Liés par le sang

It seems best to consider Richard Lester's lovely "Robin and Marian" Audrey Hepburn's swansong."Bloodline " is the most distressingly mediocre movie she ever made.

Terence Young had already directed the actress in the excellent thriller "wait until dark" ,a film which compares favorably with Hitchcock's "rear window" .So it was only natural that they teamed up again .

The screenplay is a mess,a disaster ,and it's more complicated than complex.Full of plot holes,of implausibilities (the fabulously rich heiress ,after several murder attempts does not even think of hiring a bodyguard!),and see how Young even copies himself for the last sequence where Hepburn is alone in the house ,of course in the dark,like in the 1967 highly superior effort.

An absurd international cast gives the coup de grâce to the movie: Americans (Ben Gazzara),English (James Mason),Germans (Romy Schneider,Gert Froebe),French (Maurice Ronet) ,Greeks (Irene Pappas),Egyptians (Omar Sharif).All are given lousy parts .They are supposed to be the suspects of a whodunit.

It was said that midway through shooting "Bloodline" Audrey Hepburn finally realized what a horrible and degrading movie this was going to be and desperately wanted to get out of it, but she was under contract and had no choice.

When you see this movie you will realize exactly why she felt so bad about making it. The absolute only reason to watch "Bloodline" is to see how Audrey Hepburn aged like fine wine.

Regarding "Sidney Sheldon's Bloodline", I'd like to correspond to Paramount and inquire why not re-edit the film (remaster), and create a SPECIAL EDITION, maybe with deleted scenes (with Ursula Buchfellner and Eleonore Melzer, which were cut), and commentary. I read parts of the book, and like the book, but the movie, when I watched it in the theater back in 1979, it made no sense, and was confusing, particularly with the Snuff films. The book lets you know WHY these films are created, as with the movie, you wonder why?! OR: remake the movie the way the book is! Great cast, but overall, movie STINKS! Anyway, anybody know the address to write to Sidney Sheldon so I can ask him?! Thank you.

When "Bloodline" was released in 1979, a major magazine review pointed out that in the course of the story, ostensibly for failure to pay a gambling debt, a character's knees are nailed to the floor. The critic then went on to say, `This is what Paramount Pictures is going to have to do to get audiences to sit through this picture.' There aren't enough negative things to say about this abomination of a movie. The meandering, incoherent story is hampered at every turn by ludicrously bad production values. The direction, the inept blocking of the scenes, the lighting, the sets – in every case conspires to make the results look cheap and hollow. The movie is really a miracle of dreadfulness. The following is one of thousand small crimes against cinema throughout the picture: There is an explosion in the street. This is conveyed by a flash of light on the actors in the scene and a sound effect. The next shot, meant to be the view of the street from the window, is a still photograph beneath which someone is apparently waving a lit piece of paper. Just before the cut from this scene, the photograph actually starts to buckle from the heat of the flame. And the filmmakers left this in the film! The real crime against cinema is the fact that the name of Audrey Hepburn is associated with this repugnant film, a monstrosity so putrid, one wishes every single copy of it would magically disappear.

I enjoyed this movie! Any time Audrey Hepburn graced the screen was an occasion and for her to be paired with Ben Gazzara made this movie extra special for me. The story is interesting; the scenery is beautiful; a delightful romance develops; and who could forget Omar Shariff's shenanigans with his wife, his daughters and his mistresses? I do not wish that every single copy would disappear - I wish that they would put it on DVD. In fact, I have an excellent copy on VHS that I taped from TV. I have tried to copy it on my DVD recorder but they marked it so that it cannot be copied. I don't understand this practice but that has nothing to do with this movie! Sidney Sheldon is an excellent storyteller - and this one is no exception. As pointed out by another reviewer here, there may be cinematic flaws and shortcuts in this film - I did not notice them. I was much too engrossed in the story.