In a castle by the sea in North East England, a present-day married couple--the husband a milquetoast Englishman, bald with glasses and skinny legs, and his wife a fiery French lass, barefoot in blue jeans and with untamed hair--play unwilling hosts to a wounded American gangster on the run with his partner, who has just expired in the kitchen. The wife berates her weaselly spouse for not standing up to the raspy-voiced intruder, who needs the couple's help pushing his defunct car into the barn and burying his friend. Later, he poses as their caretaker once friends unexpectedly drop by. Interesting directorial effort by Roman Polanski, who also co-authored the screenplay, is beautifully shot in crystalline black-and-white by Gilbert Taylor and features sharply-observed flickers of drama, black comedy, and of nature (as with 1962's "Knife in the Water", Polanski displays an unerring talent for capturing the sea, the changing sky, the gulls in the air and the wind whipping through the sea grass). The picture would seem to have a great deal to recommend it, including fully-invested performances by all the principals, but the long, unbroken takes and the rambling dialogue sections tend to flatten the film out. There's also an unnecessarily bizarre (and unfunny, if it's meant to be comedic) sequence wherein nerdy Donald Pleasence is unable to find his pajamas and his wife dresses him instead in her nightie (complete with mascara around his eyes and lipstick). This is meant, possibly, to show that the husband is easily led into humiliating himself, and also for the gangster to call him a "fairy" and thereby display his dominance. While Polanski, his cinematographer and his production designer ensure a terrific-looking film, the characters remain ciphers (with no intriguing qualities) and the story loses momentum as a result. ** from ****

Samuel Beckett refused to give Polanski the rights to film Waiting for Godot and so the director created with Gerard Brach a script with strong echoes of the famous play (and some by Harold Pinter). A mixture of Gothic horror picture, black comedy, and classic gangsters American pictures, Cul-de-Sac is a parody of all these genres and also a tragedy. Hopelessness, humiliation, perversion - constant motifs of his films -, are presented here below a thick veil of grotesque. The arrival to the castle of a wounded gangster who tries to be rescued by his boss, and his immediate physical and mental domain of the hostages, untie openly the woman's despise of her husband, the cowardice and vulnerability of him and both dependence on the intruder. The couple breeds chicken and the chicken seem fulfill the function that had the chorus in the Greek tragedy, Polanski is mocking in this way the solemnity of the serious genre that notwithstanding has adopted. Like in others of his films, the director remits to scenes of his former works and make also homage to some admired creators - Hitchcock's The Birds, for instance (when some birds descend on the courtyard of the castle in the manner of the mentioned picture, but without the expected consequences (another game of Polanski). The Godot of this story, Katelbach, like that of Beckett, will never appear and, in this case, shall leave a message exempting himself of any responsibility. Nobody expected shall come to rescue, the woman will escape with a new lover, the gangster is murdered by the landlord and the landlord will lament, sitting on a rock in the sea, his infinite misery. Counting with a suggestive photography by Gil Taylor, who plays smartly with shadows and lights, Polanski likes to pursue the spectators with sudden movements of the camera that show the characters withdrawing from or running over the spectators, who sometimes serve as the supposed mirror where the fictional creatures are looking at themselves. The formal perfection of many scenes could not dissimulate some serious downfall of rhythm and excessive stereotype of characters and not few dialogs. The film is perhaps too much long and repetitive, but this apparent fault contributes to intensify the atmosphere of obsession and dismay, which are considered principal marks of the director's pessimist vision of world.

The opening scene is beautifully shot, the acting is of a high standard and Polanski overall is showing himself to be a promising director here. This is all very well, but the film works the audience far too hard. There is not a single soul or thing in the film we get to like. At first we root a little for the couple in the castle against the gangsters who interrupt their idyll. Then we find the inhabitants are either weak, flighty or deranged. Every time someone new enters we find they are despicable too. Even the island and castle is constantly derided by the gangsters with little comeback from the inhabitants. The music on the stereo is excruciating, as is the art painted by the Donald Pleasance character and the vodka made by his French wife. Films should be either uplifting, scary, educational, funny or should say something deep about the human soul, this film does none of that. It all just feels clever-clever and pointless.

A pair of criminals takes refuge at a beach-front castle owned by an Englishman and his French wife. Perhaps Polanski's worst film, this works neither as a comedy, nor as a thriller. The script is boring and pointless. The humor is forced and unfunny. The cinematography is so poor that it looks like a low-budget home movie. The acting is mostly bad. Pleasence is such a dweeb that it's hard to believe that he would manage to nab a hot wife like Dorleac. Stander turns in the most interesting performance, although that's not saying much. Pleasence overacts. Dorleac, who died at age 25 a few months after this film was released, is attractive but her English is incomprehensible.