10h.30 du soir en été

Not surprising that the film was initially planned to be directed by Joseph Losey; like Losey's "Accident" or "Secret Ceremony", "10:30PM in the Summer" is full of desperate people struggling with the impossibility of love and the depths of existential pain. There's a love triangle, illicit desires, irrational self-destructive actions, excessive drinking, dark soliloquies. What Losey didn't have, though, is the extraordinary performance of Melina Mercouri...my god she's fantastic. She owns the movie completely. Her character is strong, confident, and filled with unendurable pain. Typically, "women in trouble" are portrayed as weak, helpless, victims. Mercouri is no one's fool; she sees and feels everything, and has no illusions about anyone. It's a very special performance. Where are all the strong and self-determined middle-aged women in cinema? Well, there's Geena Rowlands in Cassavettes' films ....but Melina Mercouri here might be the one to beat.

There's not much information available about this film, but it appears to have been shot in English by Jules Dassin, who had directed Melina Mercouri in the international hit, Never On Sunday, and had gone on to make the equally popular Topkapi. This film is a decidedly smaller and artier affair, based as it is on a Marguerite Duras novel. The look of the film is distinctly 60s, and Romy Schneider never looked more beautiful. Mercouri is excellent as an alcoholic who has fallen out of love with her husband (Peter Finch) and tries to find solace by helping a murderer escape from the Spanish police. Much of the action of the film goes unexplained. There is some truly remarkable photography by Gabor Pogany, an otherwise unheralded Hungarian cinematographer who plied his trade in the Italian film industry of the 50s and 60s to little acclaim. His work here is quite revelatory, at times bringing to mind the German expressionism of the teens and twenties. Overall, an abstract delight not a million miles away from Antonioni's Blow-Up.

I'm totally jealous of Romy Schneider. Not only did she get to act in this extremely steamy movie with Peter Finch, but she also had an offscreen affair with the extremely sexy German actor, Curd Jurgens. I guess she was a magnet for guys who should have been cast as Captain Von Trapp.

Romy plays the friend of Melina Mercouri, a paranoid lush. For some reason, Melina has invited Romy to go on a trip with her and her husband, Peter, even though she knows there's sexual tension between them. When Melina drinks herself into a stupor, she sees (or imagines) the two trying to keep their hands off each other - until they can't. This movie features the first explicit sex scene I've seen in a Hollywood movie, chronologically. Prior to 1966, a scene like this would never have been filmed with major actors and shown in mainstream theaters. In addition to the gratuitous nature of the scene, and the graphic details, there's also female nudity and oral sex. I guess we know now why Peter Finch wasn't in The Sound of Music. Captain Von Trapp wouldn't do those things.

A side plot of 10:30 P. M. Summer (or is it the main plot and it's just hard to pay attention to it?) is Melina's obsession with a murderer on the lam. She imagines what it would be like to meet him, then she finds him, and she thinks it's exciting to help him. Why? I don't know. Why does she drink and pretty much encourage her husband to sleep with her friend? I don't know. Why watch this movie? Well, we all know the answer to that one.

Kiddy Warning: Obviously, you have control over your own children. However, due to sex scenes, I wouldn't let my kids watch it.

DLM Warning: If you suffer from vertigo or dizzy spells, like my mom does, this movie might not be your friend. During the scene when they go to a flamenco club, the camera is handheld like a documentary to show "realism". Also, during the sex scene, the camera swirls around in a big circle, and it will make you sick. And whenever Melina has a fantasy, it shows her POV in a handheld camera. In other words, "Don't Look, Mom!"

I just saw this film (at LACMA) after having seen it when it first came out. Wow! I didn't remember it that way at all! I guess when you're 19 this kind of stuff seems hot stuff, or very very deep. Now that I'm 56, I think it's just kind of pretentious but full of wonderful acting, nice cinematography and lighting, and very pretty actors! Romy Schneider looks beautiful in this, yes. But I have seen her looking even better (mostly in French films). She did, though, have some very early-50s kind of makeup, which was perplexing, considering this was '66. Melina, unbelievably, looks very contemporary; she could have just stepped out onto Rodeo Drive in 2004. I had forgotten how STRIKING her looks are. And her emoting is, well, breath-taking. Peter Finch looked so slender and drop-dead elegant. His face took MY breath away. God, what a face! (No wonder everyone supposedly from Vivian Leigh to Danny Kaye fell in love with him!) Note: Topkapi came before this film, not after. As to the plot, maybe I'm just dense, but I didn't really see the point. I just wanted to be a part of the party! Altho' Melina played, supposedly, a horrible drunkard, I felt she acted like a reasoned lady at all times and don't see what the husband and the lover were "tsch tsch"ing about. She seemed to keep it together pretty darned well for a supposed alcoholic. The whole bit about the murderer was just a turn-off to me, and I thought it kind of spoiled the fun (some of you smarties will say, Duh, that was the POINT!), but I didn't WANT the fun to stop! In sum, pretty people in exotic locales. Lots of this film was very engrossing. The actors are everything here.

I remember when this film opened in London in 1967. It opened simultaneously with 'Accident' by Joe Losey, and 'Accident' eclipsed this one, as they were considered too similar: mysterious, conveying ineffable unspoken currents between people, a pervasive air of unreality and aetherial suggestiveness of things that could not quite be seen. Of the two, this was the more difficult to describe and comprehend. So 'Accident' ran for a long time, while this closed in a week. It is only now that this neglected masterpiece, doubtless buried for decades because it was 'a commercial failure', has reappeared and I have been able to see it again. The colour has not faded and is as fresh as when it was first released. Jules Dassin surpassed himself with this masterpiece. It is his greatest work. Of course, it all relies heavily upon the genius of his wife, Melina Mercouri. It is the most subtle and understated, and hence probably the most powerful, of all her overwhelmingly brilliant performances. Mercouri was more than just a genius, she was a demented and Dionysiac genius, a genuine Greek maenad, a barefoot raver on the heights of Parnassus, in the best traditions of her culture. She is here well matched by Peter Finch at the top of his form, two years after he did 'The Pumpkin Eater' and 'Girl with Green Eyes', in both of which he had proved he was one of the leading film actors of his generation. Now in this intense film together, they speak the unspoken thoughts of a highly complex marriage and of emotional ties where two people have grown together at the root: but will the root snap? The beautiful and alluring Romy Schneider is part of a strange trio on a journey in Spain, where passion crackles in the air, and the flamenco hands clap, as a murderer aged only 19 comes into the story. I read the original novella by Marguerite Duras and thought it was poorly written and, although evocative, far from being a superior work. But it provided the atmosphere Dassin and Mercouri were looking for, a hothouse of semi-articulate and complex emotions, of raging currents of suppressed passions, a crisis of existential doubts, a veritable torrent or electrical storm, to match the real storm which lashes the stranded travellers in the film. Rarely has the invisible been filmed so successfully. This film was not really filmed in Spain, it was filmed in the ionosphere, and what appear to be buildings and people are really plasmas of charged particles. Dassin rose above reality, to film what lies behind it. These things are sometimes thought and felt, they are never seen. But here he reveals them to the eye, like a cloud parting. This is not mere cinema, it is something higher.