DEEP END (1971) – Ripe for Rediscovery

Posted by morlockjeff on August 25, 2007

Deep End poster Sometimes a film comes along that no marketing department can get a handle on and as a result it just gets tossed out there to fend for itself and to find an audience on its own. That was the case with DEEP END, released in 1971 by Paramount Pictures to selected art houses and whatever theatre chain was willing to book it. I saw it at the Westhampton Theatre in Richmond, Va. which was obviously run by an Anglophile – you could almost count on any new British film to play there. Of course, DEEP END is only British on the surface. It was set in London but the majority of the film was shot in West Germany. It was also the second English language film for Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski and the cast was relatively unknown to American moviegoers with the possible exceptions of former English sex bomb Diana Dors and Jane Asher, whose main claim to fame at that point was having the dubious distinction of being Paul McCartney’s ex-girlfriend…despite her accomplished work in such films as MANDY (1952, as a child star), THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH (1964) and ALFIE (1966).

Jane Asher

The tagline for the poster reads “If you can’t have the real thing – you do all kinds of unreal things” over an image of a teenage schoolboy ensnared in the long flowing hair of a red-headed woman. In some ways, the publicists weren’t too far off the mark but this approach couldn’t begin to convey the quirky and inspired movie hiding behind the poster. On the surface, it looked like another coming-of-age film and it did play off some of the clichés of that well-worn genre. But it’s much trickier…and deeper…and darker. And also unexpectedly funny.

John Moulder-Brown

Set in a seedy bathhouse in a working class borough of London, the film introduces us to a fifteen year old boy named Mike on his first day at work there as an attendant to the clients. Showing him the ropes of the trade is Susan, a provocative and sexy 23-year-old employee who has a fiancé…and is also having an affair with Mike’s former gym teacher. In this strangely cloistered and private environment Mike’s fantasy life runs wild, obviously encouraged by his observation of some of the regular clients, especially an overweight blonde with a football fetish (Diana Dors in one of the film’s more bizarre sequences).

Deep End poster

At first the film maintains a wonderful balance between reality and surrealism but as Mike’s sexual obsession with Susan begins to grow the sense of real and unreal become entwined until you can’t tell the dancers from the dance. Skolimowski switches emotional gears often and seamlessly from hilarity to angst to tenderness to tragedy without losing credibility or momentum. And it’s this very quality that divided the critics when it first premiered in the U.S. The ending, in particular, disturbed and angered many but if you are paying attention the road signs are there marking the way. It is not, after all, a coming-of-age film in any ordinary sense but a black comedy about the fears and fantasies of an adolescent male, one whose virginity is more troubling to him than we could ever imagine. Here are just a few of the varied responses it received from the nation’s foremost critics at the time:

“DEEP END seems likeable and promising until it begins to drift, morbidly and irreversibly, off the deep end. I think the final result is rather weird and loathsome…Judging from DEEP END, Skolimowski has a fairly distinctive personality, but it happens to be a split personality, split in a way – half-Truffaut, half-Polanski – that I find rather disconcerting and unappealing.” – Gary Arnold, The Washington Post

“Jerzy Skolimowski has finally put it all together in DEEP END: passion without hysteria, intelligence without derision, and compassion without special pleading. DEEP END is the best of Godard, Truffaut, and Polanski, and then some; nothing less, in fact, than a work of genius on the two tracks of cinema, the visual and the psychological.” – Andrew Sarris, The Village Voice

“A pop-psych tragedy…basically pointless and shallow – a demonstration of artlessness imitating lifelessness.” – Arthur Cooper, Newsweek

“Skolimowski has created a masterpiece, a picture that freezes the smile on your face…Without uttering a word of social protest as such, Skolimowski has created an impassioned denunciation of society’s evils…Before that chilling moment of truth, DEEP END is a very funny film.” – Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

“…as clumsily contrived to provide visual thrills as ever any corny old melodrama was contrived to provide chase thrills…The symbolism of the bathhouse is patent; so are the colors. We even see walls being painted red as the passions hot up. (The idea of Red Desert trivialized into Red Dessert.)” – Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic

“….John Moulder-Brown and Jane Asher – They take a vision that had been sober, fateful and heavily ironic and help render it alert, subtle, graceful and sensitive.” – Roger Greenspun, The New York Times

“A canny black comedy, executed with a surrealistic flourish…transforms the rite of puberty into a frenzied and often wildly funny vaudeville.” – Jay Cocks, Time

“Skolimowski mistakes artiness for artistry.” – Hollis Alpert, The Saturday Review.

