A Trip Back in Time

The standout film in the final week of the American Cinematheque’s fourth annual Mods & Rockers Festival is Jerzy Skolimowski’s “Deep End” (1970), which screens at the Egyptian on Wednesday at 7 p.m. and which warrants extended comment as a major work not as familiar to audiences as it deserves to be.

Skolimowski will be present to discuss his film after its screening.

Like the Polish-born director’s 1967 Belgian film “Le Depart,” in which Jean-Pierre Leaud discovers cars can be more important than girls, “Deep End” deals with a youth on the brink of manhood, but this time the hero’s wryly comic encounters move from poignancy and charm to unexpected darkness. It is a masterpiece, a picture that freezes the smile on one’s face.

When 15-year-old Mike (John Moulder Brown) is hired as an attendant at a huge and dingy London public bath, his instructor, Susan (Jane Asher), is a beautiful redhead several years his senior. Shy and sensitive, Mike is abashed by Susan’s warning that the patrons may want more than just soap and a towel and what’s more, there can be good money in accommodating them. Sure enough, Mike is almost overwhelmed by a blowsy blond (Diana Dors).

One day, however, Susan, who is alternately cruel and provocative, discovers Mike is a virgin and makes a teasing pass at him only to catapult him into a total and helpless love. Mike’s passionate pursuit of Susan is hilarious until there is a final confrontation between innocence and corruption. For Susan, a resilient young woman who has been embittered by poverty and indignity, is at once more cynical and a better person than she realizes. Without uttering a word of protest as such, Skolimowski has created an impassioned denunciation of society’s evils.

Before its chilling moment of truth, “Deep End” is a very funny film. The choice of that cavernous public bath, with its huge, indoor plunge, as the film’s principal setting is inspired. It lends the story a slightly surreal quality that is echoed in Skolimowski’s highly developed sense of the ridiculous. Populated with acutely observed, beautifully played characters, the deceptively casual “Deep End” is full of superb comic episodes.

Impassioned yet disciplined, Skolimowski finds the line between comedy and tragedy very thin indeed. “Deep End” remains a high point in his career.

The flawed “Lord Love a Duck” (1966), which screens at 6:30 tonight at the Egyptian, is an instance of the large attempt being worth more than the small success and remains one of the most offbeat Hollywood movies of the ‘60s.

Indeed, George Axelrod had so inspired an idea in adapting Al Hine’s novel to the screen (with Larry H. Johnson) that he should not have attempted such an ambitious project for his directorial debut. What makes this teenage movie for adults so ambitious is that while charting a high school girl’s progress toward beach-picture stardom, it satirizes life as it is lived in Southern California and, by extension, exposes the crassness and shallowness of the American dream.

Amid this large territory, Axelrod, whose main concern is the failure of love, zeros in on such ripe targets as sexual inhibitions and hypocrisy, the Beverly Hills bourgeoisie, teenage tribal customs, public school bureaucracy, parlor psychoanalysis, marriage counseling and drive-in religion.

The heroine is Tuesday Weld, whose every wish is made true by her Merlin-like mentor, Roddy McDowall. At first, all she wants is a dozen cashmere sweaters to qualify for membership in a school club and to go to Balboa over Easter vacation, but soon demands a husband with money and a Hollywood career.

Using this classic picaresque plot, Axelrod succeeded in creating wonderfully comic situations that keep snagging the underlying sadness of the empty lives of his characters. But as a director he is not a sufficiently experienced stylist to link them smoothly. He is unable to manage difficult shifts in tone and fails to create enough striking images to set off his frequently glittering dialogue. The result is an uneven comedy that is, unfortunately, almost all talk, with static stretches vitiating the best sequences.

Axelrod’s cast, however, is terrific. The relationship between Weld and her cocktail waitress mother, Lola Albright, suggests the pathos of the late Flo Aadland with her little girl Beverly, Errol Flynn’s last teenage inamorata. Martin West’s unctuous husband (of Weld) and Ruth Gordon’s dragon of a mother-in-law represent the acme of well-off vulgarity.

Most of the rest of the Mod & Rockers’ offerings are swinging London and Cold War spy thrillers. Screening Saturday at 5 p.m. is “The Ipcress File” (1965), the first-rate film version of Len Deighton’s excellent thriller. As British army intelligence spy Harry Palmer, Michael Caine marked the beginning of his full-fledged international stardom. A nearsighted, bookish gourmand, Palmer is nonetheless so sharp he could teach James Bond a trick or two--even about women.

Exciting, fast-paced and engrossing, “The Ipcress File” is a hip fantasy for the entire family. In trouble for making ill-gotten money while stationed in Berlin, Harry is rescued by Ross of army intelligence (Guy Doleman), who needs a man of few scruples and a lot of smarts to stop a brain drain, a series of mysterious disappearances by top British scientists. In one of his best films, director Sidney J. Furie develops a bold visual style with which to express Palmer’s sardonic view of the world. At its start, the film verges on satire with a deadpan take on spying, but subtly shifts to a more serious tone when ominous things begin to happen. The success of “The Ipcress File” led to two more spy pictures with Caine: “Funeral in Berlin” (1966), which screens at 7:30 p.m. and “Billion Dollar Brain” (1967), noted for the near-surreal vision director Ken Russell brought to it. (323) 466-FILM.

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The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Double Exposure: Photography, Film and the Cinema series is also presenting a pair of films from the ‘60s: William Klein’s “Who Are You, Polly Magoo?” (1966) and “Mister Freedom” (1969), Friday at 7:30 p.m. An American photographer and documentary and experimental filmmaker, Klein turned to feature filmmaking in France after working as an artistic consultant to Louis Malle on his 1960 “Zazie dans le Metro.” The first satirizes the French fashion industry and focuses on a naive model from Brooklyn; the second is a heavy-handed satire on a freedom fighter who looks like Superman and talks like a white supremacist and has been dispatched to France to save the country from communist infiltrators. Klein’s feature documentaries “Muhammad Ali, the Greatest” (1974) and “The Little Richard Story” (1980) screen Saturday at 7:30 p.m. (323) 857-6010.

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Best left to dedicated Elvira fans: The horror comedy spoof “Elvira’s Haunted Hills” (2001), in which Elvira (Cassandra Peterson), the poor man’s Vampira, departs a Carpathian village back in 1851 to star in a Paris revue only to be diverted by a Vincent Price impersonator to a spooky castle, where she discovers she possesses an exact resemblance to the creepy lord of the manor’s long-dead wife. Friday and Saturday at midnight at the Fairfax. (323) 655-4010.