Word: decorative
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Director Losey tries to cover cliches with camera trickery. He works from arresting angles, all but caressing the decor of a world made to order for the filthy rich. Fond of polished surfaces, he dotes on reflections in mirrors, sunglasses, brandy snifters. But the validity of Eva lies in Moreau's accomplished bitchery. As a sleek alley cat commuting at her whim between Venice and Rome, she slinks from warm beds to warm baths, purring over her furs and silks and blues records with such hypnotic self-absorption that even a silly role begins to seem not just interesting...
Opulently photographed in and around a crumbling English abbey, Ligeia, like its predecessors, offers meticulous decor, shrewd shock techniques, and an atmosphere of mounting terror that fails to deliver on its promise. Again, the cream-centered menace is Vincent Price, an actor who appears to be swooping around in a cape even when he stands perfectly still. His first wife dead, Price marries a breathtaking beauty (Elizabeth Shepherd) and takes her on a honeymoon that includes a stop at Stonehenge. Back home he resumes his necrophilic fancies until, as usual, a great raging holocaust consumes castle, corpses, black cats, Price...
Despite serious shortcomings, Circle of Love is worth seeing if only for its breathtaking color decor. The camera wizardry of Henri Decae produces acres of gauzy portraiture, plus one exquisite vignette in the style of Lautrec, and nearly always the film glows in a red, green and golden wash of art-nouveau elegance. Against such sumptuousness, Vadim's elementary lechery seems to be the only thing out of place...
...UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG. A shopgirl submits her first careless rapture to sober second thoughts in French Director Jacques Demy's sadly cynical fable, entirely set to music and done up in candy-box decor...
...makes simplicity almost a fetish, disarms the audience with ingenuousness. Like a kid with a handful of bright new crayons, he scrawls his sadly cynical fairy tale across the shabby landscape of the town. Through his eyes Cherbourg becomes a city of promise done up in candy-box decor, where every shopfront, boudoir and corner bistro has been daubed with gentle pastels or vibrant reds, yellows, pinks, blues. This is the way things ought to be, he wistfully suggests, not yet faded with the passing seasons into the greyness of things as they are. Hollywood has been performing such tricks...