Director

Writers: Roman Polanski (original screenplay), Gérard Brach (original screenplay) (as Gerard Brach)

Cinematography: Gilbert Taylor

Music: Krzysztof Komeda

Stars: Donald Pleasence, Françoise Dorléac, Lionel Stander, Jack MacGowran, Jacqueline Bisset (as Jackie Bisset)

Polanski’s “Cul-de-Sac”

By Walt Mundkowsky
(mostly written in London, 1969)

By this viewer’s idiosyncratic standards, Cul-de-Sac (1966) is Roman Polanski’s sole brush with greatness, and the only feature to keep faith with the surrealist metaphors and perceptions of his celebrated short films. It’s his most bizarrely funny, as well as his most serious work.

Cul-de-Sac takes a Desperate Hours-style situation (criminals on the run invade a normal household) and turns it on its head. George is a fiftyish English factory owner who has sold his business and retired to a fortress-like structure on Lindisfarne, a barren island (except at low tide) off the Northumberland coast. Teresa, his young French wife of a few months, busies herself homebrewing vodka, raising chickens, and advertising her sexual wares to passing males. Into this amalgam of character and landscape come Dicky and Albert, two gangsters wounded in a bungled robbery attempt. This quartet is reduced to a trio when Albert dies during the night. Dicky waits for Katelbach, his boss, to mount a rescue, but it never happens. The accumulated tensions heighten as a party of George’s former associates drops by unannounced. After George forces them off his property, Dicky calls Katelbach again and realizes that he’s been abandoned.

Polanski is here much influenced by the Theatre of the Absurd. Indeed, the proceedings might be profitably described as a cast of Ionesco characters, their outrageous humors and quirks on parade, playing at Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The shifting power alliances among this trio are pitilessly observed; more pessimistic still is the sense that each of them is a solitary planet incapable of contacting the others, obeying physical laws they comprehend only fleetingly.

This is by several miles Polanski’s most ambitious and singular directing achievement. His unnerving use of the setting’s potential for entrapment, his instinct for the detail that clinches a line of development, his restless but purposeful editing touch — all these cohere into a moral argument presented in scathing terms. And Krzysztof Komeda’s off-kilter jazz is itself almost an individual personage — catchily melodic, texturally grating.

The lead performances are as much a triumph of casting as of directing; they reinforce Polanski’s view of human nature by having virtually nothing to do with each other. Donald Pleasance’s George is a career best, and somewhat related to his brilliant Davies in Harold Pinter’s play The Caretaker. In both we are invited to see the desperation lurking beneath the character’s picky, hectoring surface. Pleasance’s skill at shifting in mid-syllable from a command to a confession still astounds. Teresa is a nearly unactable monster as written — conniving, dishonest, juvenile. Françoise Dorléac (older sister of Catherine Deneuve, and tragically dead in an auto accident the following year) at least gives her a coquettish playfulness that renders the extravagances bearable. Lionel Stander has less operating room than they do, by Polanski’s design. Dicky is a none-too-bright career criminal and a blustering brute besides, but he’s the sanest of this unholy threesome. Stander delivers the primary tones unfailingly. Jack MacGowran, one of Samuel Beckett’s prized performers, makes the most of Albert’s deathbed scene. The young Jacqueline Bisset (billed as Jackie Bisset) is a sharp and snotty delight as the guest who notices too much.

An account of Dorléac’s death figures in Derek Marlowe’s novel Echoes of Celandine (1970, The Viking Press, Inc.) —

“On one page, her face stares out at me (beautiful, alert, almost boyish …). It is the face non-Europeans neither produce nor ever appreciate. It is too strong and yet fragile, too independent, too revealing — not only of the owner but also of the onlooker — and too defiantly feminine. (…) she out-Eves Eve in expression alone. If her body has been left to medical science, her eyes, at least, ought to have been left to Tiffany’s.

“I make a note of the actress’s name and attempt to tear the photograph from the magazine, but it is stapled badly, the picture tears, and I am left with half her face in my hand (right eye, a triangle of soft rain of hair, the crescent shadow of a cheekbone) and so drop the magazine, reluctantly, in pieces, on to the floor.

“It is not my night.”

(p. 91)

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Directed by

Screenplay: Alan Trustman & Harry Kleiner

Based on novel, “Mute Witness” by Robert L. Pike (Robert L. Fish)

Cast: Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughn, Jacqueline Bisset, Don Gordon, Robert Duvall, Simon Oakland

Cinematography: William A. Fraker

Editing: Frank P. Keller

Music: Lalo Schifrin

Frank Bullitt, Establishment Nonconformist

Walt Mundkowsky

As an entertainment (“chewing gum for the eyes,” to apply John Mason Brown’s view of TV), Bullitt (Warner Bros. – Seven Arts) must be considered “a good buy”: It holds the attention for the whole of its 114 mins. Problems are mostly concealed by the film’s hip stances.

