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BADLY AHEAD OF ITS TIME After reading Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes, you wonder if author-critic David Thomson can sleep well at night knowing his hyperbole on Robert Rossen’s Lilith is so far off the mark as to become self-tormenting: it’s “the best film Beatty has made at that point in his career and you could make a case that it is the best he will ever make. A failure in its year (1964), the picture grows more profound and beautiful as the years pass by. It is a lake that resists every effort to plumb its depths....(it’s) the picture that most clearly engages Beatty in something like his own appetite for sexual encounters.” Anyone who has paid even the slightest attention to Beatty’s near-legendary sexcapades knows Hal Ashby’s Shampoo comes closest to what we perceive as the image of Beatty’s hunger. And how is it possible not to fathom Lilith when its depth is considerably lower than one’s own crotch? But Thomson’s British-born and educated, which goes a long way in explaining his annotation. Lilith is a respectable bomb, though: it wants to dive into the murky waters of sex, into an exploration of what turns people on, that just because one person’s appetites are different from the norm doesn’t mean he/she/they can be conclusively judged as abnormal. As the scheming Lilith, Jean Seberg is institutionalized because she’s a nymphomaniac, and, as a therapist-in-training trying to pull her from her amoralism, Beatty falls for her. But the premise is misleading: He isn’t really in love with her, he’s intrigued by her, and, it becomes obvious, turned on by her teasing sexuality. (The only honest scene in the movie is when, after discovering Lilith has made it with another woman, he has to have her right then and there.) But you don’t believe this screen Lilith is so powerful a sexual magnet to draw in so many; something’s not there—an angelic demoness vacillating between sexual bliss and fatal attraction. Seberg was never much of an actress to begin with, and it’s unfortunate she was chosen over other actresses considered: Sarah Miles, Diane Cilento, Samantha Eggar or Yvette Mimieux, who might have been able to pull off a sort of supernal looniness needed to entice, to entrap, to be the icon of free sex. Seberg, on the other hand, isn’t much more than a tramp with extra-large looking front teeth as repellency when viewed close up. Seberg’s real-life suicide may add a mystifying lore to Lilith, but it has zero effect in enhancing her performance. And once more Beatty is a movie’s most beautiful love object, made disconcerting by his ludicrously moody, intentionally evasive portrayal. Watching Lilith, based on the 1961 J.R. Salamanca novel, you will quickly surmise it would have benefited from having been made, say, in the 70s, when the subject of sex didn’t face the threats of censorship and the National Catholic Office. But you can appreciate Rossen’s attempt in trying not to make judgment on the self-discovery of the ease with which one can become a sexual habitué. (Today we’d all be branded.) Rossen’s last movie, and it’s also lenser Eugen Schufftan’s last American picture—another example of what we miss by not using b & w. Text COPYRIGHT © 2007 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved.
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