Hello sadness. Sumptuous, widescreen CinemaScope production all about the aesthetic beauty of natural surfaces, sea and skin. Idle rich Anglo-American family that hardly anyone in the world could relate to vacation in the French Riviera and fret over their romantic pastimes while not busy with their athletic pastimes. Surly, sober tyrant auteur Otto Preminger somehow achieves a light, almost frivolous delight sandwiched between his Saint Joan and Anatomy of a Murder. Something about the saturated color of Mediterranean vistas contrasted with crisp black-and-white scenes of chanteuse Juliet Greco singing a torch song in a night club makes for a remarkable fusion of the avant-garde and kitsch, made at the very moment when bloated Hollywood extravaganzas were about to cave in under their own weight while being nipped away in little chunks by the influence of the Nouvelle Vague and independent cinema. At the center of it is mercurial, spritely Jean Seberg, Joan of Arc a year earlier, star of Godard’s Breathless a year later, but here a capricious socialite out for a good time and nothing more, a wealthy Gidget. Frequently seen in and out of the water in swimsuits, both she and Geoffrey Horne seem to have been cast strictly for their trim, tanned, youthful beauty, which, posed in tableau with aqua blue sea and sky and jutting rocks and green trees, whip up overwhelming sensuality. When Deborah Kerr appears, moving in with Seberg’s father, David Niven, and wants Seberg to do her homework, she is targeted for destruction. (Frankly, if I was a 17-year-old on the loose in the Riviera in the late 1950s, I would murder anyone who tried to interfere too.) The sudden burst of tragedy in the film’s last five minutes is somewhat awkward and incongruous compared to the tone of the rest of the film, but it does add to the overall feeling of soap opera-like passion that was threatening to interrupt the pleasant vacation all along. The film ends with a humbled Seberg, back in tinted black-and-white, gazing into a mirror and smearing cream on her face, distantly, maybe unconsciously, hoping to stave off the withering effects of age that will soon enough transform her into the Deborah Kerr character she so despised, a middle-aged woman jealous of youth who can only gain pleasure from spoiling the carefree fun of young people. Special mention must be made of the phenomenal, painfully gorgeous hand-animated main title sequence and poster design by the great Saul Bass, from the same year he did likewise for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. (Preminger and Hitchcock were the two greatest employers of Bass’ talent in the late 50s and early 60s.)
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