Vashirdfel Simply A Masterpiece

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Isbel A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

GUENOT PHILIPPE This film is very close, faithful to the James Hadley Chase's novel. Actually Chase gave with this book the quintessence of his whole world, whole atmosphere, among the more than eighty books he wrote - the femme fatale, as we found in nearly each of his novels. But here you have NO criminal elements, ONLY the femme fatale line, no gangsters nor killers and blackmailers, no psychopaths either. This story is filtered, purified of allthe other ingredients that I just mentioned above.So, back to this movie, the female character is absolutely perfect for a complex and so deep minded actress as Jeanne Moreau was all long her career. The thousand faces actress for me. The eternal search for her true identity woman on screen. Not because I am French. But she is absolutely awesome here. Back to James Hadley Chase, there were two main elements in his work. Femme Fatales and GREED, GREED, GREED. Here you have only the woman aspect. Women who ALWAYS drive men to their own doom.

barbarella70 Truffaut muse Jeanne Moreau was one of the sexiest women in cinema. Her features were unnaturally glamorous: the dark eyes that registered anything but passivity, eyebrows always slightly furrowed, upturned mouth will full, sensuous lips. She's on fire here; thus, her Eva transcends this material. Miss Moreau fills every scene with a physicality that looks almost choreographed yet not rehearsed. She's raw carnality personified. Combining that quality with a careless self-consciousness make it easy for one to see what's missing in today's female actors. Louise Brooks had it. Jessica Lange had it in The Postman Always Rings Twice. But nobody else really. The film itself hasn't held up unless you're a film scholar or part of the intellectual art house crowd. Characters register pain by pressing a cheek against whatever wall comes their way and letting their jaw go slack. A myriad of sixties kitsch fill the screen: white masks, fur blankets, overdubbing, a jazz-scat score, and a fishtank image Mike Nichols must have borrowed for The Graduate. We even see a character face her obsession and say with fervor, "I love you! I love you! I love you!" while they have breakfast on a piazza. I've used the term 'dated' in other reviews and I'm beginning to frustrate myself. It's an easy buzzword (like co-dependent or brilliant); sometimes it has a place but mostly I find it insulting and the wrong word to use for Eva. But the film is intellectual camp.

fordraff I don't think "Eve" is worth the attention of anyone but cinephiles and graduate students doing work on Losey. There are interesting sequences, interesting primarily from a technical point of view, for the camera work, for the mise-en-scene, for the set decoration and so on.But the film doesn't hold up as a story. The character development and motivation are missing in the cut I saw at New York's Film Forum on 4/15/00. In "Conversations with Losey," Losey makes it clear he saw this film as a very personal document and offers full explanations of the characters and their motivations; they simply aren't there in this 125-minute version.The characters are two-dimensional, and, because of this, right away one is thrown out of the human dimension into a graduate school world where the film becomes a puzzle to be solved, a series of symbols to be interpreted, etc. James Leahy provides just such a literary-type analysis of the film on pages 116-124 of "The Cinema of Joseph Losey," exactly the sort of article that appeared in abundance about various European films in the late 50s and early 60s.In the version I saw, I couldn't care a bit about the characters or what happened to them. It was never clear what Tyvian Jones saw in Eve Olivier, especially after she knocks him out with a heavy glass ashtray on their first meeting. Is Tyvian a masochist? Jeanne Moreau, as Eve, is photographed attractively here, but she doesn't have the necessary je ne sais quoi that I expect in femmes fatales.Nor are other aspects of Tyvian's character very clear. At one point, he says that the novel he published and which earned him fame and has been turned into a successful film was, in fact, written by his brother, a Welsh coalminer now dead. What does that have to do with his fascination with Eve?Stanley Baker, who plays Tyvian, is without sex appeal here, though in other films I've seen him in, he was quite the stud of his time, exuding a raw sexuality.Eve's character is likewise blank. At one point she tells Tyvian a story about her youth, then laughs at Tyvian, saying, "You'd believe anything," implying she'd made the story up on the spot. She talks of having a husband but turns out not to have one. "At the end of the film we are not one whit nearer to understanding why Eve's life should be dedicated as it is to the dual passion for acquiring money and destroying men." (John Taylor, Sight & Sound, Autumn 1963, p. 197)The supporting characters aren't fuller developed either. I know next to nothing about Branco Malloni and could not understand why Francesca preferred Tyvian to Branco. What is the function of McCormick and Anna Maria? Perhaps they were intended as foils to Eve and Tyvian, but they are in and out of the plot sporadically.Though the film is of interest for its camera work, the film looks like many other films of the late 50s and early 60s, like films by Antonioni, by Fellini, by Resnais ("Marienbad" in particular). And why shouldn't it? Gianni Di Venanzo, who worked with Antonioni, photographed "Eve." And the film takes place in Rome and Venice. There are nightclub scenes that could have come from "La Dolce Vita"; the same with a scene at a gambling club. The film's jazz-based score by Michel Legrand makes it like many other European films of the time. And, of course, the opaque characters and the heavy use of symbolism are typical of Italian and French films of this time.In addition to all of this, the plot was a bit confusing to me. It was not until I read the plot summary of the film in "Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life" (pages 158-162) that I understood many points of the plot. I'd suggest that anyone read a plot summary before seeing "Eve."But, then, should the average moviegoer have to do all this? No. Which comes back to my original point: the characters and their relationships, their story, are of little or no interest in themselves.Of course, if Losey's original 2 hr. 45-minute version of the film were available, I might have a very different opinion of "Eve." But that version, apparently, is lost forever.

monabe If you fondly remember Jeanne Moreau from Jules et Jim, that alone will make this film well worth seeing. I recall it as a very " early 60's " movie, with not a little incoherence in the plot department. However, Jeanne Moreau's unique presence and "look" really fitted the role she played, and is something of a tour-de-force.