Don’t Look Now ***** (1973, Julie Christie, Donald Sutherland, Hilary Mason, Clelia Matania, Massimo Serato, Renato Scarpa, Leopoldo Trieste) – Classic Movie Review 681

The dazzling, chilling and eerily disturbing 1973 pyschic chiller Don’t Look Now, based on Daphne du Maurier’s story, is easily esteemed British director Nicolas Roeg’s most popular and successfully realised film.

A perfectly paired Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland star as the John and Laura Baxter, an English married couple, shattered by the drowning of their daughter, who move to a wintry Venice, where the husband is working on restoring a church’s mosaics.

There they appear to contact their drowned child via English blind medium Heather (played by Hilary Mason) and her sister Wendy (Clelia Matania), who seem to bring them a warning from beyond the grave that John Baxter’s life is in danger while he stays in Venice. Heather thinks Baxter has the same gifts of second sight as she has, but that he doesn’t know it yet. The gift can also be a curse.

There is everything to commend and recommend here. Roeg is nothing short of inspired. Christie and Sutherland are at the peak of their powers, acting naturalistically and convincingly, mumbling a lot of their lines like real people do. Christie is both haunted and haunting as a mother desperate to make contact with her dead child, but it is mainly Sutherland’s film, and he really pulls you into his character of a father who fells for ever guilty because he has been unable to save his daughter. Anthony Richmond’s photography of Venice in winter is stunning – indeed the decaying, threatened and threatening Venice is one of the main stars of the film.

Pino Donaggio’s score is outstanding (though his name is misspelt on the credits as Pino Donnagio), adding another extra character to the film, one of its main co-stars. And there is a long continuous succession of memorable sequences, including the stars passionately making love, Sutherland’s spectacular near-death fall in the church and the film’s searing climax as he chases an apparition of his red-coated daughter.

But what is this nightmarish vision of damaged psyches all about? Sutherland has a premonition of his daughter’s death in their pond at the start of the movie and of his own fate later, but the premonitions prove useless and fate can’t be avoided. Venice itself is utterly beautiful, but it is also of course a city drowning in its own watery grave (the Venice in Peril signs are on the wall, water is everywhere, the very element the daughter was killed by). The sisters appear to help the couple, but they actually do not, and so are they actually angels of death?

At any rate, whatever it’s all about, Roeg’s cleverest fusion of artiness and skillful storytelling still makes for a uniquely scary and dislocating experience after all these years. The beautifully staged and edited ending remains very hauntingly creepy, brilliantly effective and leaving in its wake an eerie state of mind long after the film has finished.

Adelina Poerio as the Dwarf.

The British TV version cuts the film’s four four-letter words, but not the famous torrid adult love scene between Christie and Sutherland, with full-frontals of Sutherland but not of Christie. The once ‘shocking’ love scene now seems very tender, loving and beautiful.

Don’t Look Now was released by British Lion in Britain on 16 October 1973 as the main feature of a double bill with an 87-minute cut version of The Wicker Man accompanying it as its ‘B’ feature. You can’t fault that for value, can you? Two five-star movies for the price of one.

Hilary Mason, who is best remembered as the blind psychic Heather, died on 5 September 2006, aged 89.

Also in the cast are Massimo Serato, Renato Scarpa, Leopoldo Trieste, Giorgio Trestini, David Tree, Ann Rye, Nicholas Salter, Sharon Williams, Bruno Cattaneo and Adelina Poerio as the Dwarf. The film doesn’t seem to have a very high opinion of the Italians. Serato, Scarpa and Trieste are all rather camp and creepy individuals as Bishop Barbarrigo, Inspector Longhi and the Hotel Manager. There is a lot of Italian spoken, much of it by Sutherland, whose Italian is mainly limited to ‘yes’ ‘no’, ‘here’, ‘there’, trying to order food, and trying to find out whether the locals speak English. Sutherland’s character, like the film-makers, seems to look down on the Italians, only just casually and slightly, but it is there.

How Hitchcock would have loved making a film of this material – after all he made three of his own from Daphne Du Maurier stories – Jamaica Inn (1939), Rebecca (1940) and The Birds (1963). But of course his would have been a very different movie. There would be none of the zoom shots, swift pans and jump cuts for a start. These are very ugly by the way, and normally to be avoided, but Roeg makes them work as part of the uniquely unsettling nature of his fractured film. The Hitchcock film would have been more formally elegant and stately.

Don’t Look Now, Summertime, Death in Venice and The Comfort of Strangers are the four great, essential Venice movies, a mixed bag, certainly, but all must-see movies. The Talented Mr Ripley is worth a look for Venice lovers too.

RIP the great and good Nicolas Roeg (1928–2018), maker of Don’t Look Now, Bad Timing and The Man Who Fell to Earth.

The 2019 4K restoration of Don’t Look Now enjoyed a one-night only showing in UK cinemas on 17 July 2019. The sound and vision are not in a brilliant state, fuzzy and woolly, though of course the film is still brilliant.

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© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 681

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