Word: losey
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...GIOVANNI Directed by Joseph Losey Screenplay by Patricia and Joseph Losey and Frantz Salieri...
Conceived by Paris Opéra General Director Rolf Liebermann, Don Giovanni is an attempt to go beyond the usual filmed operatic performances or made-for-TV studio productions. Joseph Losey (The Servant, The Go-Between) takes his cast of international singing stars out on location to the waterways of Venice and to some stunning Palladian villas in the countryside around Vicenza. Never mind that Ingmar Bergman's 1975 version of Mozart's The Magic Flute showed what enchanting results a modest, studio-bound production could achieve. Never mind, too, that the locale of the Don Juan legend...
Mindful that the work was composed in 1787, on the eve of the French Revolution, Losey chooses to see it as a drama of conflict between a cynical, depleted ancìen régime and the exploited lower orders. He tacks on an epigraph from Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: ". . . the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appears." His Don, solemnly played by Ruggero Raimondi, is a joyless, brooding creature whose compulsive sexuality is merely a neurotic reflection of social tensions. Losey gives us the least passionate seducer...
Directed by Joseph Losey Screenplay by Franco Salinas
Director Joseph Losey (The Boy with Green Hair) conveys menace with every worn-out Hitchcock device except a creaking door. Delon is summoned to a strange country house, where aristocrats he has never met greet him warmly, and the second Klein's mistress, acted with a shrug by Jeanne Moreau, plays word games with him. Even the other fellow's dog unaccountably (and illogically) takes a liking...