Wtf-film: cult cinema and video reviews

Year: 1965  Company: 20th Century Fox / Panoramic Productions   Runtime: 104′
Director: John Guillermin   Writers: Ennio Flaiano, Stanley Mann, Phyllis Hastings
Music: Georges Delerue   Cinematography: Marcel Grignon
Cast: Patricia Gozzi, Dean Stockwell, Melvyn Douglas, Gunnel Lindblom
Disc company: Twilight Time   Video: 1080p 2.35:1   Audio: DTS HD-MA 1.0 English
Subtitles: None   Disc: BD25 (All Region)   Release Date: 12/13/2011
Rapture is available for purchase exclusively through ScreenArchives.com
Reviewed from a screener provided by Twilight TIme.

Young Agnes, an adolescent malcontent struggling to reconcile her childish nature with her budding desires, lives in isolation in her widowed father’s modest seaside estate. One day, after her father (himself obsessed with ruminations on “compassionate justice”) dashes her favorite doll on the coastal rocks in a fit of misplaced rage (“You’re not a child!” he screams), Agnes decides to construct a new companion for herself – a scarecrow made from one of her father’s old suits. A few days later Agnes, her father and their housekeeper witness the violent escape of a jailed man. When one stormy night that same man arrives in the family shed, having stolen the clothes from the scarecrow to hide himself from the authorities, Agnes becomes convinced that her manufactured companion has come to life.

The stranger-on-the-run is welcomed into the presumed safety of the home by the father, the housekeeper, and especially Agnes, though each for very different reasons. The promiscuous housekeeper takes him on as a lover, while the father uses him as a testing ground for his legal theories. Agnes, meanwhile, remains convinced that he is hers alone, and after throwing off his plans for escape (both from the police and the home) develops a more intimate relationship with him.

It’s rare anymore that I see a film so uniquely its own that it leaves me with no starting point from which to discuss it, but such a film is Rapture, director John Guillermin’s bleak yet sumptuous adaptation of Phyllis Hastings’ novel Rapture in my Rags. Transposed from the novel’s English countryside to the Brittany Coast to sate 20th Century Fox executive Darryl F. Zanuck’s taste for young French talent Patricia Gozzi, who would soon disappear from the film business all together, and produced by a largely French crew with American actors Melvyn Douglas and Dean Stockwell and Swede Gunnel Lindblom filling out the leading roles, Rapture is a film of strange international pedigree. That it was directed by a man (fittingly an Englishman of French lineage) best known for his contributions to the super-productions of mega-producers Irwin Allen (The Towering Inferno) and Dino De Laurentiis (King Kong and the much maligned King Kong Lives) only makes it stranger still.

Of course it’s not just the cultural diversity of the production that makes this film so unique, as good an initial indicator of such as that might be, but its substance and artifice as well. Ostensibly a coming-of-age drama about a confused young woman and the father whose misplaced anger threatens to obliterate their tenuous family ties, but with darkly fantastic overtones, a penchant for forbidden romance and art-house panache to spare, Rapture never comes across as being the usual cinema fare. Indeed, from the opening shots of a giggling bride on the way to her wedding ceremony to the final closing fade, I’m still not at all sure what to make of it, though it’s certainly a film I’ll never forget.

Portrayed magnificently by Patricia Gozzi, who was just fifteen at the time, Rapture‘s Agnes is the very embodiment of bewildered adolescence, and struggles to find herself under the domineering auspices of a father who at once demands she behave as a woman while treating her as though she were a child. Having spent most of her life out of school and in social isolation, with the threat of a nearby loony-bin forever looming, Agnes is predictably unprepared for the outside world. Her brief encounters with modern France, both during an early wedding and a later elopement, are claustrophobic, nightmarish affairs, with the trappings of metropolitan life (buzzing neon, busy streets, and dense, impenetrable crowds) skewed into horrific sights and sounds by her maladjusted perspective. By contrast her life on the depopulated French coast is appropriately rapturous, dysfunctional family dynamics aside, and spent splashing in the waves and reaching out for the greater freedom of the gulls fluttering above. Still the specter of her father (a troubled turn by the veteran Melvyn Douglas) lurks, omnipresent, waiting to lash out at her for any petty grievance.

