The Deep Blue Sea

Anyone expecting an aristocratic performance by Vivien Leigh is doomed to disappointment. Clad in a drab series of blouses and slacks, she makes Hester Collier a self-interested neurotic perpetually needing succour from anyone willing to listen. Her main problem is a lack of self-reliance, as the Doctor (Eric Portman) informs her. The men in her life are self-interested in their different ways, and have no emotional capacity to empathise with her. The only person who understands anything is her landlady (Dandy Nichols).

Director Anatole Litvak opens the play to include multiple views of the seedier parts of London, where Hester (Leigh) has voluntarily ended up. The sera is hard and tough - not the place for a shrinking violet trying to assert her authority yet failing.

To all extents and purposes this film adaptation of Rattigan's arguably most famous play is lost. It was also written by Rattigan himself which gives it extra value as it broadens out the drama and uses flashbacks which could not be used on the stage, showing the growing relationship between the two lovers played by Vivien Leigh ( an extraordinary performance ) and Kenneth More as her weak willed lover. Emlyn Williams plays her unimaginative husband and he too stands out as being just right for the role. In fact the whole cast is excellent and Moira Lister is almost a match for Vivien Leigh in her gossipy role of a neighbour who tries to help when Hester ( Vivien Leigh ) tries to kill herself. The performance that is equal to Vivien Leigh is that of a struck off doctor played superbly by the great actor Eric Portman, and in the penultimate scene of the film he gives a light of hope in the darkness of the play which is both wise and moving. That this underrated film may have been too downbeat for audiences and perhaps critics alike is sadly possible in 1955, but for an audience of today the complexities of physical passion and love could be fully understood. So why has it not been put on to DVD ? There must be a good copy out there as it was shown at the National Film Theatre in recent years. So again who is sitting on it and why are no distributors interested ? I possess a poor copy of it in drained out colour, jump cuts and yet despite this the film glows and resonates. No Vivien Leigh film should be forsaken like this; especially a film of her last years when her acting was at its finest. Personally I find this loss shameful and should be rectified as soon as possible. Since writing the above review I have just seen it on UK Talking Pictures, and many thanks for showing it. The film looks almost perfect in Cinemascope and much cleaned up. Leigh is devastating, and Kenneth More's performance excellent. A heart breaking play and a heart breaking film.

"Suicide is painless", the M. A. S. H. song announced, but Hester (played by a negative Vivien Leigh) is determined to commit suicide, beginning and ending the film on the verge of it.

I have long admired Ukrainian-born Director Anatole Litvak for his ability to bring emotional situations to the screen, and I am particularly fond of GOODBYE AGAIN and SNAKE PIT, but here the room where pretty much all the action unfolds has no view at all, other than suicide.

Perhaps the beautiful Vivien Leigh identified with Hester's plight because in reality she was a nymphomaniac bipolar schizophrenic who kept cheating husband Laurence Olivier with Peter Finch and a host of other men, and it fits that she might want to convey to all that she could only see suicide as the solution. Sad as that might be, she died in 1967 of chronic TB.

I watched a shabby, rather unfocused copy of this claustrophobic film on Youtube, which only rendered it bleaker, but I still liked Kenneth More's performance, a happy jobless golfer brimming with unconcerned humor and selfishness, Eric Portman as the horse race bookie apparently preparing medication for the quadruped competiitors who comes to her rescue, Emlyn Williams, as her ditched Old Bailey judge husband who still loves her but is shunned, Moira Lister as the gossipmonger of a neighbor, and other minor characters who you can see fitting into this play by Terence Rattigan.

Vivling, as Larry Olivier used to call his then wife, delivers a rather cold and helpless performance vaguely reminiscent of Blanche in STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE but without the sympathetic touch and the deft direction of Kazan, and not even Jack Hildyard can save the film from unremitting hopelessness with his usually top notch cinematography, here reduced to pretty one living room, with the odd exterior shot.

All told, I can understand why the film rated a dud with critics when it came out. 6/10.

Terrence Rattigan's play was a popular success in London, tho not in the NY production that starred Margaret Sullavan. There were two revivals last year, one in London and one in NY, starring Blythe Danner. Although the movie is boxy and stagebound, it does preserve one of Rattigan's most entrancing creations, Hester Collyer (Vivien Leigh), a woman all at once rabid with latent sexual desire and without remorse or ounce of self-pity for her choices. The performance more than meets the requirement that Hester should never be viewed as either sordid or immoral. Listen, this is the early 50s.

Rattigan's closest American playwright kin was William Inge. Like Inge, he favored characters tormented with issues out of sexual repression and the price they paid for what society, then, viewed as their *sins.* Like Inge, Rattigan was homosexual and often used his characters to illuminate his own dark closet. A video transfer is desperately needed.

For a while it looked as though the BFI's Vivien Leigh season would be without "The Deep Blue Sea". As others have noted here, it's been unavailable for many years. Programme notes revealed that the BFI has a single 35mm print in its archive - with faded colour, sound damage in the first and last reels, and many splices. Nothing better could be located anywhere in the world. The BFI digitised the print and this was shown tonight to a sold-out house seemingly well aware this may be the only chance to see the film on the big screen. It looked better than anticipated. The performances are excellent. Incidentally, whoever said the film is "stagebound" can't have seen it since 1955. Rattigan's play has been cleverly opened out with flashbacks, many locations (among them an air show, Klosters, and the London Embankment) and several big studio sets including a law court, bars and pubs, and a huge recreation of London's Soho. I didn't have a pen and and have now forgotten many of the uncredited actors. But they include Frederick Schiller, Gerald Campion, Jacqueline Cox, Shandra (later Sandra)Walden, Amanda Coxell (later Mandy Harper),Patricia Hayes, Raymond Francis and John Boxer.