John Moulder-Brown

And there you have it. For me, DEEP END remains as fresh and inventive as any of the French New Wave films of the early sixties (as several critics noted above) such as Godard’s BREATHLESS or Truffaut’s THE 400 BLOWS but has never enjoyed the reputation or following of either. The only things that betray its age are superficial details – the hair styles and fashions of the early seventies plus a music score that features a theme song by Cat Stevens (“But I Might Die Tonight”) and one by Can – “Mother Sky” – which provides the hypnotic beat over one of the film’s most riveting sequences and involves the Soho nightclub scene, a Chinese hot dog vendor and a bed-ridden prostitute wearing a full leg cast rigged to a pulley.

Last but not least are the subtle but complex performances of both Jane Asher and John Moulder-Brown who continue to work in films and television today but are rarely singled out for their excellence or their fascinating filmographies. Asher can be seen in the recent DEATH AT A FUNERAL while Moulder-Brown’s most recent credit is the Greek-Egyptian-UK co-production of YOUNG ALEXANDER THE GREAT (2007). Like Asher, Moulder-Brown was also a child actor (ROOM AT THE TOP, 1959) but is best known by horror film buffs as the deceptively innocent hero of Narciso Ibanez Serrador’s LA RESIDENCIA aka THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED (1969) and for VAMPIRE CIRCUS (1972).

And why am I talking about DEEP END after all these years when it’s been unavailable in any format? Because TCM will be showing it for the first time in its late night franchise, TCM Underground, on January 15, 2010 at 2:30 am ET.

Now if only The Criterion Collection would give it their deluxe treatment

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17 Responses DEEP END (1971) – Ripe for Rediscovery

Posted By Dean : August 25, 2007 4:31 pm

I have been wanting to see this film since reading about it in Danny Peary's Cult Movies. Can't wait. Hope Crtierion has the rights.

Posted By Maggie May : August 25, 2007 8:39 pm

I know the Westhampton Theatre on Grove Avenue. I used to live in Richmond. I thought it was leveled a while ago but I go online and see that it's part of the Regal Theatre chain. The weird part is that DEATH AT A FUNERAL is playing there with Jane Asher in it..way down in the supporting cast..but still!!! Talk about a crazy coincidence! And Asher was on the marquee there in 1971!

Posted By Todd : September 19, 2007 3:25 am

Hey Jeff,We're showing Deep End at Flicker in Athens on monday September 24th at 9: 15 P.M. Sadly it ain't no 35mm print but it is a good copy. Come one, come y'all .. it is free.And yeah, It's a killer movie. Wes Anderson obviously took a few ideas from it … and it does fall into that younger guy /older woman relationship type thingy like Harold And Maude , The Graduate and Rushmore ( flattening car tires, bikes getting run over) did. Killer music too.

Posted By Jeff : September 28, 2007 5:31 pm

Todd, where did you rent the print from? Swank? Didn't know there were any non-theatrical prints of it left. And I missed it dang it because I just found this post today!

Posted By steven : January 14, 2010 1:01 pm

I can’t believe I’m going to see Deep End again. I thought that important 1971 movie experience when I was using my unemployment checks almost exlusively on movies–I thought I’d never be able to revisit it. Its importance to me is measured by my almost complete recall of about five haunting images from the film–and from the wonderfully strange feeling I had–which I can still recall–when I left the theatre that San Francisco afternoon. The theatre was on Polk Street. My loyalty and affection for TCM deepens.

Posted By joel : January 15, 2010 12:20 pm

I saw this at a midnight show at the Coolidge Corner Cinema, Brookline, MA around 1985. We were all very tripped out when we saw this.
Good on you TCM!

Posted By godfrey hamilton : January 15, 2010 2:52 pm

I yelped with joy when I saw this listing; I’d just the previous week been extolling the greatness of this movie to friends (which I’ve been doing relentlessly since I saw it in 1971); once seen never forgotten – a haunting,unmissable masterpiece. Ad if rights are available, yes, this is certainly a top-of-the-list candidate for Criterion. Please? Please!

Posted By Jeff : January 15, 2010 3:16 pm

When I first started as a film buyer for Cinema V Theatres in New York, I booked this film into the Paris Theatre. It is a fascniating, if flawed, film and I thought it demanded to be seen. Obviosuly, audiences and Pararmount Pictures disagreed and the film was pulled after just over 2 weeks, having recieved a disasterous reception from audiences. I nearly lost my job, as a result. I am pleased that the film has resurfaced at last and can only hope that the transfer will do it justice.
The director’s other films are equally personal, but definitely worth a look, as well.

