By Lee Pfeiffer
The remarkable art house movie Rapture has been released on Blu-ray by Twilight Time as a limited edition (3,000 units). The movie should have been a sensation with critics back in 1965 due to the outstanding performances and surprisingly frank examination of sexual passion. For reasons we'll never know, the movie was instead greeted with polite but underwhelming praise and even the more enlightened critics of the day, who delighted in championing offbeat films like this, ended up largely ignoring the Fox production. Stunningly filmed in B&W, Rapture is a very intense, often disturbing character study that was directed by John Guillermin, who seems an unlikely choice for the film given that he went on to earn major success directing epic action movies like The Towering Inferno, The Bridge at Remagen and the 1976 King Kong remake. Perhaps it was the commercial failure of this movie that turned Guillermin toward more mainstream projects, but he obviously had a penchant for making serious dramas that was never quite realized.
Rapture is set in Brittany on the coast of France where Agnes, a 15 year-old girl lives with her stern, humorless father Frederick (Melvyn Douglas). He's a widower who never quite got over the fact that the wife he loved so dearly never had the same passion for him. He clearly resents having to raise Agnes on his own and constantly sends less than subtle signals to her that she suffers from a mental illness. Indeed, when we first see Agnes, she is still playing with dolls and living a lonely life as a tom boy. The only other adult presence in her life is the live-in housekeeper Karen (Gunnel Lindblom), a vivacious young woman who acts as big sister to Agnes, even though her nocturnal sexual encounters with her boyfriend in her room results in passionate sounds that cause the younger girl considerable frustrations. Agnes is also haunted by the fact that the house she lives in is close to a mental asylum and she lives in fear that her father will have her committed there. The humdrum lifestyle of these three people is upended when a wounded escaped convict, Joseph (Dean Stockwell), shows up at their house. For their own selfish reasons, they decide to hide him from the police and nurse him back to health. Frederick believes the young man's assertions that he has been framed and values his intellect. Frederick is a left wing liberal former judge who still fights quixotic battles for social justice and he sees in Joseph a sympathetic audience for his writings and editorials. Karen sees Joseph as a sexual plaything and Agnes deludes herself into believing that he is a scarecrow that has come to life to be her emotional salvation and lover. The sexual friction between the two females ultimately leads to dramatic and highly disturbing scenarios.
While the three adult leads all give very fine performances, the real star of the show is young Patricia Gozzi, who gives a remarkably nuanced performance as the rag tag young girl who wants so desperately to be loved. Joseph plays the women against each other and beds both. He seems to develop a genuine affection for Agnes and tries to convince her that her alleged mental problems are easily curable- if she will just get away from her dominating father, who continues to degrade and belittle her. The ill-fated love affair between convict and teen is handled with remarkable candor for 1965, complete with bedroom scenes that leave little doubt that Joseph is engaging in sex with an underage girl. The fact that Fox backed this film speaks well for the studio, because Rapture is the kind of film that major studios rarely went near.
Twilight Time's Blu-ray doesn't boast any extras which is a bit frustrating because, if ever a film called out for a commentary track by film scholars, this is it. The movie's outstanding B&W cinematography looks great and Georges Delerue's marvelous score is a joy to listen to. Julie Kirgo's excellent liner notes explain that Patricia Gozzi sacrificed a promising film career by going into self-imposed retirement at an early age. A pity because her work in this film was Oscar-worthy and she could have had a brilliant career. Rapture is a remarkable film on many levels. Put it on your "must see" list.
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