Donald Sutherland says Don't Look Now sex scene with Julie Christie 'WAS NOT real' | Daily Mail Online comments Actor Donald Sutherland has emphatically denied an assertion that he and actress Julie Christie actually had sex during a graphic love scene in the 1973 film Don't Look Now. In a book called Famous Players: A Tale Of Movies, The Mob, (And Sex), former Variety editor Peter Bart claims he was on the film's set and saw the two stars engaging in real sex. But 75-year-old Sutherland totally rejects Bart's claim, calling it 'mendacious'. In an email sent to the New York Daily News, he said the claim was: 'Not true. None of it. Not the sex. Not him witnessing it.' On-screen chemistry: Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie cosy up in the heated love scene in Don't Look Now The sex scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland has long been the subject of conjecture over whether it was real He added: 'From beginning to end there were four people in that room. No one else.

Wires under the locked door led out side and this was twenty years before video monitors.' The four people he was referring to were himself and Christie, director Nicolas Roeg and cinematographer Anthony Richmond. Unsurprisingly, it is one of the most notorious ‘did they or didn’t they?’ moment in movie history. So passionate was the love scene between Christie and Sutherland that ever since there has been speculation the pair were actually having sex. The stars have always maintained the steaminess was down to good acting and inspired direction in what was an unscripted improvisation. Sixties sex siren: Julie Christie wearing lacy night gown in a sultry pose with a cup of tea Bart's graphic account reveals how he visited the Venice set as a young Paramount Pictures executive on what he calls that ‘auspicious day’. As he arrived, the director Nicolas Roeg reportedly told him: ‘Good day to come by’, Mr Bart says. At first he claims his mind drifted off for a few moments as he sat watching the filming but then he suddenly focused on the actors, who were both completely naked.

‘It was clear to me they were no longer simply acting: they were ****ing on camera,’ writes Mr Bart, according to a report in the Los Angeles-based Hollywood Reporter which obtained an advance copy of his book, called ‘Infamous Players: A Tale of Movies, the Mob, (and Sex)’. Mr Bart says he then whispered to Roeg: ‘Nic, don’t they expect you to say “cut”?’, to which Roeg replied: ‘I just want to be sure I have the coverage.’ On-screen chemistry: Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in the 1973 film Don't Look Now. A new book has said their sex scene WAS real The film starts with the death of the couple's daughter, played by Sharon Williams. The majority of the film, including the famous sex scene, was shot in Venice This apparently prompted Mr Bart to comment on what he could see going on and to say: ‘That’s beyond coverage.’ It has long been rumoured in the movie world that the love-making was real – and have even claimed that out-takes from the scene were viewed in private Beverly Hills screening rooms.

British actress Miss Christie, 69, won an Oscar in 1965 for the John Schlesinger film Darling, although her most famous performances were in Dr Zhivago, also 1965, and Don’t Look Now. She and Canadian Mr Sutherland, now 75, were in their 30s and at the height of their careers when the latter, a psychological thriller adapted from a short story by Daphne du Maurier, was released amid considerable controversy over the sex scene, which was unusually graphic for the time. Miss Christie later said she found the scene difficult to film and once said: ‘People didn’t do scenes like that in those days. I just went blank and Nic [Roeg] shouted instructions. ‘I hardly knew Donald then. But, apart from being a bloody good actor, he is a responsible one and he took responsibility for the scene, helping me through it.

‘Making love on camera is such hard work that there is no time for the libido to take over.’ In another anecdote from his new book, due out in May, Mr Bart claims Warren Beatty, who had a serious relationship with Miss Christie, demanded that the sex scene be re-edited because it was too graphic. Miss Christie turned her back on Hollywood in the Seventies when her affair with Beatty ended and has since described being a celebrity as ‘like always having chewing gum stuck in your hair’. She earned an Oscar nomination in 2008 for her poignant portrayal of an Alzheimer’s sufferer in Away From Her. Neither she nor Mr Sutherland, whose also had memorable roles in MASH and Ordinary People among many other films, commented on the claims made in Mr Bart’s book. In a 2005 interview, Donald Sutherland insisted their realistic romp was the result of quality editing. ‘Julie and I lay side by side on the bed, Nic yelled instructions, "Donald kiss Julie’s breast, Julie tilt your head back". ‘What made that scene wonderful to people was the editing. The audience never ended up being a voyeur, they watched a cinematic collage and were reminded of themselves.

