Comments on: DEEP END (1971) – Ripe for Rediscovery

By: gbs

gbs — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 03:41:00 +0000

Thanks to TCM for showing this amazing, sadly neglected film TWICE in 2010. Keep up the good work!

By: links for 2010-11-15 : socks-studio

links for 2010-11-15 : socks-studio — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 17:22:29 +0000

[...] TCM's Classic Movie Blog (tags: movie deep end classic cult) [...]

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 16:30:49 +0000

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.

By: skolimowski directs « chained and perfumed

skolimowski directs « chained and perfumed — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 05:39:42 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: Bob Hopeless

Bob Hopeless — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 19:50:26 +0000

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!

By: Spanki

Spanki — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 22:11:30 +0000

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.

By: CarmNYC

CarmNYC — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 17:15:50 +0000

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.

By: artfrankmiami

artfrankmiami — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 10:04:43 +0000

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!

By: Fighting Bob

Fighting Bob — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 09:59:27 +0000

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.

By: Fighting Bob

Fighting Bob — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 09:46:09 +0000

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!