Interlude (1968)

Their Love Could Never Be. She Knew it. He Knew it. So did His Wife...

‘An illicit romantic liaison…’

Ahoy, there, Lovebirds! I've just rediscovered Interlude (1968). It's on YouTube (in a lovely quality ‘1080 widescreen' recording). Good news for us British 1960s film fans, as unless you happened to have a video recording, previously the only way to watch it was via an expensive DVD shipped over from America— which, in any event, was only going to work on American DVD players. One of the rules I set myself when I started writing Luke Honey's WEEKEND FLICKS. Cinema for Grown Ups was that every film should be readily available. There's no point recommending a film if you can't watch it.

‘A blonde, twenty-something, mini-skirted journalist…’

Interlude (1968) is Kevin Billington’s loose remake of Douglas Sirk’s film of 1957, transposed to Swinging London. Kevin Billington’s previous films include Voices (1973), starring David Hemmings and She-Who-Can-Do-No-Wrong Gayle Hunnicutt, a creepily good ghost story along similar lines to The Others (2001), with a nod to Don’t Look Now (1973)— which for some unfathomable reason (usually to do with copyright) doesn’t seem to be available on DVD or download.

It’s about an illicit romantic liaison. Sally, a blonde, twenty-something, mini-skirted journalist (Barbara Ferris), begins an affair with Stefan Zelter (Oskar Werner), a world-famous, forty-something German conductor, married to a perfect, oh-so-English wife. That’s the plot. It’s a superior melodrama— for those of us with limited brain capacity, not too difficult to grasp. And like many other films of this period, beautifully made, with intelligent casting, nostalgic locations and a cracking soundtrack, which includes Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Rachmaninov and Albinoni.

Talking of the music, I would give my teeth (what’s left of ‘em) to identify the beautiful orchestral Baroque piece at 1: 31, which isn’t listed in the credits but sounds like Vivaldi or Albinoni. I’m pretty sure it’s an uncredited pastiche by composer Georges Delerue, who came up with a similar Baroque number for Promise at Dawn (1970). If you now, please drop me a line.

‘A Maestro for the Swinging Sixties…’

Oskar Werner's Stefan is terrific, marvellously convincing as a dynamic, thrusting, celebrity conductor (the man has rhythm!): a sort of cool, younger version of a Von Karajan or a blonde Daniel Barenboim, a Maestro for the Swinging Sixties, with a so-called 'Chinese Eye' drop-head Continental Bentley in chocolate brown, an elegant Society wife Antonia (Virginia Maskell), and a stuccoed wedding cake of a Regency country house, plus an ego as big as Beethoven's brow ("I'm surrounded by idiots!"). From memory, he doesn't wear a black polo neck, but he might well have done.