Games

 Curtis Harrington was an interesting filmmaker.  Although he had the spirit of an underground avant-garde director, Harrington was also drawn to pulp and exploitation movies.  He imparts to his genre films an unique and perverse sensibility.  His movies always look fantastic and they are full of unexpected touches.  In some way, his Hollywood work resembles Val Lewton's stylish horror films from the early forties, although the shocks are presented with a more detached, and campy flair.  Harrington always wants to amuse you first; his horror is always highly aestheticized and secondary to the wit.  Openly gay, Harrington pictures have a distinctly homosexual tone -- this is evident in an early scene in his picture Games (1967) in which James Caan wears a fake moustache that is peeled off his upper lip by his wife (played by Katherine Ross) and planted on her face for their kissing sequence.  At the start of Games, an odd-looking fop is delivered to a party hosted by a depraved young couple, Jennifer and Paul (Ross and Caan).  The fop arrives in horse and carriage to a town house a couple blocks from Central Park.  The scene is redolent of Lewton's pictures ostensibly shot in New York City, particularly Cat People and The Seventh Victim, a movie set in Greenwich Village.  The fop is ushered into a strange party full of perverse looking people.  Paul says that he and his wife have been "dead for three years" but maintain themselves alive by buzzing and sparking Tesla coils and arcing electricity.  "Galvanism!" Paul declares as he distributes electrically charged wands and orbs to his audience.  The fop, who really has nothing to do with the rest of the movie, preens like Quentin Crisp or Oscar Wilde.  All of this takes place in a town-house decorated opulently with modernist art particularly Roy Lichtenstein's pop art canvases and various examples of op (or optical) art.  Heavy, funereal antiques are mingled with taxidermied ravens and occult statuary.  The art design in by Alexander Golitzin, the art director who worked on over 300 movies during his long career with the studios, including many of Val Lewton's films.  The first half hour of Games is startling and fantastically eccentric.  However, gradually Harrington has to settle into his suspense-thriller plot and, to be honest, the rest of the film plays out as an inferior variation on Henri Clouzot's Les Diaboliques.  Although the film is quite frightening and never less than engaging, nothing in last hour can quite match the bizarre and grotesque elements in the first third of the film.  

Paul and Jennifer are a young couple supported, primarily, it seems by Jennifer's wealth.  Paul has bought a fine art collection funded by Jennifer's money.  We don't know what Paul does for a living although he wears a suit and sometimes goes to a "club" where gets massages from hunky masseuses in a sort of steam room.  One day, a strange older woman, Mrs. Schindler (played by a very plump Simone Signoret (she was in Les Diaboliques 12 years earlier) appears at the home.  The woman is selling cosmetics door-to-door in this very tony neighborhood, seems perplexed and even a bit deranged -- she rants about meeting "quotas" -- and collapses in the townhouse.  Later, after being revived, she insinuates herself into the household.  She offers to pay for her room and board with a pair of antique dueling pistols, apparently weapons with which one of her past husband's killed himself during a friendly bout of Russian roulette.  Mrs. Schindler says that "three times" she had to escape by clambering over barbed wire and this was something that she had come "to love."  Clearly, there is something seriously wrong with her.  Mrs. Schindler mocks the perverse games that the couple sometimes plays as being without any consequence.  (The couple have a pinball machine in which points are awarded for running down pedestrians, a sort of precursor to video games like Grand Theft Auto.)   Mrs. Schindler encourages the couple to play at Jennifer cuckolding Paul with a handsome if dimwitted grocery delivery boy.  But this sport goes too far and Paul accidentally shoots the delivery boy in the eye with one of the dueling pistols.  (The scenes with the delivery boy and Jennifer are shot with mise-en-scene derived from mid-sixties hard-core porn although without the actual penetration footage.)  The couple scheme to conceal the corpse.  They own a George Segal plaster cast of a man that they display with their Lichtenstein prints and this inspires Paul to put the dead body in a plaster-cast similar to the white statuary made by Segal.  (This foreshadows the scene in Scorsese's After Hours in which the hero is trapped inside a Segal-like plaster cast; this is the movie in which Cheech Marin says that you can tell the value of post-modern art by how ugly it is -- the uglier, the move valuable.)  Throughout these scenes, there are clues that the dead man may not be entirely at rest -- we get the sense that he is haunting the large three-story (with cellar) townhouse.  There is a dumbwaiter used to stow the gory body in one scene and this device later triggers inexplicably as if to convey the living corpse right into Jennifer's bed and bathroom.  Mrs. Schindler isn't helping things by doing eerie Tarot readings and, later, obtaining a crystal ball from which she prophecies all sorts of dire things.  In the end, as in the Clouzot film, the corpse reappears seeking vengeance. The Tesla coils and Jacob's Ladder's all spurt into operation.  And there's a final twist that the audience has seen coming for, at least, half of the movie.  

This is all standard genre stuff but replete with baroque details.  The ghost whistles "London Bridge is Falling Down" (because this was whistled by the delivery boy before he was killed).  There are many shots staged in mirrors that are similar to the tightly woven visual apparatus that drives Fassbinder's films, shiny glass knitting the spaces together in a compelling if illogical way.  An open window is full of wind chimes.  Pinpoint lighting flares on certain details in the fine art decorating the walls of the mansion -- at one point, a character stands in a threshold flanked by a canvas lit so that we can see only one of the brutish-looking hands of the painted figure.  It's all very stylish and ingenious and the story, although predictable enough, holds together reasonably well.  Signoret is effectively eccentric with an edge of hysteria.  James Caan and Katherine Ross are mere children.  They are the weakest part of the film -- it is hard to imagine them as perverse as they pretend to be and the film would be better served by older, more jaded, actors in the central roles  -- maybe Rip Torn and Janet Leigh.  (Harrington has said that he wanted to cast Marlene Dietrich in the Schindler role).   The film is diverting and it is certainly professionally made and there is always something interesting to see in every shot.  Midway through the film Caan develops his trademark strut, something a little like John Wayne's ambling gait although this is not in evidence in the earlier scenes in the movie and one wonders if Harrington taught him how to walk this way.