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| Courtesy of Shout Factory |
The late Lewis John Carlino who passed
away last year at the age of 88, initially began as a playwright before working
his way up into screenwriting and film directing. Best remembered for his screenplays for John
Frankenheimer’s Seconds and for Michael Winner’s The Mechanic,
the prolific screenwriter only ever directed three feature films to his
name.
Though making an Oscar nominated splash
with his adaptation of Pat Conroy’s celebrated novel The Great Santini,
his career petered out with the 1983 sex comedy Class starring Jaqueline
Bisset and he never directed another feature again. A shame because his first time in the
director’s chair was as ambitious and daring as movies come: a transposition of
controversial Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from
Grace with the Sea to contemporary English town of Dartmouth, Devon.
Though heavily promoted as a sordid
steamy erotic romance ala Don’t Look Now replete with a
near-pornographic Playboy photoshoot on set with actors Kris Kristofferson and
Sarah Miles going at it, the actual film is seen almost entirely from the
perspective of 14-year-old Jonathan Osborne (Jonathan Kahn). Living with his recently widowed mother Anne
(Sarah Miles), Jonathan gets caught up with a boys only club ran by sadistic
neo-Nietzchean prepubescent demon child “Chief” (Earl Rhodes) who berates and
beats up his disciples.
Meanwhile Anne
gazes off into the sea harbor dreaming of her late husband who perished three
years prior. But when a large merchant
vessel sails into the harbor, Anne takes her son with her on a tour of the ship
where they cross paths with the second officer of the ship, Jim Cameron (Kris
Kristofferson not playing the King of the World).
From here, the film grows increasingly
disturbing as Jonathan finds a hole between his room and his mother’s, allowing
him to spy on her naked and/or masturbating when she isn’t making love to her
new beau, leading towards an engagement that throws Jonathan into a jealous and
sociopathic rage. Soon as the “Chief”
and his own behavior grows more violent, including but not limited to a deeply
unsettling murder and dissection of his own cat, Jonathan relays his woes about
his mother and her new fiancée which prompts the formulation of a violent coup that
will shake the small town (and the viewer absorbing all of this aberrant and
repugnant behavior) to its very foundations.
While the marketing campaign for the
film went above and beyond the call of duty in sexing up the picture as some
kind of salacious carnal excursion, the real movie represents the first time
any western filmmakers tried to adapt Japanese author Yukio Mishima’s work to a
contemporary big screen drama that means to push buttons, disturb and
provoke. Considered by critics at the
time to be an odd duck of a film whose already elusive points in the novel flew
even further over spectators heads when they first saw it in 1976, The
Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea still is a most peculiar bird of a
film that has more than a few difficult scenes that won’t go down so easily.
Though no animals were harmed in the
film, the aforementioned cat scene is so profoundly disturbing and
uncomfortable to sit through you feel as though you have briefly entered a
horror film. Then there’s the ongoing
thread with Jonathan whose ideas of the outside world intruding upon his own
that all but paints the film’s troubled central protagonist as a potential
psychopath.
The film more or less played to confused
critics and filmgoers who were enamored with the film’s lovely and scenic
widescreen cinematography by future Raiders of the Lost Ark cinematographer
Douglas Slocombe and fleeting orchestral score by John Mandel but perplexed by
the film’s ambiguities and Oedipal fixations. Mishima was both provocative and elusive and it shows onscreen however classy the setting and dressing may be. For all of the ornate visual design (save for some curious
The project also came just a few years after the celebrated author’s
notorious coup d’etat and suicide which gave the picture a hint of additional
illicitness though in later years the controversy generated by Mishima’s
actions were eclipsed by Paul Schrader’s still stirring biopic Mishima: A
Life in Four Chapters. Sans the
text, the film itself though touted as a seductive romp in carnality in reality
is rather tame (supposedly UK releases are naughtier) and pales in comparison
to the horrors inflicted by the “Chief” and his tribe of misguided juvenile delinquents.
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the
Sea, being one of two film adaptations of
Yukio Mishima’s work not made or set in Japan (the other being the French drama
The School of Flesh made in 1998), isn’t the most successful interpretation
of the infamous author’s writing as many of the ideas in it which played out as
poetic in the text land as deeply disturbing here. On its terms however it does kind of work as
a dark and introspective quasi-erotic drama that’s largely driven by youthful angst.
While Sarah Miles and Kris
Kristofferson featured heavily in promotional (as well as erotic cross promotional)
materials and go the full distance for this movie, the one viewers will not
forget is actually Earl Rhodes as the twisted and cruel “Chief” who speaks with
authority and disdain in such a manner you could very well see this actor going
on to play a Nazi later in life. So evil
and calculating is this boy, you feel threatened by him even when adults are present.
Between the film’s cinematographic
qualities, the sweeping score and the fearless, uncompromising performances
from the ensemble cast with no safety nets for the audience to fall back on,
Lewis John Carlino’s big screen directorial debut remains nonetheless an
intriguing if not discomforting cinematic experience which tries and somewhat
succeeds in bringing Mishima’s literature to the silver screen unexpurgated
with all of the author’s divisive and elusive points translated faithfully to
the panoramic canvas. As such it is
truly an interesting project that isn’t the easiest to digest or process but
one the controversial late novelist would be proud of.
--Andrew Kotwicki
