Cul-de-sac (1966)

Cul-de-sac is a British comedy thriller film first released in 1966, directed by Roman Polanski.  The film stars Donald Pleasence, Françoise Dorléac, Lionel Stander, Jack MacGowran and Iain Quarrier.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


When a job goes horribly wrong, two American gangsters, Dickie and Albie, go on the run.  Both have incurred severe gunshot wounds and need a place to hide out for a while to recover.  Nothing could suit their purpose better than the remote castle they discover on a barren stretch of coastline in the North East of England.  The sole inhabitants of the castle are George, a retired businessman, and Teresa, his attractive young wife.  Although they have only been married a short time, the marriage is already falling apart.  Whilst George is out flying his kite, Teresa is busy rolling about on the beach with their neighbours’ handsome son.   Dickie has no difficulty dominating the weak-willed George and his compliant wife, and when Albie dies from his wounds they help him bury the body.   As the trigger-happy gangster waits for his chums to pick him up and take him to safety, he amuses himself by taunting his two reluctant hosts.  The cowardly George realises that this could be the end of the road for all of them...

Roman Polanski followed up his startlingly expressionistic psycho-thriller Repulsion (1965) with this equally individualistic comedy thriller, which is effectively the Humphrey Bogart film The Desperate Hours (1955) remade in the manner of a Samuel Beckett or Harold Pinter Theatre of the Absurd play.  Polanski’s second English language film, Cul-de-sac divided the critics and was not a great commercial success but it was awarded the coveted Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1966.  It may not be Polanski’s greatest film, but it does perhaps reveal more about the man who made it than most of his subsequent work and is strangely prescient of the director’s own life.

The Island of Lindisfarne in Northumbria is an appropriate setting for this bleakly comedic thriller, the barren coastal landscape reflecting the sterile and confined lives of the three protagonists.  George has given up everything he possessed to buy the island retreat, thinking it a piece of paradise whereas in fact it is merely a prison.  Theresa is trapped in a loveless marriage and her only relief is the perverse pleasure she takes in tormenting her husband.   Meanwhile, Dickie, the hoodlum, has literally reached the end of the road, left out to dry by a gangster boss who has taken him off the payroll for good.  The island on which these three miserable wretches are brought together seems to shrink in the course of the film, becoming chillingly claustrophobic when it becomes apparent that there is no escape for any of them.  

This was not an easy film to make.  Roman Polanski’s perfectionism and lack of tact created tensions with his cast and crew that very nearly brought the production to a halt.  Polanski had a particularly bad working relationship with his three lead actors, who in turn found him very unsympathetic to work for.  In spite of this – or perhaps because of it – the three leads turn in some of the best performances of their respective careers.  Donald Pleasence and Lionel Stander are at times outrageously over the top and yet never cease to be utterly convincing, even when the former is frolicking about in a frilly nightgown and the latter playing the comedy gangster for all it’s worth.  French film star Françoise Dorléac (the sister of Catherine Deneuve, the star of Repulsion) is perfect as the alluring nymphomaniac wife who takes a sadistic delight in manipulating the men in her ambit.  This was one of Dorléac’s last screen appearances before her tragic death in a car accident, less than two years after she made this film.

Cul-de-sac combines some brilliant artistic touches (not least of which is Gilbert Taylor’s arresting film noir style cinematography) with Polanki’s trademark lunacy and perverse fascination with the darker side of human experience.  The more times you watch this film, the darker it becomes; what first appears to be playful comedy, almost farce, acquires a much more sinister aspect.   This is a film which is obsessed with showing us the depravity and vile ugliness of human nature.  None of the three main characters in the story has any redeeming features, everyone of them is driven to exploit, taunt and humiliate the others in what is effectively little more than a grotesque sadomasochistic fantasy.   There is a cruel irony in the fact that the grimness and pessimism that we see in Polanksi’s early films would manifest itself in the director’s own life in later years, sometimes to horrific proportions.  The world of Roman Polanski is a dark, strange place...

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