My old review of the Kino release - bear in mind the BFI disc is the UK version, which is ten minutes longer, from a new scan (so much for my last paragraph):
“You know, I feel pretty sure that if I were ever in any kind of trouble I wouldn’t come to you for help.”
“No, I don’t suppose you would.”
The Sixties saw a major change in James Mason’s screen image. Where his 40s British screen persona had seen him typecast as sadistic gothic romantic antiheroes and his 50s American films offered either smooth villainy or an abrasive strength, perhaps mirroring his own changing fortunes and a spectacularly bitter and drawn-out divorce his roles more and more became men who had been defeated by life and retreated from the fray in the hope of not being noticed, a trend that wouldn’t be reversed until his ‘Prince of ****ing Darkness’ in 1982’s The Verdict. 1967’s
Cop-Out aka Stranger in the House is a perfect example, following on from the previous year’s thinly disguised (for legal reasons) George Smiley in The Deadly Affair with another man wrecked by a destructive and unresolved marriage having to return to his former trade to solve a mysterious death – in that film spycraft, in this the legal profession when the body of one of his daughter’s friends is found in his house. Based on Georges Simenon’s Strangers in the House, the title perfectly describes their relationship: they may share the same roof but live completely separate lives, she having nothing but resigned contempt for him and he having no idea of her life beyond the humiliation of her working for one of his former clerks, whose career has risen while Mason has sunk into numb alcoholism. So much so that the discovery of the body is more an opportunity for morbid amusement at the embarrassment it will cause his brother-in-law, the local chief constable, rather than a cause for real concern.
On one level it’s a redemption tale as Mason finally gets a chance to do something for daughter Geraldine Chaplin when her boss opts to prosecute her boyfriend (Paul Bertoya) instead of defend him, but it’s a very unexpected one: rather than turning into Perry Mason in the courtroom, he barely pays any attention to the pre-trial proceedings. Instead the real drama is played out in the flashbacks. Mason’s initial flashbacks to his disastrous marriage are shot in brilliant white highly stylised surroundings that contrast with the peeling wallpaper of the house that looks like he’s getting it ready for Miss Haversham to move into. But these are soon abandoned in favour of a more pertinent series of flashbacks to Chaplin, Ian Ogilvy and Pippa Steel’s disastrous association with hipper than thou and randy as Hell sailor Bobby Darin (if you turned the film into a drinking game and took a swig every time he says “Ain’t that so?”, you’ll be dead of alcohol poisoning long before the end credits), most of them set in a similarly decaying abandoned cinema littered with old posters and promotional standees (including, to add a note of surrealism, giant bustafotos of Mason on his knees being tortured by John Ireland in The Fall of the Roman Empire, which the film makes no effort to hide). At times the film seems more interested in parading both Mason and Darin’s outrageously anti-social behaviour than uncovering the truth that, even in the late 60s, dare not speak its name, with both Mason and the killer ending the film at the beginning of a long journey towards spiritual and moral renewal, but not before driving a cart and horses through the genre’s traditional restoration of order.
But then this is more a character study and a stab at Chabrolesque social criticism of the petite bourgeoisie than a thriller, which isn’t altogether surprising considering director Pierre Rouve’s Renaissance man credentials. A forgotten figure today, he was one of those key polite society figures of his day whose parties everyone wanted to be invited to: interpreter, diplomat, art critic, semiotician, BBC World Service broadcaster, film producer (he produced Antonioni’s Blow-Out, and there’s a brief scene here with a fashion photographer to remind you of the fact), translator, university lecturer and raconteur. This was his only film as a director – its disastrous box-office saw to that – but it’s an ambitious one that never seems to care about who its potential audience is, let alone meeting their expectations, or sugaring the pill by making the characters likeable. At times it has the feel of an after dinner table conversation, particularly when discussing the entitlement of the class system or the mutual jealousy that fuelled the generation gap (the young jealous of the old for their money, the old jealous of the young for their moral freedom). It’s also a very Sixties film, with all the desperation and everyday ugliness of a decade that didn’t swing nearly as much as people like to remember.
It’s not a total success by any means, and I suspect both the 1941 Raimu version and the 1992 Jean-Paul Belmondo version may be the more effective films, but it is still a fairly ambitious state of the nation piece in thriller’s clothing that isn’t quite good enough to pull it all together but pulls off enough to be an intriguing character piece. It wouldn’t work half as well without Mason, and it’s fans of Mason who’ll get the most out of the film, but it’s far from a one man show, with a decent cast of old pros like Harry Andrews, James Hayter, Megs Jenkins and Moira Lister backing him up.
Kino’s Region A-locked Blu-ray is a respectable enough transfer of a film that probably didn’t look that great to begin with, but it’s definitely from an older and at times inconsistent master, though a far from disastrous one. It’s probably far too obscure a film to get the full remastering treatment, but if you have realistic expectations you shouldn’t be too disappointed. The only relevant extra is the film’s trailer, which tries to make it look more modish, swinging and ‘happening’ than the film actually is. Just as this totally misleading bait-and-switch poster does:
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