Ladies of a certain age tend to favor polite and obliging young boys. So do some gentlemen.

[craigjclark]

Comments

Thank you, TCM, for showing this one

[joeblevins]

Skolimowski does a great job establishing the public bath as a house of horrors here, a dreary, immense mausoleum with paint peeling off the walls and a sense of despair seeping into every room and corridor. Even when Brown and Asher head up to the rafters where some birds have taken up residence, the place looks and feels like a prison. There is humor -- dark, suppressed humor -- in the scenes with Brown's lustful female clients (like Diana Dors, whose big scene is funny but also sad), but the overwhelming sense of despair and tragedy is never far away even in these moments. The absence of a score (other than some songs by Cat Stevens and Can) is an almost subliminal cue that something is deeply wrong here, both in this place and with this disturbed young man. Asher is the "older woman" here, but she's scarcely more mature than Brown: coldly toying with this very impressionable and messed-up kid for her own amusement and juggling multiple romantic relationships without a thought as to the consequences. There is a streak of sadism

Re: Thank you, TCM, for showing this one

[craigjclark]

I'm trying to think of where I might have seen Diana Dors before, but at the moment I can't place her. And I don't want to look her up on the IMDb because that's beginning to strike me more and more like cheating.

Re: Thank you, TCM, for showing this one

[joeblevins]

I can't say that I've ever seen another Diana Dors movie but I was familiar with her reputation as a former glamour girl who let herself go. In a way, she reminds me here of Shelley Winters: another pretty young actress who grew into stout middle age. Had this movie been made in America, Winters might've been perfect for the Dors part because she was absolutely unafraid of playing unglamourous parts like this one. Not long ago, TCM Underground aired Pretty Poor Eddie, which had Winters as a deluded middle-aged showbiz has-been who attached herself to a young man, in this case a psychotic and violent Elvis wannabe named Eddie.

Deep End made me wonder about the respectability of public baths. Today, of course, there's just one connotation to the term "bath house." But in this movie, it seems like the baths are just starting to slide into seediness. The kid's parents show up at the baths in one scene, and no one seems to think it's awkward or embarrassing... except for the fact that Asher is inexplicably mean to the kid's mom for no

Re: Thank you, TCM, for showing this one

[craigjclark]

Aha! I've figured out where I know her from. Dors played one of Vincent Price's victims in Theater of Blood (which was made just a year or two after this film). If you've never seen that, I highly recommend it.