Word: lerner
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Hunter's camera creates characterizations with considerable skill. Lerner, who has the lean chops and darting eyes of a nouvelle vague flesh peddlar, is obviously claustrophobic beneath the heavy angles and oppressive ceilings of Adams House. But outside his own room, he pays for a heightened freedom of movement with his inability to be at ease or in scale against alien objects or in alien environments. He's lost, often quite literally, insuch differing surroundings as a mortuary-like IAB shower room and the lush mechanical complexity of the Loeb shop...
...materialist, I would guess, from the way he handles objects and from his obvious rage at ambiguity. If there's a door, he'll open it; it there's a curtain, he'll pull it aside. We're tipped off at the beginning of the picture when Lerner's and the camera's preoccupation is with the ring and the dagger, rather than with the body, which is scarcely examined and then only for a second's slap across the cheeks to be sure it's really dead. In the film's most immediately powerful sequence, he spells...
...Lerner's vulnerability to the camera is in sharp contrast to the elusive and inviolable presence of the title character, her features frozen in that maddening half-smile which is traditionally associated with the Mother of God. Hunter scarcely gives her a motion until her third appearance, when she shows up outside a magnificently imposing Widener Library, takes Lerner's arm, and leads him away without betraying a flicker of interest in her own action. Usually, there is an obvious gulf (sometimes a mite too obvious) between her and Lerner or between her and the camera...
...very much aware of her proximity to the sequence. In fact, we feel that she is there. In the one scene where she actually enters a room already dominated by her photograph, we are pretty sure that she's there twice. The sequence indicates that she and Lerner make love after the dissolve, and the physical duality of her image is an obvious but successful reminder that her surface can never really be animated or her enigma cracked. She is completely and very dangerously a virgin, whatever she does. The black cowled, nunlike presence which dominates the gothic dining room...
...film's faults are major but understandable. There's budget movie's inevitable problem with continuity. Lerner in white shirt and dungaree jacket rounds a corner to become Lerner in De Pinna pullover. More seriously, Hunter is not always successful in staging the actions he photographs. The clumsiness of the amateur actors in the several fight scenes betray the excellent cinemastic ideas which inspired them. Too often, Lerner's delayed reactions suggest a bored actor. And in several sequences, Miss Anschuetz looks like a very beautiful child twisting her features to burlesque a temptress. The best major performance, I think...