SANDRA (Vaghe stelle dell'orsa…) - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Electra Myth Sizzles as magnificent melodrama under Luchino Visconti's masterful rendering, screened on ALL-NEW 4K restoration at TIFF Bell Lightbox Cinematheque series "SUMMER IN ITALY", programmed by the inimitable James Quandt.

Sandra - Vaghe stelle dell'orsa… (1965)
Dir. Luchino Visconti
Starring: Claudia Cardinale, Jean Sorel,
Michael Craig, Fred Williams, Marie Bell, Renzo Ricci

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I can think of few juicier morsels of grand melodrama than Luchino Visconti's Sandra (Vaghe stelle dell'orsa…), a modern re-imagining of the Greek myth involving Electra, the Princess of Argos, who, in cahoots with brother Orestes, spins a mad plot to avenge the death of their father King Agamemnon at the hands of Queen Clytemnestra and their stepfather Aegisthus.

Visconti, however, never content to merely ape his inspirations, takes the aforementioned narrative base and careens wildly into the territory of an opera plunged into the deepest depths of genuinely perverse sexual obsession. (A layer of wartime collaboration, Auschwitz and a reclamation of Jewish Heritage is stirred in for good measure along with attempted rape and suicide for those so inclined.)

With the astoundingly baroque black and white cinematography of Armando Nannuzzi, Visconti spins a (seemingly) measured yarn which mounts ever-so broodingly to a shocking, over-the-top climax and a denouement which is as fraught with irony as it is deeply moving.

Beginning at a swank cocktail party in Paris and winding up amongst petty bourgeoisie squabbling within an ancient, crumbling, family estate in the provincial Italian enclave of Volterra, Sandra is a grandly entertaining belly flop into a pool of madness and incest. It makes the sordid spectacles of Giuseppe Verdi at his most floridly, bombastically romantic seem quaint and subtle.

Where Sandra deviates from the Elektra myth is in substituting the sexuality of Daddy worship (and competing with Mommy for Daddy's love) to a deep sexual spark between the sister (ravishing Claudia Cardinale as the title character) and brother Gianni (dreamy Jean Sorel) as a reaction to the siblings' joint belief that their long-dead Jewish scientist father was betrayed to the Nazis and Fascists by their Antisemitic concert pianist mother (Marie Bell) who has now gone completely insane and the mad matriarch's blusteringly petty lover and eventual second husband (Renzo Ricci).

Add to this mix Sandra's loving, but clueless American husband (Michael Craig) and the hunky town doctor (Fred Williams) who still carries a torch for her and we've got ourselves a heady brew, indeed.

Much of the action is centred within the family estate. Sandra and her hubby are visiting to convene at a special ceremony honouring her late father who died at Auschwitz. It's a nice enough tribute, but its reason for being is that the family fortunes are dwindling and the once massive grounds can no longer be cared for. They've been taken over by the town as a Memorial Park dedicated to Sandra's Dad.

There is much in the manner of slinking and skulking about the corridors, corners and shadows of the once grand old house, along with all manner of hushed whispers, most of them related to the unholy relations twixt Sandra and Orestes. The only time vocal timbres gush out full throttle are when we meet Mad Momma who screeches out her various hatreds and regrets with considerable bile and lung power.

The centrepiece of the entire picture is the voluptuous, pouty-lipped, big-ole-dark-eyed Claudia Cardinale, who manages to acquit herself as both a fine actress and ravishing camera-loves-her sexpot.

As is his wont, Visconti allows us to wallow in the majestic mire of the melodrama to our hearts' content, but for those seeking added noggin stimuli (the noggin that thinks, of course), Visconti handily invests the movie with moments of sheer visual poetry and much in the way of historical, social and class-related ruminations. Happily, one can take one's pick or go for the fully loaded big banana split of sex, sin, art and politics.

It's the Visconti way, God Bless Him.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *****

Sandra is playing in Toronto at the TIFF BELL LIGHTBOX. For dates, times and tickets, visit their website HERE. For those who cannot make it to Toronto, a gorgeous import DVD from Italy is available through Amazon. One hopes it's merely a matter of time before the 4K restoration will be available for sell-through on Blu-Ray.

The Region 2 Italian Import of Sandra can be ordered directly via the links below (and as such, contribute to the ongoing maintenance of The Film Corner).

