Lilith

This forgotten, totally under-appreciated film from 1964 is very powerful (I believe it was Robert Rossen's last film). Strangely hypnotic and frightening in a very subtle way, this showed Beatty three years before B&C showing the potential he had in Splendor in the Grass. He also met Gene Hackman while making this and later cast him as his brother in B&C which launched Hackman.

There is also a splendid performance from Peter Fonda, of all people. As Hackman's wife, Jessica Walter showed how amazing she was at a relatively young age and just never got the right parts in decent films. You'll also see a young Rene Auberjenois and Olympia Dukakis in a bit part. I hope more people look into this devastating piece on mental illness.

This film was referred to me by a classmate at the U.S. Navy school I was attending in mid-1965. I was a naive young sailor who invariably felt like I didn't fit in. I had felt very connected with James Dean, specifically in REBEL WITHOUT a CAUSE -- talk about a misunderstood young man! Being a bit disturbed seemed to work with both James and myself when attracting kind-hearted and trusting young women.

That being said, and having no idea what the movie was about, I paid my dime (at the base theater), entered, visited the snack bar and proceeded to have my whole world altered. Warren Beatty a kindred spirit -- honest, compassionate, trusting and vulnerable, with a few secrets of his own best kept buried deep within. Jean Seaberg was a vision of desire, sensuality, and intrigue, with more than enough dark secrets herself to draw me and Warren into her world like the largest, strongest magnet on Earth. Before long the co-stars were as one in Lilith's playground. I quickly followed eagerly -- her world looked far better than any I had ever seen or imagined. I was lead on a fabulous, ALICE IN WONDERLAND journey where, while much was familiar, I wasn't at all sure which way was up.

As the movie ended I still had no sense of direction. Hoping to gain greater understanding of where I had ended up and how to return to the "real" world, although I was not entirely sure I wanted to, I exited the theater, paid another dime and returned to my still-warm seat.

No answer was forthcoming -- only more questions, as I re-entered Lilith's wonderland. I think I have never left, nor do I have even the slightest desire to.

This is a film I have never seen and I enjoyed the great acting by Warren Beatty, (Vincent Bruce) and Jean Seberg, (Lilth Arthur). Vincent Bruce is a Korean War Veteran and has returned to his home town and is trying to find a job and eventually he finds work in a mental institution. Vincent is assigned to a help a very attractive blonde girl named Lilth who never goes outside and once she set her eyes on Vincent things change and there becomes a great improvement with her mental state of mind. Lilth really spins a web all around Vincent and even teases him with a lesbian relationship with another female inmate. This is a very different and interesting film with young stars just starting out like, Gene Hackman and Peter Fonda.

Jean Seberg was a woefully inadequate actress in almost every role in which she was cast but she seemed born to play Lilith, the unstable, deeply amoral 'heroine' of Robert Rossen's last film. It's an extraordinary performance and it's extraordinary because it doesn't appear to have anything to do with 'acting'; it just seems to exist. The theme of the film is madness, not 'mental illness' but madness in the truly Shakespearean sense of the word, and everything about the film is heightened, a little unreal. Eugen Schufftan photographs the film in a hazy monochrome with the emphasis on white. We peer at the characters through shafts of sunlight, (and there is a lot of water on view, too).

And Seberg isn't the only extraordinary performance. There is excellent work, too, from Warren Beatty as the young nurse drawn into Lilith's web, Kim Hunter as the woman who runs the institution where Lilith is housed and Peter Fonda, (the best of his early performances) as another patient obsessed with Lilith. Indeed the whole cast, (which includes a brilliant, early cameo from Gene Hackman), is working at the top of their form.

The film is an adaptation of a J R Salamanca novel but Rossen renders it in wholly visual terms. He uses his camera the way an artist uses his canvas to convey the inner lives of his characters. It isn't a total success. There are times when it dissolves into hysteria and the symbolism tends to get a bit top-heavy, but it is still a fearless, totally uncommercial movie, possibly it's director's best, and a key American movie of the sixties.

The mental institution in this film, called "Poplar Lodge" I believe, is modeled on Chestnut Lodge, a Bethesda, Maryland institution famed for early attempts to establish interpersonal relationships with (rich) psychotic patients. This fits the institutional style depicted in this film. Hopwever, the main characters do not seem to be mentally ill so much as metaphores for the madness es in our society. The perception that sexual expression represents evil or crazy behavior, not changed all that much from the time this film was made, frequent wars, and the way sensitive people are brushed aside as others hustle toward dubious goals, are all personified as forms of madness. Okay so far.

But the film does not quite work. The character played by Anne Meacham, seething with barely suppressed sexuality, works, but Lilith, played as a golden haired all American, girl next door beauty, doing and saying odd things, making up her own language, seeing herself as an outside observer of our society, is a character which doesn't hit home. She seems more quirky than mad. That she drives men into destructive actions seems somehow unlikely. At the most, she may be a catalyst for their weaknesses to be expressed.

Jean Seberg doesn't personify madness. She seems just bemused. Warren Beatty conveys a lack of inner direction, a developing depression, and strange longings by looking blank, seeming inarticulate, and acting as if he has no idea of the direction his next step will take. All of this slows this film down to a very languid pace, frequently accompanied by a relaxed bop-along jazz score. Thus, the film is too slow, a long windup for a soft pitch. It is hard to feel much tension, even though it is clear that there is supposed to be a lot of tension. Nice try, but no cigar.