Cinema: A Need for Illusion

• Share

The Sailor from Gibraltar is Writer-Director Tony Richardson's contribution to the Cinema of the Absurd. Cinema because the actors in it move, however torpidly; absurd because it is film-flam posing as philosophy.

Sailor promotes the feeling of a mal-de-mare's nest from the beginning. That most shopworn of all modern literary figures, Alienated Man (Ian Bannen), is on vacation in Italy, accompanied by his mistress, played with leggy lassitude by Vanessa Redgrave. Her British banalities suddenly bug Bannen, and he tells her to buzz off. The very next day he picks up a new playmate, a mysterious and wealthy Frenchwoman (Jeanne Moreau). Playing her customary erotic neurotic, with pouting mouth and matching accessories, Moreau is searching for a young sailor she had an affair with years before. Why the pursuit after all this time?

"When you've known innocence," murmurs Moreau, "when you've seen it asleep at your side, you never forget it. It changes you." Obviously it has changed her for the worse. Throughout the film she expresses views that never graduate to the sophomoric: "He wanted the big cities, the bright lights . . . I was just a woman." To the lumpish Bannen she remarks: "I like you to be like this . . . like a stone wall."

As she trails after the sailor, she and the stone wall traipse from Greece to Alexandria to dullest Africa, for no other reason, it seems, than to run into an overblown Levantine (Orson Welles) and a flyblown white hunter (Hugh Griffith). In the end the sailor remains unfound. Perhaps, ventures Bannen, this romantic ideal never existed. "But if he didn't," allows Moreau. "we would have had to invent him." Translation: We all need our illusions no matter how false we know they are. After seeing Tony Richardson's most recent flopdoodles—Mademoiselle, The Loved One, and now Sailor—moviegoers may have a new illusion to foster: that the man who directed Tom Jones and Taste of Honey is worth watching.