Don't Look Now - 1973 film review

There are a lot of hopeless horror movies around, but there are also several masterpieces. My three all-time favourites are The Wicker Man, Rosemary's Baby and Don't Look Now (Midsommar, which has grown on me, is not too far behind, but I don't think it's quite in the same league, while The Shining didn't impress me quite as much as it did most people). I first watched Don't Look Now in the 70s and the shock ending made a great impact on me. It's an arty film, perhaps too self-consciously so, but a recent viewing confirmed that it hasn't lost its power.

The premise is simple and is based on a short story, rather than a novel, by Daphne du Maurier. Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland play a married couple, the Baxters, whose young daughter dies tragically in a drowning incident. The little girl was wearing a red coat at the time. The couple are deeply affected by their dreadful loss but some time later travel to Venice, where John Baxter is working on an ancient church. In Venice, they meet two elderly sisters, one of whom (superbly played by Hilary Mason) is blind and psychic and claims to be able to see the little girl. Meanwhile, a series of murders is being committed in the city... 

The first time I watched the film, I found it quite bewildering. At that time, I'd never visited Venice, which makes a fantastic setting for the story. Venice is gorgeous, but it also has its macabre side, with all those bewildering twists and turns of the alleyways and the ever-present canals. Water is a central theme of the screenplay and the camera work is dazzling.

I've always been a Julie Christie fan and although the casting of Donald Sutherland must have seemed like a gamble, he is terrific too. This is a film that could easily have slipped into pretentiousness, but the performances are so effective that the risk is averted. The result is a haunting gem.

Nina Bawden at the double

Whilst on holiday, I read a number of ebooks published by Bello, who have managed to resurrect some very interesting titles, long unavailable. Two were early works by Nina Bawden, indicative of her strong interest in crime and mystery during her apprenticeship as a novelist.

Of the two, I felt The Solitary Child was the stronger. It has distinct echoes of Rebecca, and whilst it certainly does not rank with the Daphne du Maurier masterpiece, it's sufficiently enjoyable for me to recommend it. A young and rather naive woman has a whirlwind romance with an older man and marries him. However, he has recently been acquitted of murdering his first wife, and suspicion continues to cloud his life. Soon it becomes clear that he has a number of enemies, and his bride begins to doubt his innocence.The story is neatly worked out and, I felt, psychologically plausible.

At that early stage of her writing career, it seems to me, Nina Bawden was sometimes tempted to try to increase mystification by withholding information. This is a device that can work exceptionally well, as Agatha Christie showed so many times, but I'm not sure the young Bawden was especially good at playing tricks on her readers. As a result, I felt Who Calls the Tune was a little frustrating, even though the storyline, about a troubled family in a remote part of Wales, was full of interest and kept me reading the pages. But I wasn't too happy about the ending. Christie did the same thing so much better.

Anyone who is a fan of Bawden ought to give at least one of these books a try, because they contain plenty of good, crisp writing, and some good evocations of life in rural Wales, with which she was obviously very familiar. Children who are, or claim to be, being poisoned, feature in both stories, an odd coincidence. In later life, she wrote more famous books, but these early works show a young writer of real talent and potential, a potential that was happily fulfilled. How splendid that they are now there to entertain a new generation of readers.