In Canada order HERE

In USA order HERE

In UK order HERE

HARD DRIVE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Well acted, but dour, predictableand typically earnest Canuck drama

NOTE: The Film Corner's Star Ratings will now appear at the end of the review.

A Babe, a Hunk, Jerry Granelli & Anne of Green Gables:
All this and more for you in Halifax!!!

Hard Drive (2014)
Dir. William D. McGillivray
Starring: Douglas Smith, Laura Wiggins, Megan Follows, Jerry Granelli

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Ditch (Douglas Smith) is a hunky dreamboat loner who lives with his single Mom (Megan "Anne of Green Gables" Follows) and a very cool boarder (legendary jazz drummer Jerry Granelli) in their modest Halifax home. Mom urges Ditch to better himself and enrol in community college, but he seems satisfied with his job at the local dump where he can play frisbee-fetch with the junkyard dog and have carte-blanche access to his employers' beater van. He dreams of becoming a musician himself, like Granelli and his long-out-of-the-picture itinerant drummer Dad, but as is typical of Canadian heroes, Ditch doesn't do much about it. He's yet another in a long line of English-Canadian cinema's "Beautiful Losers" that began with the likes of Pete and Joey in Goin' Down the Road and Marshall Dillon in Paperback Hero. When a mysterious American mega-babe (Laura Wiggins) comes-a-sashayin' into town, Ditch's tongue hangs to the ground and he befriends the young beauty with a - you guessed it - dark secret. Not a whole lot happens save for some Mother-Son disputes, an unexpected death and Ditch burning a strange tattoo off the babe's lower back with a piping-hot iron (at her request, of course). Things race to a "I-did-the-math-on-that-one-in-the-first-half-hour" revelation and hard-to-swallow denouement.

Hard Drive is a superbly-acted and beautifully shot drama with a fine indigenous sense of place, but it pokes about far too foreseeably, riddled with an annoying de rigueur indie soundtrack, a surprisingly awkward Granelli score and that dour earnestness of so many Canadian films. McGillivray is one of Canada's great filmmakers. He's given us the astounding Life Classes, Understanding Bliss and the wonderful, but idiotically cancelled CBC-TV series Gullage's. Alas, once in awhile, even the best fail (I'm looking at you John Ford, Frank Capra and, among many others, Ingmar Bergman), so it's hardly the end of the world. He's got a few masterworks left in him.

A deep, dark and predictably Canadian secret just 4 U!!

To be fair. it would be remiss of me not to mention that my 13-year-old daughter enjoyed the film immensely. She loved the two young leads and found the story moving and compelling. As I groused about it during the closing credits, she hurled one of my favourite expressions back at me and cracked, "Dad, really, you're so full of shit sometimes." My burgeoning Pauline Kael has spoken!

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **½

Hard Drive is enjoying a first-run engagement at Toronto's Royal Cinema.

PLEASE FEEL FREE TO ORDER ANYTHING FROM AMAZON BY USING THE LINKS BELOW. CLICKING ON THEM AND THEN CLICKING THROUGH TO ANYTHING WILL ALLOW YOU TO ORDER AND IN SO DOING, SUPPORT THE ONGING MAINTENANCE OF THE FILM CORNER.

AMAZON.CA

AMAZON.COM

AMAZON.UK

THE BUTTERCUP CHAIN - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Gorgeous Douglas Slocombe Cinematography (Almost) Saves This Moronic, Dull, Soft-core 70s Euro Sleaze Replete With Incest and Swingin' Swingers

The Buttercup Chain (1970) *1/2
Dir. Robert Ellis Miller
Starring: Hywel Bennett, Leigh Taylor-Young, Jane Asher, Sven-Bertil Taube

Review By Greg Klymkiw

This dull, idiotic, pretentious bit of soft-core is not especially sexy and lacks even the tiniest shred of entertainment value, in spite of its more ludicrous elements of prurient excess. It is, however, one of the most sumptuously photographed bad movies I have ever seen.

Shot by the brilliant Douglas Slocombe, one is treated to impeccable compositions, delicate interior lighting and sun-drenched location photography of the highest order. And of course, whenever the supple flesh of the attractive leads is bared, Slocombe captures the puff pastry of the ladies and the buff brawn of the gentlemen with the eye of a pornographer extraordinaire.

