By this point in the 1960s the use of black-and-white photography was a statement of artistic intent. So no bright red London buses or other colorful tourist features here. Instead, there’s an overall drabness, lack of bite and energy and a curious tale headlined by a purportedly rising star and a faded Hollywood marquee name. We’re back in rebel territory without much to distinguish it, a poor American studying art on a scholarship who gets in with a wealthier crowd, an under-explored Oedipal theme. On the other hand, the gender-reversed May-December episode is treated with more realism. There’s one superb scene of spite.
The impoverished Marco (Michael Parks), friendly with medical student Timothy (John Leyton), quickly appropriates his girlfriend Sarah (Jennifer Hilary), the cuckolded one too spineless to object, too needy of the arrogant buddy’s attention. They move into an apartment together. Timothy’s over-protective widowed mother Carol (Jennifer Jones), seeing the dangerous influence Marco wields, tries to separate them. She’s worried about how her son will react to her plan to marry confident businessman Martin (Guy Doleman).
Marco is theoretically at least the kind of pushy character who’s had to pull himself up by the bootstrings and despises his friends who merely inherited their good luck. He’s less of an Alfie (1965) than a self-destructive version of the rough-hewn Albert Finney character in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) but minus any genuine redemptive working class credentials. We never learn much about him.
When he makes an ill-advised play for Carol she dismisses his “schoolboy attempts at flirtation” and humiliates him. When she catches him in a bedroom in her house with Sarah. she wipes the lipstick from his mouth with a linen handkerchief and tosses said item out of the window. This scene taking place in front of a bunch of partygoers being given a tour of her grand house. He is thrown out.
Later, he wins back her favor after saving Timothy from being beaten up in a fight. What begins as a demonstration of maternal instinct soon leads to bed. But in the morning, in a reversal of the scene at the party, his draws lipstick on her lips, then wipes it off with a linen handkerchief and tosses the item out of the window. He was just using her. One of the best revenge scenes you’re likely to come across and carrying contemporary reverberation, not so much of the older woman falling for the younger man (an ongoing trope these days) but of the foolish woman trusting a man who has little interest in being faithful and treats her either as a sex object or an extension of his domination over the opposite sex.
It doesn’t end well, once Tomothy gets wind of his act, but the climax, especially the minor twist, feels tacked on. Marco’s the kind of character who romances them and leaves them, no love involved (except for himself), relatively little consequence, only tripped up by happenstance, and without engendering any empathy or sympathy from the audience.
In part this is because Michael Parks was an inexperienced movie actor, a rising talent after landing the male lead in Bus Riley’s Back in Town (1965) opposite Ann-Margret, which had a much better script, was in color (natch) and any time the plot slackened the camera could turn to the actress to save the day.
And in part it fails because Jennifer Jones was attempting one comeback too many, her first picture in four years, and only in her second in a decade, the marquee appeal that won her an Oscar for Song of Bernadette (1943) and a quartet of nominations besides long gone. Like contemporary Olivia de Havilland in Light in the Piazza (1962) she’s on relatively solid ground as a mother, but it’s quite a stretch for her to fall, even in a moment of weakness – unlike de Havilland who resists blandishments – for the churlish Marco.
It’s not helped by the weakness of the rest of the acting. John Leyton (The Great Escape, 1963) never managed the leap from pop star to movie star and Jennifer Hilary (The Heroes of Telemark, 1965) was merely another ingenue.
Daniel Petrie (Stolen Hours, 1963) is out of his depth with material that doesn’t quite fit together and doesn’t get a tune out of his male lead. Script by Millard Lampell (Escape from East Berlin, 1962).
The lipstick-wiping scenes stand out, and Jones is always watchable, but this is hardly memorable.
The Magnificent 60s 