Posted By morlockjeff : January 15, 2010 7:41 pm

The transfer is ok but much better than the faded-to-red color print I saw on 16mm years ago. It is just as deceptively complex and as alluring as I remember it. I only wish Jane Asher had made more films but Skolimowski remains criminally underrated even though I admit he has had a checkered career. It would be great if Criterion took this on but Paramount owns it and they are famous for neglecting their own library.

Posted By Fighting Bob : January 16, 2010 4:16 am

I can’t believe how everyone here is going on an on about this film. And to compare it to the best of Truffaut or Polanski, Mr. Sarris, when you wrote the definitive review of The Seventh Seal. Unbelievable!

As a cleaver wit once said about a middlebrow magazine with its slick pages parading as highbrow art, it’s dross on gloss. The last sequence is the topper, a cheesy symbolic reverie of Freudian eros-thanatos dreck. No doubt Criterion will eventually release this work considering their choices of late — Rossellini, Wenders and Nava’s El Norte excepted.

If you want to see an interesting film from Skolimowski get a hold of Bariera (Barrier), that is if you can find a copy. That’s why I went to see Deep End in the 1970s and came out thinking Jerzy was in Deep S… in swinging England. Anyway, Barrier with its non-linear plot is far more interesting than Resnais’ execrable Last Year at Marienbad, but that’s not saying much is it. Oh, thanks again Criterion!

Posted By Fighting Bob : January 16, 2010 4:29 am

Oh, that’s clever, not cleaver. I guess I was thinking how aesthetically comparable Deep End is to that other great masterpiece, Corman’s A Bucket of Blood.

Posted By artfrankmiami : January 16, 2010 4:34 am

Wow! i was surprised that these comments went all the way back to 2007. TCM had the movie on tonight (01/16/10) and I put the recorder on during The Friends of Eddie Coyle and promptly fell asleep. I awoke to Deep End to see a beautifully photographed love scene shown only in extreme closeups of eyes and lips, ending with the above shot of the pool. A movie I saw only once 30 years ago, The Shout I believe is the title, is now on and when that’s over and I can stop the recorder, what a wonderfully artistic double feature I’ll have!

Posted By CarmNYC : January 16, 2010 11:45 am

The more compelling elements — the hot dogs, the prostitute, the sexual angst of a young boy — have been done better elsewhere. What saw was Skolimowski taking his revenge on some girl who done him wrong years before. Moulder-Brown and Asher are indeed remarkable, much better than the film deserves. Asher is stunningly complex as the disturbed young woman who had been molested as a teenager by a pedophile, a man still at it with seeming impunity. The worst he gets is a verbal dressing-down. She is killed. It’s disturbing and rather sad that this film is apparently so cherished by men who were young when they first saw it.

Posted By Spanki : January 16, 2010 4:41 pm

Fianlly got to see this at a recent festival and was surprisingly not disappointed. Funny, bizarre, and ultimately heartbreaking. The performances of John Moulder-Brown and Jane Asher are remarkable. It’s a great film.

Posted By Bob Hopeless : January 29, 2010 2:20 pm

Had wanted to see this for years, maybe since I first read something about it during the film’s initial release, and never was able to until now. So thank you, TCM. But…my DVR recording ended about 2-3 minutes before the end! Still, it lived up to all my expectations. Maybe it is a very specific male adolescent thing, as one poster above suggests, but I’m not that teenager anymore and still completely haunted by this. Asher was great, her verbal dressing down of the gym teacher astonishing, and the mix of the surreal and the grotty mundane just perfectly balanced. PLEASE, we need a restored widescreen DVD – today!

Posted By skolimowski directs « chained and perfumed : June 17, 2010 1:39 am

[...] thought lost” though that doesn’t seen quite true. Either way, there seems to be some renewed interest in this guy’s sixties work in recent [...]

Posted By Rob : July 7, 2010 12:30 pm

I saw this movie for last week on TCM. It was not a movie that you could walk away from as it keeps you totally involved. It caused an odd sensation of returning to the early seventies and realizing that the revolution was not as much fun as it was made out to be. Mike was truly everyman.

The only scene that did not seem right was when Susan refused to take care of Mike’s mother. I guess it was her frustration with their division of labor in the bath.

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