Not that this should come as a surprise. Slocombe, a multi-award-winning-and-nominated cinematographer had, by the time he worked on this film, been making dazzling images for twenty-five years. His early career in Britain included lensing some of the great Ealing Pictures including the classic chiller Dead of Night, the black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, Alexander Mackendrick’s wry satire The Man in the White Suit, the quiet, delicate and almost elegiac The Smallest Show On Earth and the all-out hilarity of The Titfield Thunderbolt.

Throughout the 60s, Slocombe created indelible images on a variety of classic films from all genres. He gave us the lurid glory of the sickening, terrifying Circus of Horrors, the hip, groovily-dappled colours and endless heart-stopping shots of Raquel Welch in Fathom, the glory of the intimate historical epic The Lion in Winter, Roman Polanski’s gorgeously, insanely, expressionistic The Fearless Vampire Killers, Peter Collinson’s Euro-trashy heist thriller The Italian Job and among many others, the subtly darkening black and white palette of Harold Pinter-Joseph Losey’s The Servant. In the same year The Buttercup Chain was made and released, Slocombe also shot Ken Russell’s phantasmagorical biopic of Tchaikovsky, The Music Lovers a cinematographer-director match made in heaven.

Of course, any of the above-named titles, should probably not even be mentioned on the same page as The Buttercup Chain, but alas, Slocombe was also enough of a pragmatic artist that he also took jobs that were just that – jobs. Not that money was the only aim in shooting this, but I suspect he was attracted to the stunning and wide variety of gorgeous European locations and the prospect of photographing a bevy of babes and hunks against said backdrops.

And just what, pray tell, is a “Buttercup Chain”?

Well, aside from being one of the least entertaining bad movies ever made, it appears to have something to do with the two lead characters and their childhood obsession with buttercups and how this, by extension, transmogrifies into a summer of carnal delight with everyone but each other in order to avoid the hint of incest that lingers over their desire for each other.

“Say, what?” you say!!!

France (the broodingly beautiful and ever-so-slightly mincing Hywel Bennett) and Margaret (jaw-droppingly ravishing model Jane Asher) are cousins. Their respective mothers are twin sisters. From childhood, they are deeply in love – the cousins, that is: not the twin sisters. As adults, they give each other lots of hugs and pecks, but never consummate their fleshly desires for each other. Instead, France desires to “pimp” (the word – I kid you not! – that he actually uses) Margaret out to as many lovers as possible so he can experience, from afar, the joy she will receive from every other man, but himself. For her part, Margaret also wants France to get some lovin’, so she encourages him to bed down the luscious Manny (that scrumptious morsel of big-screen 70s desire Leigh Taylor-Young). France chooses the swarthy Swede Fred (stiff-jawed and bulgingly endowed salami-meister Sven Bertil-Taube) to lay pipe within his beloved.

We, the audience, get to sit back, take our shoes off, apply the palm lubricant of choice and voyeuristically participate in this oh-so-sexy romp through the most exquisite European vacation spots imaginable as our two attractive couples… couple.

Alas, I feel I have made this cinematic equivalent to dog-shit-splattered-sidewalks sound far too watchable, if not downright compelling. It’s not. The dialogue is moronic, the performances wooden and Robert Ellis Miller’s direction is utterly pallid.

Miller’s poor work is not surprising. Essentially a camera-jockey (television director), he lucked out with one big screen picture, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – thanks mainly to a fine cast and lovely source material. Here, he has a quartet of incompetent actors and high-mindedly boneheaded source material.

There is, however, Slocombe’s gorgeous cinematography, but as mentioned above, a myriad of good and sometimes great movies already existed prior to this film and benefited from his magnificent eye. In fact, AFTER shooting The Buttercup Chain, Slocombe continued to dazzle as the Director of Photography on such diverse and solid work as the two terrific Norman Jewison pictures (Jesus Christ Superstar and Rollerball), the flawed, but compelling Jack Clayton version of The Great Gatsby and especially, the first three instalments of Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones pictures.

This deservedly obscure picture has recently and shockingly been bestowed with a DVD release on Sony’s weird “Martini Movies” label. Like many pictures in this series, one wonders why The Buttercup Chain is considered a “Martini Movie”. One thing I can assure, however, is a few dry, stiff, shaken-not-stirred carafes of the old olive-garnished belt-back will numb you rather pleasantly – should you choose, that is, to divest yourself of 95 precious minutes of your life.