and sociologists. Mr O’Donnell knows well enough what they and the Pop artists expect of him and his creation, and sees that they get it, while using the knowledge thus gained to keep always one outrageous step beyond his readers’ (viewers?) wildest imaginings.

The film works the same way. For a few minutes it looks as though it may be dreadful, one of those terribly patronising intellectual attempts to send up something popular which is completely aware of its own absurdity to begin with. But then suddenly, with the first appearance of the archcriminal Gabriel (Dirk Bogarde in slit-eye spectacles and an ashen wig), the film hits the right tone: enjoying its own preposterousness, it still manages to work inside the conventions of the secretagent genre and keep us on the edge of our seats even though we giggle. When it is funny it is very funny indeed. The whole topsy-turvy organisation of Gabriel’s fantastic Mediterranean hideaway, with “Mrs Fothergill” (Rosella Falk) cheerfully torturing prisoners to death with all the earnest application of a junior

hockey-captain while Gabriel covers his ears so as not to hear the boiling lobsters scream or swigs lilac liqueur with a goldfish still in it under a selection of pastel sunshades, is conjured up in an eye-dazzling assortment of op-art decors and with a feeling for the funny-sinister worthy of Charles Addams. If the baddies are Op, the goodies (relatively speaking, of course) are resolutely Pop: Modesty and her companion in legalised crime.

Willie Garvin (Terence Stamp), live and love—everyone but each other—among a litter of dolls, cushions, tailors’ dummies, and the other paraphernalia of highpriced junk without which no with-it bed-sitter has been complete for several years. (Interesting point: does this mean that crime is more modish than virtue?). But Op or Pop, the way the film looks never ceases to stagger and delight: the designer, Richard Macdonald,

has really surpassed himself. And so has the director, Joseph Losey. While his “respectable” films, based on serious, well-written scripts full of conventional dramatic values (most recently “The Servant” and “King and Country”) have sometimes been disappointing, he has seldom failed to rise to the challenge of decorating nonsense attractively. Modesty Blaise is all decoration, with no noticeable desire to do anything but entertain.