Castaways

Thinking about Roman Polanski still being in jail led me to watch one of his lesser-known movies, Cul-de-Sac, from 1966. It's not currently on DVD, but you can see it on Hulu (if you can tolerate the scratchy print and incessant commercial interruptions). It reminded me of everything I love about Polanski's work. It's a black comedy starring Lionel Stander as a wounded gangster who makes himself at home with a newlywed couple played by Donald Pleasence and Françoise Dorléac. (Stander was a charming, gravelly voiced hulk who'd been blacklisted in the McCarthy era and went on to play Max in the cheesy TV show Hart to Hart; Dorléac was Catherine Deneuve's older sister, who died in a car crash in 1967.) The couple's home is an actual castle, on Holy Island in England, and they're all stuck there while the gangster awaits rescue. In his 1984 autobiography, Polanski remembers the lead actors' insufferable behavior and the maddening challenge of shooting on the island (which he calls a "tiny, inbred community of under 300 inhabitants"), but none of that shows in the film: it's small, dark, and very funny, with clever role reversals and mockery of class and sexual politics. And every shot is perfectly composed.