Interesting exercise in style. Ray Milland is a physicist and a communist spy who passes secret information to his contacts. The FBI sniffs him out and the Party provides him with a new identity and passport to Cairo for his getaway. After accidentally causing the death of an FBI agent who has been following him, he makes it to the ship but then tears up his fake passport and turns himself in.
Milland is in just about every shot and the whole exercise depends on him. He pretty much pulls it off. We very rarely get to read any written messages, but his expressions tells us much of what we need to know. He's tortured with guilt throughout. He sweats profusely, not from the heat but from the cupidity. And there are closeups of his face, so that the slightest change in his facial muscles registers on the Richter scale. The extreme closeups are sometimes odd -- a telephone receiver pressed against an ear -- but they tend to break up the sometimes irritating visual flow of figures coming and going without ever speaking. The director also breaks up the stream of traditional shot with some overhead angles.
One of those figures doesn't have to speak. Rita Gam, as his provocative neighbor, slinking around in her loosely tied dressing gown, is astonishing sexy and extraordinarily attractive in an Arabic kind of way, an houri out of scripture, looking a little like a plump-lipped Cher. I don't know why Milland, before tearing up his fake identity, didn't move in with Rita Gam for a while. After all, the guy is in for a long stretch in the slams and maybe the hot seat. Might as well have one last fling. Looks like it would have been sufficiently memorable to last him a lifetime.
But the film raises a question. Why make a film with no dialog? That is, what's the purpose behind imposing such a stricture on the production? Vladimir Nabokov once speculated on how successful a novel would be that avoided the use of the letter "e". It probably wouldn't be successful because the experiment would be pointless.
Self-imposed limitations sometimes work. Hitchcock used only a lifeboat in the movie of the same name, but it generated a palpable sense of isolation and despair. But his experiments with long takes were pointless in "Rope" and "Under Capricorn." So-called concrete poetry strikes me as equally absurd -- poetry written in the shape of a rhomboid or a parallelogram. I have doubts about haiku in English as well, a form devised for use in a foreign language whose "syllables" don't correspond to English.
In any case, the silence here is a little distracting, to be honest, but the story -- simple as it is -- is engaging enough to keep a viewer from being bored. And it took guts to make the movie.
Milland is in just about every shot and the whole exercise depends on him. He pretty much pulls it off. We very rarely get to read any written messages, but his expressions tells us much of what we need to know. He's tortured with guilt throughout. He sweats profusely, not from the heat but from the cupidity. And there are closeups of his face, so that the slightest change in his facial muscles registers on the Richter scale. The extreme closeups are sometimes odd -- a telephone receiver pressed against an ear -- but they tend to break up the sometimes irritating visual flow of figures coming and going without ever speaking. The director also breaks up the stream of traditional shot with some overhead angles.
One of those figures doesn't have to speak. Rita Gam, as his provocative neighbor, slinking around in her loosely tied dressing gown, is astonishing sexy and extraordinarily attractive in an Arabic kind of way, an houri out of scripture, looking a little like a plump-lipped Cher. I don't know why Milland, before tearing up his fake identity, didn't move in with Rita Gam for a while. After all, the guy is in for a long stretch in the slams and maybe the hot seat. Might as well have one last fling. Looks like it would have been sufficiently memorable to last him a lifetime.
But the film raises a question. Why make a film with no dialog? That is, what's the purpose behind imposing such a stricture on the production? Vladimir Nabokov once speculated on how successful a novel would be that avoided the use of the letter "e". It probably wouldn't be successful because the experiment would be pointless.
Self-imposed limitations sometimes work. Hitchcock used only a lifeboat in the movie of the same name, but it generated a palpable sense of isolation and despair. But his experiments with long takes were pointless in "Rope" and "Under Capricorn." So-called concrete poetry strikes me as equally absurd -- poetry written in the shape of a rhomboid or a parallelogram. I have doubts about haiku in English as well, a form devised for use in a foreign language whose "syllables" don't correspond to English.
In any case, the silence here is a little distracting, to be honest, but the story -- simple as it is -- is engaging enough to keep a viewer from being bored. And it took guts to make the movie.