I remembered this movie as being particularly boring when I half-watched it or maybe even didn’t watch it last… I have a Shelley Winters prejudice, I think, her name makes me think of Charlotte Haze in Kubrick’s Lolita and I cringe… but I always forget, why exactly I’m cringing, and it’s because of Winters’ talent in making that character so damn annoying as she is in Nabokov’s novel. Here she plays a slightly similar character, quite hopeless in a way, the nothing special to contrast with the glorious Elizabeth Taylor.

This is a great story of a strange love triangle that ends in death – a death that’s part-intended but technically accidental, and for which the half-innocent, half-guilty perpetrator ends up on death row for. The thing that lingers with me most from the movie is the final shot as the character I won’t name, I don’t want to ruin it, walks towards the camera, towards their death, and another character’s face briefly fades in over before it goes to the end title. Absolutely beautiful.

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