Modesty Blaise (1966)

Very Cool!!!

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Aceptable fumetti adaptation to big screen with the great casting to support this comic robbery plot,Monica Vitti is quite convincing as Modesty Blaise sexy and beauty,Terence Stamp is just pretty face and didn't add too much....but Dirk Bogarde play yourself through the movie and didn't need to strive...a nice surprise comes with unexpected Clive Revill on a double character both amusing deserves a best reviews,the kitsch style and pop score is quite appropriate for movie's purpose...Monica could be more hot,she had what to delivery....Resume: First watch: 1996 / How many: 2 / Source: TV-DVD / Rating: 6.5

Joseph LOSEY directed MODESTY BLAISE, not John Schlesinger.This is to correct Alan Mount's following comment. Mr. Mount is entitled to dislike the film but it's fair to ask that he get the director correct.Mr. Mount wrote:"Director John Schlesinger seemed to use the movie totally as a showcase for his friend Dirk Bogarde whose performance is irritating in the extreme. If Modesty Blaise is to be resurrected as a movie heroine in the future a director with a genuine flair for action is required.This was not Schlesinger's forte at all."Given his comment, Mr. Mount seems to consider Modesty Blaise an "action film." I don't completely agree with that, but I might if he would be so kind as to elaborate on what he found lacking in the action in the film or how it was handled. Or better yet, why he considers it in main an "action" film? Since he would have preferred a director with a "genuine flair for action," what then should such a director have done with the film? Thanks.

Fox pinned hopes on 'Modesty' becoming a franchise to rival Bond, but these were cruelly dashed as Joseph Losey's film played to mostly empty theatres in the U.K. and U.S.A. ( it did rather better on the Continent ). Taken on its own terms, its not too bad. Jack Shampan's production design is superb, as is John Dankworth's music, there are a couple of decent performances ( Clive Revill, Harry Andrews, and a wonderfully camp turn from Dirk Bogarde ) and some good moments such as Modesty finding herself trapped in an op art cell. But as an adaptation of Peter O'Donnell and Jim Holdaway's comic-strip, its a non-starter. Monica Vitti fails to project warmth and charm as Modesty, while Terence Stamp sounds like Michael Caine on an off-day. The scene where they sing a romantic duet whilst under fire is just painful. Losey was clearly not the right director for this project. Fox made a rather more successful 'girl power' Bond thriller a year later - 'Fathom', starring Raquel Welch.

There's an art to making a psychedelic film. Some possess it, like Losey, and some don't, like Terry Gilliam ( drugs totally make the room spin around, man! ) Modesty Blaise may disappoint people looking for stoned 60's hijinks in the same way that a book like Maldoror disappoints those who say they want extreme, dangerous literature when all they really want is pornography. Maybe the world hasn't realized yet that nothing is dangerous except genuine spiritual expression hiding beneath unlikely -- frivolous, disgusting, or two-faced -- forms. This film constitutes one of the best examples of DANGER in cinema history.Modesty Blaise is angry. Not the character, but the film. It's hard to say how or why this is achieved, but I've never seen a movie that radiates such a clenched, suppressed fury from every frame. It's fitting that Joseph Losey ended his career ( if you don't count Steaming, and who does? ) with an Isabelle Huppert film -- her deadpan manner of expressing unappeasable, borderline serial-killer rage fits perfectly with Losey's style. The characters, with the exception of the God-like Dirk Bogarde, live in the most stomach-churning delirium, with no concept of who they are or what they're doing, but their plight is rendered more poignant by their attempts to make other people think that they're fashionably 60's, liberated and mythically hip. Images like this must run through any aging flower child's mind as, after becoming Republican and hoarding his pennies and thinking that he's left all of that idealistic stuff behind, he lays on his deathbed in a morphine-induced fever.Plot? What plot? To say that Modesty Blaise is one of the purest expressions of aesthetics for its own sake is a cliché, but true. This film carries you along on the inexhaustible fertility of Losey's mise-en-scene and cutting. Influences as diverse as Tati, Godard and Antonioni crop up in unexpected ways, all revitalized by the allure of Pop-Art, which this film continually promises but never delivers. Losey uses the pop-cultural trappings merely in order to avoid mausoleum pretension and to keep dumb critics whose approval is worse than death off his scent. Imagine a two-hour expansion of the end of Playtime, the cubistic ballet of balloons, buses and children ( who only LOOK more grown up in this film ), then add a thousand liters of vitriol, and you have Modesty Blaise. Maybe we'd like to send those aliens a film like 2001 to show what we're capable of, but Modesty Blaise is one of the most precise depictions of what we really were.