Film "Staircase"

Description

Stair case
the ladder
Stanley Donen · 1968 · 96'

Program: Stanley Donen.

Technical sheet
Directed by Stanley Donen
Starring Richard Burton, Rex Harrison, Cathleen Nesbitt, Beatrix Lehmann, Gordon Heat, Stephen Lewis, Jack Kavanagh.
Great Britain-France-USA production
Year 1968
VOSE version (Original version with Spanish subtitles)
duration 96'
Format 35mm
An old homosexual couple share their lives amid deep differences and bitterness. One of them is a hairdresser who is going bald. The other, a failed actor, ironic and a little sadistic, who fears that he will be imprisoned for transvestising.

The sordidness of his world is accentuated by the presence of the first's mother.
"Donen avoids any kind of affectation, limiting himself to looking at his characters with affection and staying as far away from anathema as from apology. He moved comfortably in a film that did not attempt to hide his theatrical origin and that allowed him, on the one hand, to offer a psychological portrait of individuals marginalized by their sexual tendencies and, on the other, to offer an incisive vision of married life with its relationships of cruelty, fidelity, masochism, loneliness and submission. The sordid atmosphere and the paroxysm of the situations manage to make the vision of the film almost unpleasant. Only at the end does the vision of the filmmaker become less gloomy. Harrison and, especially, Burton played their roles as brilliantly as they were restrained" (Jorge de Cominges).

Details