A ilha do Desejo

Edmond T Greville was nothing but a beginner when he made the most risqué movie ( the Office Catholique Du Cinéma forbad the movie to their flock at the time ) of his career ; some of his previous works may have predicted such a work (who relegated " et Dieu créa la femme ,in which Christian Marquand already co-starred as one of Bardot's lovers ,to kindergarten) :"remous" "le port du désir" and mainly "le diable souffle" .

"Le diable souffle" almost entirely took place in a house on an island (in the middle of a river),almost cut off the world, where a surgeon , escaping from the Spanish dictatorship wound up;"remous" ,in the thirties tackled a taboo subject :impotence!

Unlike many movies about shipwrecked , there 's no real danger on the island; they have found plenty of tinned food ,and there's game and even she-goats on the place ; probably due to the presence of another shipwrecked ,who wrote a diary ; another weak point :although there are two French ,one English and one Italian (born in Tripoli) ,there's no problem of languages .

But it does not matter,for the story focuses on the characters ,a hunk and three babes (one of the girls is a mentally disordered person );it's a fantasm come true : and as they do not really struggle for their life,sex comes to the fore ;and it might be their doom ;told in voice over by Christian Marquand ("le diable souffle" used the same device to introduce its character),slowly but inexorably , the relationships deteriorate ; intimity is impossible on a tiny island ,and the story becomes some kind of lesson in survival ...Who will survive?

I have been trying to track this movie down for decades. Again, like our other friend in Australia, I saw it in Sydney (late-night) on free-to-air as part of an "adult" movie festival on Channel 10 it was, and I still remember it's haunting musical theme and have been trying to trace that too. I know it's not a great film but to me there is just something about it, maybe due to the music so if anyone can throw any light on the subject, I would appreciate it.I'm off to Amazon France to see what I can find. Something tells me that after looking at the movie's credits here, I think that maybe another composer did the English version, it HAS been known to happen before.

Probably one of the lowest budgets ever seen till Reservoir Dogs, since only five people appear, with one location--the island--and two props--a life boat and an M1 carbine.

A sort of "onanist" fantasy essentially, where one virile man is marooned with three desirable women. However, one of the three is not all that pleased about having to share him with the other two.

The jealous one, Magali Noel, is the principal in an underwater nude scene incomprehensible in a movie from 1959 Bear in mind too: I was watching it on free-to-air TV in the mid sixties, albeit late at night. Evidently the censor had gone to bed early.

Anyone who knows where to come by a copy is invited to tell me.

As to similar viewing I can only think of the work of Henry Clouzot "The Wages of Fear", "Les Heroes sont Fatigue" (a.k.a. "The Heroes and the Sinners"), with Yves Montand as the sweating, stranded French expatriate loser...and other 50's French movies glimpsed similarly on late night television but not long enough to cite. Whether there was ever a name given to the genre I would be curious to hear.

As with many persons who saw this movie in the late 1950s or early 60s, it was an unforgettable experience for me during my adolescence. I just remember it was erotically intense, not graphic, with three very beautiful female stars of those years and the 50s version of a hunk, all alone in an island. There is a funny visual reference to it in T.G. Alea's "Memorias del subdesarrollo", when a film director (Alea playing himself) shows to the protagonist several scenes and shots that had been cut by Cuban censorship, and that he was planning to add to one of his own films. One of these clips belongs to this motion picture, when Christian Marquand is kissing one of the women and adjusts his body on top of hers, between her legs. It is funny to see it has three costume designers, when they were hardly dressed; three producers and so many composers! I would love to see it again. And it also had a sexier title in Spanish, "The Island of Desire".

This low budget sex-exploitation film was unusual in many different ways. For starters the budget couldn't get any lower with just four actors running around a desert island. On the other hand these four actors are not the usual no-name individuals common in so many of these sex campers. Here you are dealing with three ladies which had already established themselves as serious actors in European and Hollywood films (Rosana Podesta, Dawn Addams, Magali Noel) and a young stud who had appeared in several respectable classics and would later become an accomplished director...Christian Marquand.

I saw this film when I was a totally innocent 13 year-old and it made quite a dent on me. I have not seen it again but it remains forever in my mind. It woke me up to sex and its power on human beings. It also taught me that things about sex are not always black and white. Gray prevails. Of course, of the quartet, only Magali Noel plays the sex-crazed lunatic and this was an inspired casting. Noel in any film role always has that decadent insane look on her beautiful eyes and that is probably why she showed up in so many Fellini movies later on. In any event, those three ladies are a sight with those scanty beach outfits and there's a definite amount of suspense in their relationships with the only man in town.

It'd be nice if this film ever makes it to home video. I, for one, would like to see how the movie holds up in time and if it was really the source of so many fantasies one experienced in those early days.