Saturday, November 28, 2009

The Endangered List (Case File #54)



THE BLUE HOUR (1971)

Starring
Ann Chapman
and
Edward Blessington

Directed by
Ron Nicholas
and
Serge Goncheroff

Produced by
Carl Hittleman

Executive Producer
LeRoy Klein

Music by
Harry Fields

A
Grads Corporation
release

In Color
82 minutes
MPAA rating: X

PLOT

This story is about two people whose relationship is falling apart. David is a young architect whose dream is to build an ecological sound city. Tanya is a girl from Greece who wants a family. The two are living together and David is busy raising money so that he and Tanya can go to Canada. Something is wrong and they both know it. Tanya says in the beginning of the story “that her head is so hung up with her past that she can’t get herself together today”. The story shows how this happens to people. We see different things come up between David and Tanya in their everyday that “triggers” her similar past experience. Then through the use of flashbacks we see all the traumatic experience in Tanya’s life. Slowly we trace her life from the most current relationship that she has had with men back to her early life in Greece and her first love affair with a young priest. The priest kills himself and sets Tanya’s life on a road to

America to live with her uncle on a farm in California. The uncle is a lonely man who has lived by himself since his arrival in America. After a period of time he begins to think of Tanya more as a woman than his niece. After a few futile attempts on the part of the uncle Tanya decides that she wants to try to have a relationship with him. After a terrible experience in bed with him Tanya leaves. A man picks her up and takes her into Los Angeles to work in a modeling agency of questionable reputation. The time she spends at the agency is a degrading experience for her. She meets a young man who is a teacher. Through his kindness and love for her she finds the strength to try and leave her work. In their attempt to escape the teacher is killed and Tanya is once again on her own. David enters her life and the world seems different except that her past haunts her. It controls her life. The only way she is able to free herself is to go back and relive her past. Until she understands why she is there is no way for her to exist as a whole person in the present. The startling climax of the film is this moment where we see what reafly happens between her and the young priest. She had blamed herself for his death. ‘I didn’t kill him. I didn’t. In two hours it will be morning and it will be the first day of the rest of my life”. Our story ends with David and Tanya on their way to Canada. David with the money for his city and Tanya with herself.


BOXOFFICE review

A young architect (Edward Blessington), with dreams of building an ecologically sound city, and a young Greek girl (Ann Chapman), who seeks only to find herself, in aftermath of a tragic love affair in her homeland with a young priest, meet in modern-day Los Angeles. Only in telling her new love what happened across the ocean, with no sparing of details, can the girl free herself of emotional hangup. There are several deaths along the way. The two young people embark on a new life in Canada. LeRoy Klein was executive producer, Carl Hittleman producer, and Ron Nicholas and Serge Goncheroff the co-directors. The photography is strikingly effective and the score by Harry Fields is touching in its mood.

[Boxoffice BookinGuide, January 10, 1972, p. 10]

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