Looking back on the 10 years I lived in Provincetown on Cape Cod I remember how bleak the winters could sometimes be. I also remembered something I learned during that time- a watched pot does too boil. This winter I’ve decide to compile a list of films I’ve read about but never have seen. And then track some of them down. The first on the list is A Reflection of Fear, a little known 1972 Gothic thriller starring Sondra Locke and Robert Shaw. I’ve always heard what a weird movie it was and with a whopper of an ending, but I’ve never had the opportunity to see it anywhere.
There was a made-on-demand DVD available but I decided to order the Blu-ray from Imprint, an Australian company of limited editions that I really like- and the disc can play on American Blu-ray players. I’m glad I did because it looks stunning and has great audio commentary by Lee Gambin, a film historian and a big fan of the film. It also comes with fascinating archival audio interviews with Sondra Locke and actor Gordon De Vol.
The film, shot in Canada, was directed by cinematographer William A. Fraker (Rosemary’s Baby, Bullitt), and unfortunately it wasn’t a happy experience for him. Not the filming, but afterwards when the studio decided they wanted a PG rating. They recut the film and it languished on a shelf for a year before getting unceremoniously dumped in theaters. The tragedy is that the film is utterly fascinating and looks amazing. Master cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs used defused lighting, and the gauzy, muted colors gives the film a dream-like creepiness. What the original cut of the film was like is anyone’s guess and it does often have a disjointed feel. But it’s a such a lyrical, ethereal, unsettling film anyway that the plot holes don’t matter.
Sondra Locke plays 15-year-old Marguerite, living in a remote seaside mansion with her mother (Mary Ure) and grandmother (Signe Hasso). They have systematically isolated the girl- she is home-schooled and has no contact with the outside world. It’s not surprising she has a child-like innocence and lives in her own fantasyland. Daily she plays with her dolls or goes down to the nearby pond and names the amoebae there. Her dream is to see the father she has never even met. Marguerite has various peepholes in the mansion where she can eavesdrop on her mother and grandmother and overhears that her father (Robert Shaw) is actually coming to the house. He has arrived to seek a final divorce from his wife so he can marry his girlfriend (Sally Kellerman). The wife agrees to the divorce but under the stipulation that he never has anything to do with his daughter again. So, Marguerite is hell-bent on making the most of the time he is there. But then suddenly a series of violent, unexplained murders begin.
The cast is pretty extraordinary. I remember how incredible Mary Ure was in Look Back in Anger with Richard Burton. Swedish actress Signe Hasso I loved in movies like Heaven Can Wait and The House on 92nd Street. Acclaimed actor Robert Shaw brings a rugged masculinity but also this sexual component, which ramps up the weird, incestuous vibe in the film. And I love husky-voiced beauty Sally Kellerman in everything. But it’s really Sondra Locke’s film. She has this incandescent beauty, with her long, cascading blonde hair and ghostly, pale skin. There is something otherworldly about her, which gives the movie it’s strange feel.
Later in the film she finally meets a really cute boy from the outside world (Gordon De Vol), but she is so unfamiliar with normal interactions it does not end well.
This is a difficult movie to classify. Admittedly it’s a thriller. But it plays more like a character study of this disturbed young girl, imprisoned by her family in this mansion, who has created her own fantasy-reality. And one really can’t discuss the film without addressing the shocking ending which is a doozy. Even I was taken aback by it, but it also gives this strange, beautiful, forgotten gem of a film an added kick that makes it hauntingly unforgettable.
