End of the Game (1975)

"I could murder her in front of your eyes and you couldn't prove it..."

‘Jacqueline Bisset: a diverse filmography…’

It’s Jacqueline Bisset Weekend on Luke Honey’s WEEKEND FLICKS. Cinema for Grown Ups. Researching Jacqueline’s films for this post, I’m impressed by the sheer diversity (a word, yawn, I normally avoid, but in this case it’s true) of her filmography. There are the obvious contenders, sure — like The Deep (1977), with its infamous wet T-shirt episode, which caused an understandable frisson amongst schoolboys, middle-aged husbands, elderly men with heart conditions, and T-shirt manufacturers.

And then there’s the arty French stuff, like François Truffaut’s La Nuit américaine, aka Day for Night, which we will most definitely cover in a future post, Claude Chabrol’s La Cérémonie, and La Magnifique (1973), which we covered a few posts back. And then, yesterday, digging around in the archaeological debris of 1970s film history, I came across End of the Game (on YouTube), from 1975 — a new one on me, which, on paper, looked more than interesting: a German psychological thriller set in Switzerland, with a cracking cast: Jacqueline Bisset, Jon Voight, Robert Shaw, Martin Ritt and Donald Sutherland (as a dead body); directed by Maximilian Schell — the cerebral actor, producer and film director — plus, oh joy! an Ennio Morricone soundtrack. I mean, you couldn’t make it up. What’s not to like? Where could it possibly go wrong?

‘the archaeological debris of film history…’