Luchino Visconti’s under-appreciated literary adaptation of Albert Camus’s L'ÉTRANGER was something of a lucky accident. Conceived by Visconti with the novel used as starting point for his own ideas, Camus’s widow refused any significant changes. More bothersome, envisioned star Alain Delon held out for a costly/controlling contract that producer Dino De Laurentiis answered by giving the role to Marcello Mastroianni.* Two major decisions against Visconti that basically ‘made’ the picture. A level of achievement we’re at last able to verify after a major late-‘90s restoration returned the extraordinary color palette (Algiers by way of Matisse’s Morocco) Giuseppe Rotunno gave to every frame.* The story remains: French account clerk M. Meursile, on trial for an inexplicable murder of a young Arab man. There’s a back story involving an earlier attack on a neighbor, the effects of sunstroke, a possible threat of revenge attack; a job offer in Paris and a marriage proposal deferred, a mother’s sudden death; all purposefully unclear. But the murderer is convicted less by circumstantial evidence than by an off-putting attitude toward God, toward his dead mother, toward the Arab community, etc. An outspoken atheist, Meursile comes across as cold & unfeeling, but it’s more failure of communication, less apathy than indifference. But even that’s supplying an uncalled for moral. Mastroianni gets this all across with unemotional clarity and a spot on cast of alarmingly disagreeable people. (People Meursile has little problem agreeing with.) It’s not that Meursile believes in nothing, but that he believes in nothing.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *You can get an idea of what Delon would have been like in the role watching Joseph Losey’s even chillier MR. KLEIN/’76. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/03/monsieur-klein-1976.html
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Lots of subfusc options still hanging around from before the restoration. Viewer beware!
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