1953 - SAADIA, another exotic film drama from the exotic Albert Lewin

 It's kind of amazing the director/writer Albert Lewin even had a career as a film director.  This was a guy who the phrase "high brow" films was synonymous with his name.  Saadia is a strange adventure/love story epic filmed in Morocco with an eccentric cast.

Rita Gam is the mysterious Saadia who is controlled by a witch who for 1953 clearly has repressed lesbian desires for her.  Mel Ferrer plays a French doctor in love with Saadia and Cornel Wilde in another odd ball piece of casting is the ruler of Morocco who is of course is also in love with Saadia.  It's sort of a four sided love triangle.

 

Throw in some middle eastern bandits who want to overthrow the kingdom of Morocco and you have kind of an action climax.  Frankly I don't know what this film is even remotely supposed to be about.  However it looks great thanks to Christopher Challis the cinematographer who had a long association photographing the films of  Powell and Pressburger.  

 

An interesting but weird film.  Unsurprisingly the film lost money.

Written by Albert Lewin, the running time is 82 minutes.

1957 - THE LIVING IDOL, thoughtful, intellectual but ridiculous film about human sacrifice and reincarnation

The writer/director Albert Lewin appeared to fancy himself a person with many deep thoughts about deep subjects, like love, reincarnation, death and destiny.   Lewin had worked in the film business long enough to know how to put together a film and even with a silly subject like this he made The Living Idol, entertaining claptrap.

A famous archaeologist, studying reincarnation and human sacrifice in Mexico, begins to believe his adopted daughter is a reincarnated Aztec princess. Apparently the Aztec princess was sacrificed to a jaguar god in a previous life. The archaeologist gets a fascination with a jaguar at the zoo and guess what escapes and goes after the adopted daughter?

It's nice that Albert Lewin got financing to film this picture on location in Mexico, the CinemaScope photography looks great.  His cast is rather strange.   Steve Forrest star of the TV series SWAT is supposedly a writer researching an article in Mexico, he seems to be struggling to understand exactly what the hell is going on in this film. The other odd acting choice is a performer named Liliane Montevecchi who is French/Italian and is naturally cast as a Mexican woman. I had never heard of Liliane Montevecchi but apparently she did a movie with Elvis.

 

The Living Idol is the kind of film where you get loaded with your school buddies and talk about this intellectual, existentialist B.S. for a couple of hours before everyone gets the munchies and/or passes out.

96 minutes.

1945 - THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GREY and 1951 - PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN

Viewed a couple of highbrow flicks this week by the Director/Writer, Albert Lewin. How did this guy ever get work? First up, "The Picture of Dorian Grey" the story of a guy who is not nice and never ages. He has a magic painting hidden in his house which reflects all of the corruption and evilness in his nature. This was actually very entertaining for a pseudo highbrow film. Lewin was clever enough to use a lot of the dialog and situations from Oscar Wilde's book. The production had that top MGM sheen which people like to talk about. The painting on the left used in the movie actually hangs in the Chicago Museum of Art much to my surprise when I went there.



 


 Next up, "Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. Ava Gardner is Pandora Reynolds, a woman so beautiful that a man will kill himself over her (he was drunk after all). Into her life comes the legendary Flying Dutchman, doomed to roam the seven seas in search of true love, etc. Ava just happens to be his reincarnated spouse, although she says that she is just a "singer from Indianapolis". Ava Gardner could never be a "singer from Indianapolis" if her life depended on it and her life does depend on it because if she hooks up with the Dutchman she will die. There is also a jealous bullfighter involved and a race car driver trying to break some sort of beach speed record in some sort of souped up jalopy. The film is narrated by a "Dr Quest" professor type who just assumes that the Flying Dutchman sailing into a party town on the coast of Spain is no big deal. I hope the above description conveys a small taste of the goofiness of this film which I enjoyed a lot.