La baby sitter

Artistically,it represents the lowest point René Clément was to reach:he was wise enough to call it quits afterwards.

René Clément 's career had begun to decline,slowly but inexorably,during the sixties.His best works ("les maudits","jeux interdits" ,"Gervaise" and "plein soleil") were made before 1960,that is to say before the nouvelle vague's explosion.

"Plein soleil"(1959)is a movie we must come back to if we want to understand Clément's evolution:his first thriller,and the first version of Patricia Highsmith's "the talented M.Ripley",it was completely successful(although it was not really faithful to the novel),and Clement could believe he was a potential Hitchcock .All his subsequent movies bar two will be thrillers.They all boast an American star:Jane Fonda in "les félins",Charles Bronson in "le passager de la pluie" ,Faye Dunaway in "la maison sous les arbres",Robert Ryan in "la course du lièvre à travers les champs" and Robert Vaughn in this one.Another thing is obvious:they 're getting worse and worse(the movies not the actors!) as the years go passing by:only the first one,with his plot à la Boileau-Narcejac ,is still watchable today.

From "le passager de la pluie" onwards,René Clément showed ludicrous metaphysical pretensions ,quoting Lewis Caroll in the movie mentioned above,trying to mix suspense and subtile hidden meaning:"la course du lièvre..." spreads its action over 140 boring minutes.He hit rock bottom with "la baby sitter" (which was the real French title,I do not know where they found "jeune fille libre le soir"):the plot is so confused it's sometimes impossible to understand it.It seems that Clement had in mind a movie about torturers and victims.His directing is ponderous and lifeless,the cast is mediocre (Maria Schneider who starred in "last tango in Paris",Sydne Rome),the suspense absent,and the plot has more holes than Swiss cheese.Unlike "plein soleil",do not bother to remake.

This movie’s BOMB rating in the Leonard Maltin Film Guide seemed to justify distinguished French director Clement’s bowing out of the industry at the relatively early age of 62 (after all, he would go on to live for another 21 years); though admittedly clumsily constructed at times, it’s hardly such an embarrassing mess that would lead a renowned film-maker to become suddenly unbankable!

The bizarre and eclectic international cast is, in itself, quite notable: Maria Schneider, Sydne Rome, Vic Morrow, Robert Vaughn, Nadja Tiller, Renato Pozzetto and Carl Mohner; THE BABYSITTER, in fact, was an Italian-French-German co-production – albeit filmed in English – from Italian movie mogul Carlo Ponti’s stable. While it’s the Americans (Rome, Morrow and Vaughn) who truly make the film, the contributions of Schneider and Pozzetto (both of whom seemed particular liabilities for Maltin!) are hardly negligible or jarring (Schneider’s haunted, disheveled look by the end of it – having been assaulted by Morrow who, in his fury, took a knife to her hair! – and Pozzetto’s surreal ramble to Morrow himself about the apocalyptic inevitability of two-headed insects and radioactive mozzarella bear witness to this). The stunning Rome has a couple of brief, frank nude scenes (one of them at the very start of the film) but, surprisingly enough, Schneider doesn’t (her rebellious and self-destructive nature, which got the actress famously sacked from Luis Bunuel’s THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE [1977], would soon spell the end for her meteoric stardom); incidentally, the two characters meet when Rome is hit by a taxi in which Schneider is a passenger – and the two later decide to shack up together!

Rome, Morrow, Vaughn and Tiller are all down-on-their-luck actors involved in a complex kidnapping scheme actually inspired by Schneider’s titular line of work: in fact, Rome impersonates the latter at the villa belonging to a former conquest – an American industrialist – who had jilted her (the whole, then, is organized by the man’s very own unscrupulous lawyer!); a gruff Morrow doubles as a telephone-repair man in order to move about inconspicuously in the neighborhood of the designated premises, while the customarily brooding Vaughn lends a definite camp factor to the proceedings. Schneider, who’s an unwitting victim here, and the industrialist’s boy start off on the wrong foot (since Rome had mistreated and even drugged him so that he can be transported to an empty house in the suburbs) – but they eventually bond and, by the end, the kid (named Boots!) doesn’t want to leave her side; incidentally, Morrow is forced to kill an elderly neighbor whom Schneider had tried to contact.

Pozzetto, Schneider’s boyfriend, won’t rest on his laurels – also because he gave her the key to his apartment!; somehow, he manages to locate the house but is scared off by Morrow in the above-mentioned scene they share (it was certainly weird seeing the popular, chubby Italian comic interacting with the likes of him and Vaughn) – the film, then, ends on an agreeably amusing note as Pozzetto decides to call in a professional with a passkey to his home (arriving on the scene loaded with them) but, by this time, Schneider’s come back! By the way, the greedy lawyer decides to keep the ransom money all for himself and eliminates Vaughn and Tiller (a scene witnessed by Schneider and the boy); when Morrow turns up, she tells him he’s been duped and he leaves, disconcerted – after which Schneider calls the police to denounce the lawyer’s involvement in the case…

For the record, Clement started out with the famous WWII semi-documentary LA BATAILLE DU RAIL (1945) and proceeded to such Art-house hits as FORBIDDEN GAMES (1952) and GERVAISE (1956); however, after introducing Alain Delon in the excellent Patricia Highsmith adaptation PLEIN SOLEIL (1960), he seemed stuck in a rut of pulp thrillers right till the end of his career – JOY HOUSE (1964), RIDER ON THE RAIN (1970), THE DEADLY TRAP (1971), AND HOPE TO DIE (1972), etc. Incidentally, the film under review had been shown on late-night Italian TV a number of times in the past – but it was only now, still moved by the footage of Morrow’s horrific death, that I decided to check it out…and for which I was glad since, while essentially unsatisfying, it clearly turned out to be of more than passing interest.

I was not disappointed by this last René Clément's film. It's an international cast, as he did for LA COURSE DU LIEVRE A TRAVERS LES CHAMPS, a couple of years earlier. Not a bad movie which the topic reminded me Yves Boisset's FOLLE A TUER. The nanny and the wealthy kid about to be abducted. Not a masterpiece but certainly not a garbage movie. You would not find such features now. Yes, it's a typical downbeat scheme, as we often saw forty years ago, especially from France. And not only. Good performances too, despite the fact that there was no great actors in the cast. It's also a rather rare film, hard to find and no often released even on French channels.

I love watching such movies from time to time, gloomy and so sad.

The movie has been released on treeline films ( www.treelinefilms.com ) and I bought it at the store for .99 and worth every penny! They also had many other films including Mr. Wong Detective starring Boris Karloff. More on that in another review. The film is in colour and the soundtrack is a little catchy. Its in English but the voice seem to be out of sync. I am a fame of Robert Vaughn and wanted to see what he was up to. Well for most of the movie he is not present. The ending was a little surprising. Seriously I just bought it to kill time while I programming and found myself watching it to the end just because it was so bad...you know like a car wreck...

What a cast! Maria Schneider, Sydne Rome, two absolute beauties, Nadja Tiller, another beauty, Vic Morrow, Robert Vaughn and the unique Renato Pozzetto, who kind of steals the film with his role of an involuntary comic, excellently played by the actor. The story is trivial, the kidnapping of a boy for a ransom. The implications between the characters are interesting though. Worth seeing especially for Maria Schneider and Renato Pozzetto.