With a torrent of lightning and rain (and a bit of overt Christian symbolism) the escaped prisoner Joseph (an enigmatic Dean Stockwell, who plays his cards close) arrives, signalling change for the conflicted family whether it’s prepared for it or not. Though he compells the father to contemplate that which torments him, and the roots of his revulsion for his youngest daughter, it is with Agnes herself that the change becomes most obvious – and disquieting. Joseph’s tryst with the housekeeper (Gunnel Lindblom in a hefty supporting role) inspires a fit of jealous rage in the teenager, who takes to her presumed competition with a shovel in hand and a homicidal gleam in her eye. The housekeeper survives, but wastes no time in seeing herself out of her job, and it is with her exit that things take a turn for the uncomfortable.

Agnes becomes romantically entangled with Joseph, a man twice her age (literally in the case of Stockwell), and takes up the outward trappings of womanhood (curling her hair, and dressing up and so on). While the sexual aspect of the relationship, however tastefully restrained in its conveyance, is undeniably disturbing, I found Agnes’ sudden transformation into a homemaker to be even more so. Though clearly unprepared for such a development, Agnes runs away with Joseph to an oppressive one-room downtown hovel in which she dutifully takes up her domestic responsibilities. It’s a depressing development made none the less so by its transience, and as Joseph piles more and more relationship burdens on Agnes (like handling the couple’s finances) it becomes quite horrifying. Guillermin and director of photography Marcel Grignon capture the experience with uncomfortable, inorganic angles and aggressive montage that makes us long for the wide-open seclusion of the seaside every bit as much as Agnes, even though we know as well as her that, after all that’s transpired, things can never be the same as before.

Meticulously photographed in black and white CinemaScope and related in an intense, personal manner, Rapture is about as far removed from Guillermin’s big-money spectacles as I’d imagine possible. It also speaks more for the director’s not inconsiderable talents than any of his better known films. Rapture practically oozes art-house appeal, and with that in mind it’s difficult for me to believe that the film, largely ignored upon its initial release, hasn’t garnered more of a reputation in the 46 years since. Far be it from me to say whether it’s great film making or not – coming-of-age dramas, however strange, aren’t exactly my area of expertise, and I’m still scratching my head over this one – but it’s certainly something different, and a beautiful something at that. Given the present era of over-hyped mediocrity that’s more than enough for me.

The second of Twilight Time’s limited edition Blu-ray series to be culled from the archives of 20th Century Fox, Rapture has finally received the quality home video presentation that has so long eluded it. Before I get into the technical details it’s worth noting that Rapture, like the rest of the Twilight Time catalogue, has been released as a limited pressing of 3000 and is available for purchase exclusively through ScreenArchives.com.

Once again I’m left with very little room to complain. Rapture makes its high definition debut in a glorious 1080p transfer at the original CinemaScope aspect ratio of 2.35:1, and though only single layered I can’t say that things suffer much for it. Marcel Grignon’s ace photography is wonderfully replicated here, with all its lush 35mm texture blessedly intact. There’s a wide variety of imagery to take in, from the most expansive of landscapes to the closest of faces and everything in between, and all of it is delivered in that true-to-film fashion I crave. Yes, there is some damage, unobtrusive printed white marks and a bit of dirt here and there, and even a smattering of very minor encoding artifacts, there’s a lot of grain for an encoder to digest here and with some rare exception the AVC video encode at 24.5 Mbps average handles it quite well, but all things considered this disc looks very, very good. I’ll let the screenshots do the rest of the talking for this one. Bravo, Twilight Time!

Blu-ray screenshots were taken as uncompressed .png at full resolution in Totem Movie Player, and compressed to .jpg at a quality setting of 95% using the ImageMagick command line tool.

Audio for the Rapture is presented in English via a simple and effective DTS-HD MA 1.0 track that perfectly replicates the film’s original monophonic recording. The sound design for Rapture is as memorable as the imagery in my mind, with crescendos in sound effects – not music – building up to its most impacting moments. Georges Delerue’s rich, oddly romantic score sounds quite good throughout, given the limitations of the original mix, but the accompanying isolated DTS-HD MA 2.0 score track – the disc’s sole supplement – is a revelation. If there’s a complaint to be made then its with Rapture‘s lack of a subtitle track, SDH or otherwise. Both Mysterious Island and Fright Night (review coming soon, I promise!) have subtitles, and I can only assume that none were provided by 20th Century Fox for this release.

Rapture is the sort of release that really drives home the importance of independent labels like Twilight Time, which are finally allowing some of the real surprises of the big studio libraries to see the light of day on home video. This Blu-ray is another quality package from the company, with a fine transfer, a great isolated score, and a superb set of liner notes from Julie Kirgo (some perspective on Rapture is really a must, and Kirgo does an admirable job providing it), and another easy endorsement from me.