Modesty Blaise (1966)
Friday, 7:00 PM
and
Boom! (1968)
Saturday, 9:00 PM
Harvard Film Archive, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge
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The Harvard Film Archive wraps-up its Joseph Losey retrospective this weekend with two of Losey's campier films, Boom! and Modesty Blaise. Starring Elizabeth Taylor and her sometimes-husband Richard Burton, Boom! has a long line of defenders eager to declare the movie an over-the-top classic (no-one would go so far as to actually call it a good movie), acclaiming its gorgeous set design and equally gorgeous star.

But if those were reasons to like Boom!, they're reasons to love Modesty Blaise. Based on the classic comic strip, the film stars the captivating Monica Vitti as the titular Blaise, a former criminal recruited by British intelligence to (what else?) fight crime. While the source material is something of a send-up of James Bond, the movie is a beautifully filmed mess, never quite sure if it wants to satirize or take its subject seriously. At times it plays with familiar Losey themes like sexuality and identity; at one point, Blaise reads the comic strip then dresses like her cartoon alter ego. The sequence is one of the true highlights of the film, both reminiscent of Vertigo and anticipatory of Losey's even more Hitchcockian Mr. Klein, the brilliant Holocaust identity movie that the HFA screened only last weekend. Unfortunately, it also points to the lofty intentions that Losey was unable to realize. Terrence Stamp co-stars as her knife-wielding assistant in a role that's sure to treat fans of Steven Soderbergh's The Limey.

Modesty Blaise isn't as good as Mr. Klein or any of Losey's collaborations with Harold Pinter, but it's certainly a spectacle, one well worth seeing on the big screen where its bright colors and mod production design can be fully appreciated.

Post contributed by Eitan Kensky