The kind of movie Quentin Tarantino likes: lots of action, excitingly filmed, with characters that are all attitude and swagger, visual sweep, dead-pan tough-guy humour and not much substance. This one is sumptuously mounted and directed by Terence Young, fresh of his recent successes with Bond (Dr. No, From Russia With Love, Thunderball) and others (Wait Until Dark), to take advantage of its sometimes snowy, mountainous Spanish locations. One of the ways you can tell it was filmed in Spain is that when the characters are eating you find the traditional bread, lemns and a big serrano ham on the table. The great Henri Alekan makes the most of the stars, the locations and the light: it looks gorgeous throughout. The director and cinematographer combine to incite real visual pleasure in the light, the mountains, the way the horses move in the landscape, a great shoot-out near the end filmed through reeds. Charles Bronson had not yet headlined and American production. But this is one of a series of films that would make him into an international box-office star without yet having made a dent at the US box office; something akin to what happened with Clint Eastwood a little bit earlier, and Bronson, approaching 50 was much older. This film is clearly indebted to Leone’s Westerns in various ways, particularly in Maurice Jarre’s attempt at personalising a Morricone style in the score. It’s great to see Alain Delon as a villain—a rare treat — all in black, with a silver tooth, much attitude and no scruples. Ursula Andress is the prostitute who loves him. Capucine is very charismatic as a Madam. Toshiro Mifune is one of the last of the Samurais who uneasily teams up with Bronson to return a sword intended as a gift from the Japanese emperor to the President of the United States in order to save the honour of Japan (and the Ambassador’s and the Samurai’s). Bronson only wants the money. There are many things to admire in this film: it moves beautifully, looks smashing, and is exciting to watch. It’s also one of those films in which every woman is either a prostitute or an innocent about to be raped; Mexicans are all victims; Comanches unknowable but for their violence and brutality. A blu-ray that looks terrific but with sound levels bouncing all over the place is still available; an indication that whatever its ultimate merits, the film has become a landmark or classic of some kind.
The credits insist it is Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline so perhaps that is reason enough to blame him for this mess. Sheldon achieved great renown in Hollywood first as a very successful screenwriter (The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer, Easter Parade), then as the creator of hit television shows (I Dream of Jeannie, Hart to Hart) but became a household name as a best-selling author. The L.A. Times called him ‘The King of the Potboilers’. In the 70s, tweens of my generation used to read him in conjunction with Harold Robbins (79 Park Avenue) and Irwin Shaw (Rich Man, Poor Man) for their melodramatic mix of characters of low origins clawing their way into high living, corporate criminality and purple-y passages of kinky sex. Interestingly many of these bestsellers were turned into highly rated miniseries where the author’s name was usually attached (e.g. Harold Robbins’ 79 Park Avenue). The works of Jacqueline Susann, Jackie Collins and Danielle Steele, at least as popular, are female equivalents, though these have a greater tendency to use showbiz or fashion as background setting.
Sidney Sheldon’sBloodline is directed by Terence Young and the screenplay is credited to Laird Koenig so some of the blame for this failure must go to them. The film feels like a television miniseries of the period but with a very big budget. The locations, the décor, the costumes, not to speak of that extraordinary all-star cast headed by Audrey Hepburn are all top. But the film is a mess right from the beginning.
Romy Schneider’s star entrance.
You know a film is in trouble when a secondary character( Romy Schneider) gets a better star entrance than the star, Audrey Hepburn; Romy gets to whizz around a track in a sportscar, win the race, take off her helmet, reveal yet another covering — a beige balaclava — before whipping THAT off and finally bringing into view the wonder that it is ROMY SCHNEIDER guzzling a bottle of vichy water as if it was overflowing champagne; in contrast, we first see Audrey in a long shot in a museum brushing away at the skeleton of some prehistoric dinosaur looking like an aristocrat playing at housepainter – it’s very Greer Garson-ish grand and a tad embarrassing.
Our first sight glimpse of Audrey.
You’re convinced the film is heading down the toilet a few minutes later, when it gets its star and protagonist to perform the boring but necessary bits of telling the audience what it needs to know about her character. The director doesn’t even bother to get the reaction shots from the person Audrey is telling it to, Ben Gazzara. A better director would have given that exposition to Gazzara, nay a maid or an assistant, and let Hepburn ’emote’ in reaction. Bit players tell, stars do and feel. You can bet Cary Grant wouldn’t have put up with the kind of treatment Audrey gets here.
I’ve made a point of using the stars’ names rather than the characters’ because the latter remain unknowable to us even after the film ends, and this is only one of the film’s many faults. Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline has a screenplay that tells rather than dramatises. On the one hand, music and direction underline everything for you in case you’re too stupid to get the obvious: on the other, however, smart you are, the film simply doesn’t make sense.
The story is about a super-rich industrialist who gets killed. His daughter (Audrey) inherits a share in the business with her cousins (the characters played by Romy Schneider and Irene Papas; we also know that James Mason is a relation but unsure of what kind). They’re all after money; they’re all suspects in the initial murder; they’re all capable of killing Audrey.
The film plays as a whodunnit, with Gert Fröbe as Inspector Max Hornung, a Poirot-type detective who uses a massive computer instead of his little gray cells to solve crimes. The crime solving takes us through luxurious locations (Stately Home England, the Paris of Maxim’s and the George V, villas in Sardinia) with a detour via flashback to the Jewish ghetto in Cracow (where the family business started) and another into the lurid world of pornographic snuff films. It’s all unbelievably trashy but meant to be glamorous and jet-set decadent.
This is a film where most of those involved seem to be at their worst. Terence Young’s direction is a klang of over-statement; the editing has to be amongst the worst in any big-budget production (Bud Molin is credited); the great Freddie Young does no more than make the stars and locations look good (which is not nothing; it’s just not enough); and even Enio Morricone’s contribution is an embarrassing one – a slushy score that a disco beat occasionally pulses into life (as in the drug manufacturing sequence). Also, the movie has that distancing, empty-sounding quality one gets from bad dubbing and the whole film is so poorly put together that Irene Papas, Romy Schneider and Audrey all play cousins but speak in their own accents without any explanation as to why they all sound so different.
Audrey dresses daringly for Ben at Maxim’s
Still even a film as trashy as this has its compensations. Audrey Hepburn looks her age but still beautiful and ever chic, wearing those enormous glasses fashionable in the 70s that in America continue to be associated with Jackie O.
Romy Schneider doesn’t get to do much as the cousin married to a man who likes to stab beetles with pins and watch them slowly die (Maurice Ronet) but she looks stunning, is given a great entrance, and has the most interesting character to play. And of course, there are also James Mason, Irene Paps, Omar Shariff, even Ben Gazzara (though his part calls for a star rather than a very good dynamic actor). This is the type of production where one would expect the likes of Michelle Phillips, who is well cast here. The question is why did the others get involved? I suppose if Sir Laurence Olivier wasn’t too grand to star in Harold Robbins trash like The Betsy (Daniel Petrie, USA, 1978), only the year before this….
Bloodline really is as bad as everyone says and is only for fans of Audrey Hepburn, Romy Schneider or James Mason who, like I, are compulsed to be completists.
