Private Property (Cinelicious, Blu-ray+DVD) – Put this 1960 film in the “Lost and Found” category. The directorial debut by Leslie Stevens, a playwright and screenwriter and protégé of Orson Welles, it’s a neat little sexually-charged psychological thriller set in the sunny California culture of affluence and trophy wives and drifting hitchhikers crossing the stratified social borders.
Corey Allen and Warren Oates are Duke and Boots, the George and Lenny of angry drifters, and Kate Manx is the beautiful trophy wife that Duke spots on the Pacific Coast Highway in a white Corvette. They coerce a travelling salesman to follow that car and trail her to her Hollywood Hills home, taking up residence in a vacant home next door. They ogle her through the second floor window as Anne sunbathes and skinny dips, and then they insinuate themselves into her home. A student of the Method school, Allen plays Duke as an angry young con man who has perfected the sensitive soul act, while Manx, who was Stevens’ wife at the time, is a limited actress who Stevens directs to an effective performance. Oates is the revelation, walking that tightrope between loyalty and suspicion, slowly figuring out Duke’s games but slow to act until practically pushed into action.
Long considered lost until it was restored by UCLA Film and Television Archive and rereleased in 2016, Private Property is not a lost masterpiece but it is a terrific little independently-produced thriller. Constructed around a few locations (including Stevens’ own home for Anne’s gilded prison) and a cast of four central characters and shot in an economical ten days, it is both a handsome production (shot by veteran, Oscar-nominated DP Ted McCord sometime between Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Sound of Music, and camera operator Conrad Hall) and a visually evocative world taut with palpable tension and he orchestrates the quartet nicely. The simmering resentments of class and money and the confusion of sex, desire, and power point this 1960 film forward to the socio-political concerns of late-sixties and early-seventies cinema.
Released on a Blu-ray+DVD combo pack from a 4K restoration with a new interview with still photographer and technical consultant Alexander Singer and a fold-out insert with notes and observations by Don Malcolm.
