maximilian schell-fest: evening two

*SPOILER ALERT BOTH MOVIES*

Topkapi: (1964. dir: Jules Dassin) I don't like heist films, generally, and I'm not wild about Carnaby Street camp. You put the two together and I wind up grinding my teeth all through the Italian Job, despite its many charms. Topkapi seduces even a hard-case like me because of its cast of well-defined misfits, led by the irresistible Melina Mercouri, and given poignancy by the comic subtleties of Peter Ustinov as a small-time crook over his head and out of his league in a plot to steal fabulous emeralds. Schell is the suave, unflappable brains behind the operation. It's a perfectly-timed romp with plenty of tension at the appropriate moments, as you might expect from the director of Rififi ... and then it's spoiled by its ending. This is one heist which ought to have been pulled off. The end feels like a cheat, and is further cheapened by the comic tag from the Turkish prison.

This film doesn't belong to Schell: it belongs to Mercouri and Ustinov. Still, after all the sober intensity of my Maximilian Schell film festival, it's nice at last to see him relaxed and enjoying himself.

the Young Lions: (1958. dir: Edward Dmytryk) Schell's first foray into Hollywood is a remarkably adroit one, but the film itself is one of those ridiculously self-indulgent epics, the kind that were edited with extra seconds on either end of each scene to show off the picturesque locales. It's also a big mush of comedy and drama, as personified by the casting of Dean Martin opposite Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando. (Yes, I'm a sucker for Rio Bravo as much as the next guy, Dude included, but there's something about The Dean Martin Persona which does not translate past his generation; he comes across as slimy, unhealthy, mean-spirited, grotesquely charmless.) The first half of this endless movie traces three or four stupidly-written romances, the most awful being between Hope Lange's non-character and Clift's underdoggy soldier. Still, once you've fast-forwarded through all that, and also through Brando's "soulful" romance with a feisty Parisian gal, there are unforgettable pieces: namely, the scene in which the badly-wounded Schell asks Brando to visit his wife ("convince her that I am salvageable"), then the scene of the visit itself. Schell's Captain Hardenberg has been disfigured in a mine accident while sharing a motorbike ride in the desert with Brando, who escapes unscathed, and whom he suspects (rightly) of having been his treasured wife's lover.

The scene in which Brando's Lt Diestl visits him in hospital is a piece of unheimlich surrealism that will not leave my mind. Brando is all but speechless with guilt, and Schell, his head swollen and obscured by bandages, communicates his mania not just vocally but with those strange, long hands. It is the best written thing in the film, a scene in which this character, whom we have previously known only through Brando's eyes, manipulates him marvellously, convincing him to bring the weapon with which he will kill himself, an act of which Brando will not learn until he arrives in the broken-down shell of the wife's house in Berlin. This is the second best scene, and Brando's best, when he realizes with horror both the awful, destructive nature of the marriage and of his own destructive part in its drama.