Round Six of the Battle of the Blondes ended up being a perfect example of how unsuccessful I usually am at predicting whether or not I'll like a movie, because in the case of the two films I watched here, I actually liked the one I thought I was going to hate, and as for the one I thought I was going to like...well, I'll get to that in a minute. Let me say first, though, that this particular showdown -- between Janet Leigh and Brigitte Bardot -- struck me from the beginning as the most odd of the nine that TCM devised, not because I thought it was the most unfair (I already talked about that one here), but because I couldn't -- and still can't, really -- see what TCM was going for by the pitting the two of them against one another. I called their round the "Battle of the Postmodern Blondes" in my initial rundown of the BotB schedule, but that was really only because I didn't know how else to describe it; though they were roughly the same age (Leigh was seven years older) and worked at roughly the same time (though, again, Leigh started earlier), their actual careers were vastly different, with the only comparable point that I can see being that they both starred in a string of important films during the late fifties and early sixties, Bardot in a number of French New Wave films and Leigh in game-changers like Touch of Evil, Psycho, and The Manchurian Candidate.
Prior to Touch of Evil, my impression of Janet Leigh is of an actress more similar to actors of today than a cultural icon like Brigitte Bardot. She got her start in the late forties, with her first well-known role being the eldest sister Meg in 1949's Little Women (with Margaret O'Brien, Elizabeth Taylor and June Allyson), and for much of the early part of her career, she was largely known as one half of her romance with Tony Curtis. She was pretty, and she was a good actress, coming off as comfortable and exceedingly natural on screen, but if it weren't for those movies in the middle of her career -- especially Psycho -- I don't know if she'd be particularly well-remembered today, which is why I was surprised TCM didn't show any of those films for BotB.
The two films they did show were 1955's remake of My Sister Eileen, which I'd already seen (and isn't anywhere near as good as the 1942 original), and 1953's Houdini, which is the one I mentioned above that I went into expecting to hate but, fortunately, didn't. I didn't have any legitimate reason to expect I would hate it except that I always think I'm going to hate biographical films, either because the subject matter doesn't interest me or because I'm afraid they're going to be well-made movies that are nevertheless a snooze to watch (which, to be fair, is sometimes the case), but Houdini ended up being a thoroughly entertaining film that managed to cover a wide swath of the magician's life without meandering too long on any one thing. It took quite a few liberties with Houdini's story, to be sure, but it managed to make his magic tricks entertaining in a medium where we're used to seeing things that appear to be magic, thanks in part to impeccable camerawork and scoring on the part of the filmmakers. It also ended up being a good choice for Leigh, whose character Bess is just as important in the film as Tony Curtis's Harry.
Why I chose to watch A Very Private Affair for Brigitte Bardot instead of And God Created Woman, the film that turned her into a superstar, I'll never know. I realized after I recorded A Very Private Affair (but before I watched it) that I might have made a mistake, but at the same time, I genuinely expected to like Affair, if for no other reason that I had always wanted to see a Bardot film and the premise sounded interesting enough: Bardot plays Jill, a French actress and tabloid sensation who retreats to her home town of Geneva after suffering a mental breakdown and soon starts a relationship with a man from her past. (This man, contrary to both the introduction to the film on TCM and the write-up on IMDb, is the ex-husband of one of her close friends, not an ex-lover of her mother. I understand that the people behind TCM write copy for a lot of different films over the course of a month, but come on...maybe have somebody double-check the plot of the movie, maybe even on your own website, which has the correct description available.)
What could have been an interesting examination of the European celebrity culture starring a real-life tabloid sensation ends up being remarkably boring in execution. The cinematography is decent but the actual quality of the film stock is terrible, looking rather like a late-seventies after school special, and the English over-dub in the version I watched is horrendous. The story itself is remarkably boring, to the point that I'm not sure a single thing of note happens in the entire film, except maybe Jill's breakdown and the far-too-predictable conclusion, and even if the emptiness of the story is the point, to show how Jill's fame has trapped her in an ultimately uneventful life, why would anyone want to watch a movie in which nothing happens? Especially when, as I've already noted, the artistic elements of the film are almost nonexistent? Bardot and her costar Marcello Mastroianni have very little chemistry, and neither of their characters are particularly likeable, nor is anyone else in the film; to put it simply, the whole thing is a waste of their talent and our time. Bardot and Janet Leigh might well have been an odd pair to match up, but any way you look at it, Houdini is the better of the two films.
Houdini: B+
A Very Private Affair: C
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