Wicked Games: Three Films By Robert Hossein
directed by Robert Hossein
starring Robert Hossein, Marina Vlady
Radiance Films
Too late for film noir and too soon for the French new wave, the film work of Robert Hossein doesn’t fit neatly into any major film movements, but nonetheless time has proven him to be a captivating filmmaker. Three films from Hossein’s early period, The Wicked Go to Hell (1955), Nude in a White Car (1958) and A Taste of Violence (1961), are collected in Radiance Film’s new Blu-ray box set, Wicked Games: Three Films By Robert Hossein.
In The Wicked go to Hell, a pair of cellmates makes a daring prison escape and winds up on the lam, eventually taking refuge in the beach cottage of a painter and his young muse, Eva (Marina Vlady). When the painter is killed by one of the convicts, a desperate battle of wills and wits ensues between Eva and the invaders of her idyllic and completely isolated retreat. She pits the men against each other before ultimately leading them into a deadly trap.
Robert Hossein originally directed this story on stage at the famed Grand Guignol, and the play’s roots are quite apparent on screen, though to his credit Hossein keeps the film from feeling too stagey. His camera and editing are a flurry of motion and energy, even if the first-time, untrained filmmaker doesn’t even know the rules of cinema he flouts with regularity. The Wicked go to Hell is quite a captivating and rule-breaking film that stands as a testament to what a filmmaker can sometimes achieve without the constraints of cinematic rules.
Three years later, Vlady and her sister Odile Versois reteamed with Hossein for Nude in a White Car. Hossein stars as Pierre Menda, an out-of-work TV host who gets picked up by a nude blonde woman in a white Cadillac. They have sex in the car, but when Pierre tries to get a look at the mysterious woman’s face, she forces him out of the car at gunpoint. Noting the car’s license plate, Pierre tracks the owner of the car to a mansion near Nice and finds not one, but two beautiful blonde sisters, Eva (Marina Vlady) and Hélène (Odile Versois). Further complicating matters is one of the sisters, Eva, is confined to a wheelchair, and Hélène seems far too pure to be roaming the beach roads at night looking for anonymous sex. Quickly Pierre gets taken in by the sisters, and soon after realizes he is in way over his head as the trio engage in sexual and psychological warfare against each other until the sororal secrets are revealed.
In his third feature, Robert Hossein is in much better control as a director and this time is leaning hard into the gothic in his tale of two sisters who are not as they would appear on the surface. Hossein again understands his biggest asset is in his actresses and lets them shine while he plays Pierre as terminally clueless right to the end. The trust in his leading ladies is in no small part due to him now being married to Marina Vlady, who is actually a few months pregnant with her and Hossein’s second child during production. In order to obfuscate the identity of the nude in the Cadillac, Vlady and Versois alternated the part for different shots, deepening the mystery for both Pierre and the audience.
Taking a huge step up in scale and scope, Hossein delivers with his Zapata western, The Taste for Violence. The Zapata western was a sub-genre of Euro-westerns that centered on the Mexican Revolution, and the protagonists were usually bandit or outlaw anti-heroes used as analogs for current social commentary. Despite the change of genre, this film very much fits with the other films in the set, because when you strip away the scenic vistas and horses and gunfights, it is still a story of men and women trapped together under stress and constant threat of violence. In The Taste for Violence, a revolutionary, Perez (Robert Hossein), takes a dictator’s daughter, Maria (Giovanna Ralli), hostage in a ploy to rescue some captured allies. Soon the small band transporting their hostage begin to quarrel amongst themselves and Maria must choose which of her captors is the lesser threat in her attempt to survive.
Beautifully photographed in striking monochrome, the film is a huge leap forward from the director’s claustrophobic early films that leaned heavily on his background on the stage. The Taste for Violence has some wonderful action set-pieces, especially the protracted opening scene that starts with soldiers being ambushed on the train they are guarding and continues through the introduction of the characters and their mission before ending with the inevitable and terrifying mass execution of the revolutionaries’ prisoners. As always with Hossein’s work, there is an oft-clinical distance he places between the audience and the characters, so strong emotional investment is difficult, but his films are nonetheless fascinating and endlessly entertaining.
The films of Robert Hossein have been long neglected, but the Wicked Games box set from Radiance serves as a formal introduction to the iconoclast auteur. All three films in the set come with fabulous extras, including audio commentaries on all three films by Tim Lucas, as well as a video essay and writings by Howard S. Berger, Samm Deighan, Alex Cox, C. Courtney Joyner, Lucas Balbo, and Walter Chaw. Wicked Games: Three Films by Robert Hossein is a treasure and a set no fan of offbeat cinema should miss.
