A Dandy In Aspic, Madigan, and The Champagne Murders

ANTHONY MANN, a director commonly associated with several good westerns, turned to modern melodrama in his last films, and made some mistakes. For careful balancing of expansive exterior composition, he substituted that betenoir of camera technique, the zoom lens, with its infinite capacity for making an audience think suspense is present when none actually exists. In The Heroes of Telemark, some corny zoom technique was at least in part redeemed by controlled visual construction and a sensible linear narrative. Perhaps A Dandy In Aspic could have similarly transcended its endless zooms to close-ups of anguished eyeballs and urban details; unfortunately, director Mann died three weeks before shooting was completed and star Laurence Harvey finished the film, presumably supervising the editing. What remains is a shooting style in transition (Mann trying to change from pictorial simplicity to a more montage-conscious approach) put together, not really badly, but certainly impersonally. The zoom stops, the shot holds for awhile, and another shot comes on: rhythm occurs haltingly in stops and starts--a lack of continuity adds to the general plot confusion exhibited by 80 per cent of the East Coast newspaper reviewers.

Given the tricky and unpolished style and the ultimate anticlimax of the plot, A Dandy In Aspic isn't half bad. Although Laurence Harvey's acting capabilities enable him to register only an emotional strain of the kind plainly treatable with low-level patent medicines advertised on television, several scenes are genuinely moving, conveying the agony of a very trapped and very unhappy man. A secret service conference between Eberlin (Harvey) and his superiors contains some masterful close shots (chiefly of Harry Andrews), and indicates the high level of photographic composition and lighting in the interiors. A later confrontation between Eberlin and his Russian colleague Pavel (superbly played by Per Oscarrson) uses both lens and set distortion to accentuate the plot tension, creating the film's only interesting relationship despite its vain efforts to generate suspense from the conflict between Eberlin and his inhuman associate Gattis (Tom Courtenay). Mia Farrow, as Eberlin's naive girlfriend, looks interesting about every fourth shot, mishandles some dreadful dialogue about sex and photography (the two seem to go hand-in-hand these days), and wears Pierre Cardin clothes as if she were born in them.

LESS flashy than Aspic, Donald Siegel's Madigan is a quiet tour de force. Describing his own style as "classical," Siegel (director of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Killers) subordinates camera pyrotechnics to dramatic purpose, his close-ups often revealing an obvious love for the excellent performances of his actors. His stated admiration for Richard Widmark is completely justifiable, and Widmark remains one of the finest and most underrated actors working. Siegel likes to keep his camera on the actors as long as possible, often following them in medium close shot over long distances, thereby establishing character detail rare in a short police thriller. Note, for example, the affection Commissioner Russell (Henry Fonda) plainly has for the freckles on his mistress' shoulder, or the visual relationship between Detective Madigan (Widmark) and his partner toward their car and New York City.

The two plots, Russell's ordeals and Madigan's manhunt, alternate formally, cross on occasion, finally come together tragically when Madigan dies and his wife accuses Russell of indirectly murdering him. Russell doesn't know his life has influenced Madigan's, and the film ends ambiguously with no one either innocent or guilty, no one understanding himself or his effect. The small troubles that pervade the film become more tragic in retrospect: Madigan's domestic squabbles are at first banal, finally significant because Madigan dies before they can be resolved in such manner as usually satisfies audiences; his wife's final lament for her dead husband rings hollow because we have only seen her nagging him and his death locks her in the role forever in our minds. Siegel refuses to resolve the personal problems set-up during the film, and although we hope for positive change, we are often left with ambiguity or permanent limbo (Russell's relationship with his mistress, and Madigan's to both wife and job).

In this respect, Madigan is a truly realistic film, complemented by Siegel's lean, often tough, style. Occasional spurts of fast cutting, Madigan intimidating a suspect and the final gun battle, are doubly powerful because of the stylistic restraint in the preceding scenes. Steve Ihnat's high-style performance as a psychopathic satyr is a welcome change from the suave ruthlessness of Aspic's urbane spies.

THE CHAMPAGNE MURDERS (originally, Le Scandale), desrving of much more space than this column can devote to it (its re-release was announced alarmingly close to press deadlines), is far and away the most fascinating film to appear in Boston this year. The work of nouvelle-vague director Claude Charbol (Les Cousins), The Champagne Murders unfolds web-like with the violent surrealism of a nightmare. A decadent party suddenly is no longer what it has been, the guests have become a process-screen behind Anthony Perkins, who in turn finds himself virtually assaulted by a grotesque woman who claims she knew him as a gigolo on the Riviera; the objective reality of the camera has shifted imperceptibly to the subjective perception of an unstable mind. Always eccentric, Chabrol's characters toy dangerously with the lives of their friends and lovers, and in The Champagne Murders, border a thin line between the perverse and the insane. A plot, psychological warfare between Yvonne Furneaux and Maurice Ronet over ownership of the brand name of a famous French champagne, assumes only tangential importance in comparison to questions of what is or isn't real, whether insanity or cold-blooded calculation motivates the strange behavior of characters, and the three murders.

Chabrol's films often begin with a single relationship, then introduce a third person who alters it completely. In The Third Lover, for example, Jacques Charrier jealously destroys the marriage of the writer and his wife; in the immensely complex Champagne Murders, Perkins and Ronet are introduced as inseparable, almost identical companions, but the influence that undermines their relationship remains an unknown until the ending. Always unsure of motive, always aware of an eerie presence that threatens to destroy the eccentric harmony of Chabrol's self-centered trio (Perkins, his wife Furneaux and friend Ronet), we watch spellbound as Chabrol brings us further into an impeccably decorated, completely corrupt world of malevolence. The final images, shocking and indescribable, are unlike any other in narrative cinema and, if nothing else, suggest an existential hell as beautiful and provocative as we are likely to see for some time.