Eva **** (1962, Stanley Baker, Jeanne Moreau, Virna Lisi, James Villiers, Lisa Gastoni) – Classic Movie Review 3999

Director Joseph Losey’s beautiful looking, smart and clever 1962 erotic thriller is based on the 1945 novel Eve by James Hadley Chase (1906–1985), author of No Orchids for Miss Blandish, his first book filmed in 1948 and again in 1971 as The Grissom Gang.

Eva stars Stanley Baker as Tyvian Jones, a Welsh writer in Venice who is married to a sad Italian woman, Francesca Ferrara (Virna Lisi), and is destroyed by a cold-hearted French femme fatale hooker, Eve Olivier (Jeanne Moreau). The money-loving French woman Eve erotically ensnares Jones in her spider’s web.

‘Do you know how much this week-end’s going to cost me?’ Jones asks Eve. ‘Two friends, $30,000… and a wife.’ Eve replies: ‘That’s something my husband would never do – discuss money.’

Losey’s dark thriller is really rather effective and underrated, and the actors are spot on in tailor-made roles. There is a good screenplay by Hugo Butler and Evan Jones, and a strong score by Michel Legrand, though the main hero of the day is Gianni di Venanzo for his wonderfully vivid black and white cinematography. Good though Baker is, the movie is all about Moreau’s Eve.

Perhaps surprisingly, it was Losey’s favourite of his own movies, but its power was cut along with 12 minutes out of its original 128 minutes of footage in the slashings of producers Robert Hakim and Raymond Hakim – rightly named. In any case, striking and alluring though it is, it is not Losey’s best movie, as that must be Accident or The Servant.

Also in the cast are Nona Medici, Francesco Rissone, Giorgio Albertazzi, Riccardo Garrone, Checco Rissone, Enzo Piermonte, Alex Revides, John Pepper, Peggy Guggenheim and Joseph Losey.

The 128 minutes version is now restored as the Director’s Cut.

It was originally a Jean-Luc Godard project. Baker replaced Richard Burton, and insisted on the Hakim brothers hiring his friend Losey to direct. Losey said he would not normally have chosen to make a film from Chase’s novel – ‘but I made the film mine more than anything I have ever done’.

The novel is set in America, not Venice, and is a psychological study of a prostitute. With his wife’s blessing, Chase offered a hooker £5 and a good lunch to let him pick her brains.

The original film poster for Eva (1962).

The Hakim Brothers judged Losey’s first cut of Eva way too long at 155 minutes and demanded it was severely cut and withdrawn from the Venice Film Festival. It opened in Paris at 116 minutes, proving a damaging, traumatic incident in Losey’s career. He said the producers cut the film without his permission and the result was a disappointment to him.

Eva is directed by Joseph Losey, runs 128 minutes, is produced by Paris Film Productions and Interopa Film, is released by Rank, is written by Hugo Butler and Evan Jones, is shot in black and white by Gianni di Venanzo, is produced by Robert Hakim and Raymond Hakim, is scored by Michel Legrand, and is designed by Richard MacDonald.

Giorgio Albertazzi, the Italian actor-manager, died on 28 May 2016, aged 92, and was best known for his unsettling role as X in Alain Resnais’s 1961 L’Année Dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad). Albertazzi also appeared in Losey’s The Assassination of Trotsky (1972).

Virna Lisi died on 18 December 2014, aged 78.

Jeanne Moreau died on 31 July 2017, aged 89.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3999

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