Detective Lieutenant Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen) is assigned to guard Johnny Ross, a Chicago gangster who is to testify at a Senate subcommittee hearing on organized crime. A none-too-subtle politician named Walter Chalmers (Robert Vaughn) is overseeing the protection. (He tells Bullitt, “A Senatorial hearing has a way of catapulting everyone involved into the public eye — with subsequent effect on one’s career.”) Bullitt gives Delgetti (Don Gordon) and Stanton (Carl Reindel) the first two shifts and goes out with his girlfriend Cathy (Jacqueline Bisset). During Stanton’s watch two gunmen burst into the room and shoot both him and Ross. The mobster is given “no more than 50/50” odds of survival; Chalmers is furious. He tells Bullitt, “In your parlance — you blew it.” Ross dies during the night, and Bullitt vows, “I want the men that killed him” — less because they have committed murder than because they have made Bullitt look bad.

Fearing that Chalmers will close the case, Bullitt sneaks the corpse out of the hospital and refuses to confess its whereabouts. Chalmers serves Captain Bennett (Simon Oakland), Bullitt’s superior, with a writ of habeas corpus; Bullitt is ordered to reveal Ross’s death and is given only one more day to clear up the case. Eventually it comes out that the dead Ross is not Ross at all. As Bullitt waits for the real Ross at the airport, Chalmers isn’t through (“We both know how careers are made — integrity is something you sell the public”). Bullitt kills Ross in a gun battle. When he goes home, he finds Cathy asleep in his bed; the film ends as it should, on a close-up of Bullitt’s gun and shoulder holster.

Peter Yates, a 39-year-old Englishman, has directed Bullitt with cleverness and some imagination. (Reportedly his Robbery with Stanley Baker secured this assignment.) Two sequences stand out. An 11-minute auto chase through the streets of San Francisco is movieland fantasy. The suspension of disbelief would be better served if this were a quarter of its actual length. The other is the shotgun murder of Ross’s impersonator. Rather jerky close shots of the frantic victim (“No, wait — now look — he told me —”) are intercut with close-ups of the assassin slowly squeezing the trigger; the blast hurls the bloodied Ross against the wall with tremendous force. It seems to last an eternity, and is harrowing. Yates produces many brief strokes which, after their initial impact, leave one with a feeling of rightness. The camera tracks through the hospital ward as Bullitt goes to visit his wounded officer; it comes to a stop on the tense, agonized face of Stanton’s wife at his side. She looks up at Bullitt, eyes asking why. The San Francisco locations work hard to match the McQueen coolness factor, how successfully I cannot say.

The McQueen mannerisms are present — the tight little smile, the studied nonchalance — but count as humanizing touches when the script offers so little. Robert Vaughn was not all that keen on playing Chalmers, but his silky timbre gives great pleasure. As Bullitt’s sidekick, Don Gordon is loyal and patient but not thick-headed, and Simon Oakland captures the essence of quiet strength.

Jacqueline Bisset is good enough as Cathy that she enlarges the focus of the film — an error in that it introduces themes it is ill-equipped to resolve. She drives Frank to a motel where he will question a woman, and waits in her car. When the cops converge on the motel she runs in, thinking he has been hurt. The woman is dead, and Frank is talking calmly to his partner on the phone (“Yeah? Yeah, it’s a strangulation”). Her fear for his safety travels through shock, revulsion, and finally anger. “Do you let anything reach you — I mean really reach you? You’re living in a sewer, Frank — day after day. (…) What will happen to us in time?” The film and hero seem embarrassed to have stumbled across this (and her?).

Bullitt should be seen as a manifestation of the Bogart-style private eye. As Stanley Kauffmann wrote, “The private eye was the realist’s hope for intelligence and some justice against the uniformed forces of stupidity. He stood in relation to the police as the man who really sees the score against those who see only the rule-book, and his life-style suited his life-view.” When this rebel is neatly tucked back into the Establishment, he loses most of his force and relevance. Within the power structure, the validity of an individualist like Bullitt is largely drained; he resembles a panther that is engulfed and finally smothered by cobwebs.

William A. Fraker’s glossy Technicolor camerawork is a fine job, despite a tendency to dwell on irrelevancies and trivia (close-ups of the nose of a Boeing 707, a microphone, a red light, some baggage tickets; weird angle shots; a shot through a rained-on window). The editing (Frank P. Keller) moves things along smartly without the exciting forward surge of, say, Boorman’s Point Blank. Peter Yates has made Bullitt about as well as one can make a film about nothing; too bad he isn’t allowed to aim any higher.

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