![]() ![]() “Unless I believe in a picture, I can’t make it,” Aldrich told an interviewer. “Neither pleasure…nor pain”, he retorts with a meta-sadistic smile. “You feel nothing?”, she says, as it dawns on her that he no longer loves her. ![]() Instead he had Stewart Granger, and, with Lot in almost every scene, neither Anouk Aimee (fresh from filming Lola, France 1960), nor Stanley Baker (warming up for Joseph Losey’s Eva, UK 1962) could keep Granger’s earnest performance from sinking the ship but they give it all they’ve got as a perverse brother-sister team (Aimee runs Sodom Baker runs Gomorrah, which doesn’t seem to have been in the budget) whose legacy from their mother includes a penchant for S&M games learned in childhood: after a political argument which establishes that Sis is still in charge, Baker lovingly bites her fingers, eliciting a wince of pleasure, but when she returns the favor, he remains impassive. ![]() The authors of Whatever Happened to Robert Aldrich? (1) manfully attempt to rescue the film for the auteur theory by proposing Lot, the hero, as a typical Aldrichian deluded-leader figure, which he is, and Aldrich told Peter Bogdanovich that he might have brought it off if he had had “a guy you could believe was Lot” (2). DeMille the equivalent of Steven Spielberg in terms of prestige and revenues), they have aged badly, and Sodom and Gomorrah has all the drawbacks of the breed: wall-to-wall “history-speak”, without slang or contractions big scenes reduced to the level of a high-school halftime performance by battalions of lumbering non-pro extras that stretch as far as the eye can see idiotic costumes (the nomad warriors sport shields covered with fur) pretty Italian actors playing Jews and Sodomites alike special effects out of a Mothra movie and a score by Miklos Rosza that is entirely composed of cliches, including woo-woo Indian attack music over shots of the nomad cavalry. So much so that when Sodom and Gomorrah (Italy/France 1962) was released, Movie, which had joined with Cahiers du cinema in championing him, felt obliged to apologize to their readers in their review of the film, adding that, happily, Aldrich had gone on to make What Ever happened to Baby Jane? (USA 1962) while the editing of Sodom and Gomorrah was being debated in the Italian courts.Īlthough sand and sandal epics were the blockbusters of their era (making Cecil B. ![]() When Robert Aldrich undertook to make a biblical epic in 1961, he had enough artistic successes under his belt ( Kiss Me Deadly, USA 1955, Vera Cruz, USA 1954, The Last Sunset, USA 1961) to earn him a reputation as one of Hollywood’s leading auteurs. ![]()
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