Deep End [1971] Jerzy Skolimowski

Deep End (1970)


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066122/


Deep End is a 1970 movie directed by Jerzy Skolimowski featuring Jane Asher and John Moulder Brown. The film is set in the suburbs of London.

Jane Asher ... Susan
John Moulder-Brown ... Michael 'Mike'
Karl Michael Vogler ... Swimming instructor
Christopher Sandford ... Chris - fiance
Diana Dors ... Mike's 1. lady client
Louise Martini ... Beata 'Lovely Continental' - prostitute
Erica Beer ... Baths cashier
Anita Lochner ... Kathy
Anne-Marie Kuster ... Nightclub receptionist
Cheryl Hall ... Hot Dog Girl
Christine Paul-Podlasky ... White Clouth Girl
Dieter Eppler ... Stoker
Karl Ludwig Lindt ... Baths manager
Eduard Linkers ... Cinema Owner
Will Danin ... younger Policeman

Paramount Pictures seems to have thought they had another Roman Polanski in Jerzy Skolimowski. One certainly cannot fault the studio’s reasoning: Skolimowski had written dialogue for Polanski’s Knife in the Water (1962) and had become in the intervening years a lauded filmmaker in his own right. A published poet and amateur boxer, Skolimowski was prominent in Poland’s student society (he was introduced to Polanski by composer Krzysztof Komeda, who scored Polanski’s early films prior to his accidental death in 1969) and likely seemed to Hollywood producers another bona fide Eastern block absurdist.

Since the August 1969 murder of his actress wife, Sharon Tate, Polanski (whose Rosemary’s Baby had been a cash cow the previous year) was at an artistic impasse. Paramount likely felt Skolimowski was a safe bet. The studio purchased distribution rights for his English language film Deep End (1971), set in London but filmed for the most part at Munich’s Bavaria Studios. Critical responses were encouraging. David Thomson hailed the film as “funny, touching, sexy, surreal, and tragic — all at the same time” and even the prickly Pauline Kael was supportive. Nevertheless, Deep End failed to find an audience in the summer of 1971, prompting Paramount to give up on it as a headliner. The film was snuck out as a double feature “co-hit” in support of Lewis Gilbert’s Friends (among others) and forgotten...except by those who could not forget.

In fairness to Paramount, Deep End was a hard sell and not due exclusively (as critics have alleged) to its downbeat ending. Skolimowski keeps his characters sketchy but choreographs their movements as if for ballet. Employing handheld cameras and staccato editing, the filmmaker seems to be inclining toward a lumpen verité, a brushing up of the “kitchen sink realism” of Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey (1961) and Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life (1963) a decade earlier; on closer inspection, however, Deep End is precisely art directed, with strict attention paid to framing and the use of color. In Skolimowski’s strategic use of reds, his film recalls Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964) but without Antonioni’s painterly lugubriousness. The performances feel improvisatory and raw, with the characters talking over one another or swallowing their words. Yet even these potentially alienating choices are in synch with a narrative concerned with disaffection and emotional distance. Superficially, Deep End seems in tune with a tradition of winsome boy-meets-girl tales in which a protagonist on a bicycle (a signifier of low-tech sincerity and innocence) navigates a snaky course towards adulthood. On the flip side, the discomfiture of John Moulder-Brown’s bath house heyboy hints at a darker pathology. (The actor had played a full-blown psychopath in the 1969 Spanish shocker La Residencia, aka The House That Screamed.) When sexually frustrated Mike sprints along a dim corridor swatting at hanging lamps, one can’t help but flash on the swinging light bulb at the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), which had its own idea about the grim legacy of sexual repression.

All this to say that Paramount was playing the percentages when it pulled Deep End, whose trappings (a setting with the potential for boundless nudity, a sexy female lead in Jane Asher, and a protracted sidebar set in London’s seedy Soho) suggest a high degree of aerobic sexuality but deliver instead an edgy meditation on modern insecurity. Even Hal Ashby’s blackly comic Harold and Maude (which also features songs by Cat Stevens and which Paramount put into general release only a few months after Deep End) is a less problematic film, couching its morbid nature with coyness and camp.

This is not to say that Deep End is a mirthless slog – far from it. The film is richly humorous in an understated way and even works in fun cameos for Burt Kwouk (the long-suffering Cato from The Pink Panther sequels) as an oracular hotdog vendor and Diana Dors as one of the bath house’s randier regulars. (Another scene, set in a crippled prostitute’s bedsit kitted out with a Rube Goldberg network of pulleys, is a marvelous send up of British nervousness.) Notwithstanding its unexpected denouement (which recalls the sting in the tail of Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour [1945]), the broader strokes of Deep End would recur in a number of popular Hollywood hits of later years, including Peter Yates’ Breaking Away (1979) and Harold Ramis’ Caddyshack (1980), which both boast cycling heroes obsessed with a beautiful girl positioned out of their respective leagues. These later films profited from reassuring moviegoers that obstacles can be overcome and true love will prevail, while the more pragmatic Deep End paid the price for holding the minority opinion that, with love, all bets are off.