Terence Young is a moderately skillful Englishman who keeps laboring away at the action thriller, always with less than satisfying results. His three Bond pictures (Doctor No, From Russia with Love, Thunderball) had barely an atom of personality, and it would be charitable to describe The Poppy Is Also a Flower and Triple Cross as mediocre.
French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-73) is hard to pigeonhole. He operated outside established channels (eventually running his own studio) yet he employed movie stars. An inspiration to the New Wavers who liberated French cinema, he remained a consciously classical technician. Abroad he’s best remembered for a trilogy of gangster dramas — Le doulos (1962), Le deuxième souffle (1966) and Le samouraï (1967).
The Girl on a Motorcycle (Warner Bros. – Seven Arts) is not a title likely to attract studious filmgoers, and on the whole it is perhaps just as well. But the movie succeeds at what is seldom attempted — re-creating a poetic novel’s imagery in visual terms.