Omar Sharif Archives - Parallax View

[Originally published in Movietone News 52, October 1976]

A well-researched case history would probably be more relevant than a conventional review in determining Crime and Passion’s just place in the annals of film. Films like this one come to us in such a clearly piecemeal condition that it’s difficult to envision them as anything but foredoomed second-feature material. A contingency-be-damned formalist might insist on trying to find a lucid and traceable progression from the opening overheads of a bright-colored sportscar careening dangerously through city traffic to the final, emotionally apt shot of a quasi-Mabusian figure literally frozen in contemplation of a distant fairy-tale castle where two lovers half-playfully, half-dolefully wait for his Death to come claim them. If such an analysis be possible, I’ll read it with gratitude. Meanwhile, Crime and Passion seems typical of off-the-wall projects that somehow ricochet out of control the moment they hit their locations on the Continent (in this case, Austria), so that, after a while, no one can quite remember when they come on set any given day just what, ultimately, they wanted their movie to do or be about, or just how the particular scene at hand was supposed to slant them toward that objective.

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A Community of Two: Blake Edwards’s ‘The Tamarind Seed’

[Originally published in Movietone News 35, September 1974]

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world…
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
—Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach

More than one person, myself included, was not too terrifically turned on by the prospect of The Tamarind Seed. Despite Blake Edwards’s modest rep as a quirkily competent director, and memories of his refreshingly adult Peter Gunn television series in the late Fifties, the notion of Julie Andrews and Omar Sharif let loose in an environment “where love grows and passion flowers” (to quote the early ads) did not set my critical—or indeed, any other—pulses racing in anticipation. Mary Poppins and Dr. Zhivago, as one Movietone News writer aptly dubbed them, might make magical music for Middle America, but they aren’t the couple that comes most readily to mind in the context of passionate, grownup love. In fact, I fear I had come to cast the two as top-of-the-line Barbie and Kenny doll stars: handsomely groomed and coiffured, offending no one (and even enchanting some) with their unrelieved attractiveness, and wholesomely bereft of bothersome genitalia.

Even when I got the word that the love story was set within the spy-thriller framework, I wasn’t much more sanguine about The Tamarind Seed. I’ve about had my fill of the institutionalized world-weariness of this venerable genre. Like the cop flick, the international spy drama has come to wallow in unearned cynicism, automatic angst. Current events haven’t helped this drift towards self-congratulatory recognition of corruption here, there, and everywhere. Having been conditioned to accept it as our native element, we are all too easily and undiscriminatingly immersed in a cinematic environment in which every landmark is subject to change without notice, depending upon the ebb and flow of political and/or ideological expediency. With poleaxed complacency, we watch individuals, relationships, ethics suffer such swift sea-changes that nothing is certain, save the expectation that the ground under one’s feet will be shifting again at any moment.