Two men with clownish features are bickering in a car stuck in the mud. A strange angular castle juts out above a causeway and bleak tidal flats. One of the men is wounded and seems to be only semi-conscious. He wears coke-bottle lens glasses and has a huge nose. The other man speaks with the accent of a heavy in an American gangster film and has a gruff, abrasive-sounding rasp of a voice. Apparently, the men are criminals who have botched some sort of a heist and are now fleeing. After more quarreling, the man with the raspy voice removes a tommy-gun from the stranded sedan and says that he is going to seek assistance at the castle on the outcropping over the tidal estuary. In the seaside dunes, the gangster comes upon a couple making love. Later, the thug encounters the woman again with another man, her somewhat effete and nervous husband, George. George's wife, Teresa has painted his face with make-up and dressed him in women's lingerie, apparently for a lark. But, needless to say, George doesn't present a very formidable figure to the American thug, Dickie who is toting the big submachine-gun. Dickie says that he has to retrieve his wounded buddy, Albie, from the car, now sinking into the mud and partially flooded by the advancing tide. Albie, who is gut-shot, is dragged onto the patio under the looming castle-keep where he is laid on a dining table and slowly dies. The castle is infested with aggressive chickens and the food stocked in the medieval-looking kitchen consists entirely of eggs supplemented with copious stores of booze. Dickie calls his boss, someone named Katelbach, and asks that someone be sent to rescue the two marooned criminals. But Katelbach, apparently, is disgusted with the botched heist and it's not clear that he is willing to retrieve his two henchmen. Sometimes, planes swoop over the castle and flooded tidal flats.
Time hasn't been kind of Roman Polanski's 1966 Cul-de-sac. a theater of the absurd production that raises existential questions that are, now, dead as a doornail -- the universe is an unforgiving wasteland, the monuments of man are falling into decay and no longer have any meaning, and, as Sartre reminds us in No Exit, "hell is other people": the characters all are "odd couples" who engage in sado-masochistic power games with one another. Dickie, who looks like Bert Lahr, and the saturnine, doomed Albie are like Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett's Waiting for Godot -- here they are holed-up waiting for Katelbach, a mysterious figure who (it becomes obvious) isn't coming to save them. Teresa and George obviously represent a mesalliance -- the voluptuous and beautiful French woman is taller and stronger than the fey George whom she dominates. George is played by Donald Pleasance who is surprisingly attractive when made-up and in drag; Pleasance who seems bewildered for most of the movie is the best thing in the picture -- Teresa continuously hectors him to act like a man and do something about the hostage situation, but, of course, nothing is to be done. The film slides into Pinter territory when another married couple with a bratty little boy and Teresa's lover from the dunes appears unexpectedly for a visit. Teresa and George act as if the tough-talking American gangster Dickie is their man-servant and a meal is served -- apparently, consisting of fried eggs and an omelette washed down with copious amounts of booze. By this time, poor Albie has died and been buried by Dickie and Teresa (who manfully delves in the stony soil with her shovel). After the visitors depart, there's some gunplay -- George has extracted Dickie's pistol from his coat and brandishes it. Teresa flees and, after Dickie has been shot, the insulted and injured and humiliated George takes the tommy-gun and shoots the deceased gangsters' sedan, blowing it up. Now, alone, George sits near the corpse and the smoking ruin of the car and laments his fate.
The movie is shot in harsh black-and-white. The night scenes, of which there are many, are harshly lit with flares of raking light. In the sunshine, the characters have a stark, gaunt, and haggard look and they all act viciously toward one another. The acting is good and Donald Pleasance is particularly memorable in his role as the abased and self-loathing George. The film's script and action is pitiless: human beings are the victims of indifferent and meaningless fate: everyone claws at everyone else and all relationships are based upon one party abusing and humiliating someone who is weaker or disadvantaged in some way. Parts of the movie are quite funny, but, of course, it's all pointless -- how could it be otherwise? Beckett's influence hangs heavy over the movie -- the actor who plays the dying Albie is Jack MacGowan, an Irish thespian, who specialized in roles in Beckett's plays. Lionel Stander who plays the gruff Dickie is like a combination of Ernest Borgnine and Eugene Pallette, the burly gravel-voiced comedian in many films made in the thirties. Stander's very good as well, but the part isn't much more than that of barking dog. Polanski seems to think he's discovered something new and interesting and the film has an uncompromising avant-garde sensibility, but, to be honest, the plot involving a cruel gangster victimizing hostages was old when Edward G. Robinson (with Bogart) played that part in John Huston's 1948 Key Largo (people held hostage in a bar during a hurricane) and, of course, Lionel Stander channels Humphrey Bogart in The Desperate Hours (1955). Those movies made all the same points as are developed in Cul-de-Sac and with considerable more style, effectiveness, and aplomb.
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