Sebastian (1968) dir. David Greene
There are just a few Dirk Bogarde films that have so far escaped my grasp and this is at the top of my list. Sebastian is one of the forgotten films by Michael Powell. Although directed by eclectic Englishman David Greene ( I Start Counting, The Strange Affair) the original story is by Leo Marks, the brilliant WWII cryptographer who wrote Peeping Tom (1960), the controversial serial killer film that effectively ended the film directing career of Michael Powell. A few years after their notorious debacle, Marks and Powell had collaborated on an episode of the US/UK tv series Espionage with Powell directing a labyrinthine script by Marks. Around this time Powell teamed up with Herbert Brodkin, the producer of Espionage to develop an original story by Leo Marks as a feature film. Sadly Powell's recent cinematic failures precluded his chance to direct this project and instead they hired experienced television director David Greene who had just made his feature film debut with the Lovecraftian horror oddity The Shuttered Room (1967). The result was an autobiographical drama with Bogarde in charge of an office full of women codebreakers, just as Marks himself had been when he ran a similar group at Bletchley Park during 1940s. Greene uses a very kinetic Sixties Mod style using music, colour, and psychedelia to keep a hip audience interested in the rather intellectual detail of this unique take on spycraft. In North America, it opened to middling reviews and very little box office which might explain why it never made the transition here to any home video format. I live in hope that one of the surviving physical media boutique labels will uncover it from obscurity and I can finally add it to my Dirk Bogarde and Michael Powell collections.
