The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

There's Oedipal pathology to spare in this dramatically dubious yet strangely compelling curio from the arty sex-film vogue of the early and mid-1970s. Freely adapting the novel by Yukio Mishima, director Lewis John Carlino transplants the story to the windswept, unbearably romantic Devon coast of England, where a lonely widow (Sarah Miles) and her mischievous son (Jonathan Kahn) find a potentially happy future with a visiting sailor (Kris Kristofferson) who readily satisfies the widow's pent-up desires. So far, so good…but the troubled lad hangs out with a gang of little Hitlers-in-training, and their fascistic influence--which includes such malevolent diversions as dissecting a cat (in a scene that animal lovers will surely abhor)--convinces the boy that the manly American has got to be dealt with. Carlino would fare better with his later film The Great Santini, but his approach to Mishima's tale is ham-fisted, laughably symbolic, and self-consciously arty, especially in his handling of still-steamy sex scenes, which were effectively promoted, during the film's theatrical release, by an even steamier Playboy pictorial. And yet, with its creepy ending and Lord of the Flies-like subplot, the film still works as an unsettling study of pre-adolescent psychology and oh-so-British repression, and the cinematography by Douglas Slocombe (a longtime collaborator of Stanley Kubrick's) is undeniably alluring in its original widescreen format. Academically worthwhile for book-to-film studies, this is otherwise only marginally recommended. (J. Shannon)