That’s what it made it sexy.’ AN OSCAR-WINNING PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER The 1973 film, directed by Nicolas Roeg, was adapted from Daphne du Maurier's supernatural thriller. Sutherland and Christie play a married couple, John and Laura Baxter, struggling to overcome the death of their young daughter, Christine, who drowned at their English country home. The majority of the film is set in Venice, where Laura encounters two elderly sisters, one of whom is blind and claims to be psychic and in contact with their dead daughter, and John begins seeing what looks like a small child wearing a red coat similar to the one Christine was wearing when she died. When Laura returns to England where their son has been hurt in an accident, John imagines he sees her and the sisters as part of a funeral procession. He follows the sisters, believing they may have abducted Laura, but he learns that she has been in England all along. A final glimpse of the figure in the red coat leads him to a deserted palazzo and the realisation that his sightings have been premonitions of a grisly end.

The film was nominated in seven categories at the 27th British Academy Film Awards - including Best Film, Director, Actor and Actress - with Anthony B. Richmond winning the Oscar for Best Cinematography. Don't Look Now and Roeg's red coat | Film | The Guardian Movies Don't Look Now and Roeg's red coat Anyone who has seen Nicolas Roeg's 1973 film Don't Look Now will remember that little red coat. Peter Bradshaw on the pity and terror it still evokes Red for danger … Donald Sutherland in Don't Look Now. Photograph: Alamy Tuesday 18 January 2011 15.30 EST First published on Tuesday 18 January 2011 15.30 EST Share on Messenger Close It is red: red as a wound, or some mutant traffic signal without an amber or a green – the red plastic mac worn by a dead little girl.

In director Nicolas Roeg's 1973 movie classic of the English supernatural, Don't Look Now trailer , based on the short story by Daphne du Maurier , this mac is what she is wearing when she drowns in the pond of her parents' English country home. Her art historian father, John, later takes his grieving wife Laura away for a healing trip to Venice (of all the ironic waterlogged places), having accepted a commission to restore a church building. There, two strange, elderly ladies persuade his wife that their daughter, Christine, is speaking to them from beyond the grave, and John sees the red plastic mac flickering by the dark canals, as its tiny wearer rushes and scampers by the water's edge. It is a revelation that comes at the same time as the miraculous revival of their sex life. Their daughter has come back, haunting the dark alleys and echoing waterways of Venice, with a message. Is it a message of forgiveness, of love – or a terrible warning?

All too late, John then discovers a second garment, a bizarre red coat, apparently woollen, like Paddington Bear's duffel coat, being worn by a wizened female-dwarf serial killer who has been terrorising Venice with a string of murders. She claims her final victim, slashing him with a kitchen knife, having first shaken her head enigmatically at him, and us – no, she is saying, you have misunderstood. The red coat symbolises the tonal ambiguity, or superimposition of the erotic and the uncanny. Pathos and grief become fear and horror, overlaid with an insistent sensual charge. The figure in the red coat is both agonisingly vulnerable and menacing, and only in the final moments do we understand that combination. The death of John and Laura's daughter is the climax of one of the most disturbing sequences in British cinema. After a leisurely weekend lunch, we see uncollected crockery, cutlery and a wisp of cigarette smoke from an ashtray.

The little girl is outside, messing around, playing with a toy soldier, a sort of Action Man with a recorded voice; but for some reason, the recorded voice is not a macho male warrior's but a woman's. Her brother is riding his bicycle. Christine is also playing with a ball, white with a red pattern in the style of Escher, which makes the ball's shape appear to undulate as it rolls along – another touch that subliminally discombobulates the viewer. Then there is that red mac. Why on earth is this girl wearing a rainproof mac on a fine, warm summer afternoon? Evidently, she is very attached to it, though a waterproof garment is the most ironically wrong thing to be wearing. Roeg once told me that he had extensively rehearsed this scene with the girl's father present, but with her wearing a swimming costume. When the time came, however, to shoot the scene for real, and the child was fully clothed in the famous mac, the parent simply couldn't stop himself rushing forward and trying to grab his daughter out of the water. Wearing clothes was what made this moment so painful, so transgressive. And how exactly does she drown?

Common sense would suggest face down, grabbing for the lost ball, attempting to swim, scrabbling, desperately floundering. But no. In a later image we see Christine sinking face up, like Millais's portrait of Ophelia, her face receding like a memory in the depths. Shakespeare's Ophelia is committing a sort of semi-intentional suicide, while Christine's death is a terrible accident, and yet the staging here implies something willed – a grotesque, parodic christening ceremony which is a sinister symbol or prophecy of another death still to come. Christine's mother and father are played by Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, and their relationship is the most authentic portrait of a marriage that I think I have ever seen in any film. Watching the movie it is easy to believe that the actors are in fact married, and Roeg's portrait of Venice, with its intelligent, non-tourist locations, is a real vision of a real, working city. And, of course, it is in Venice that John and Laura have sex for the first time since their daughter's death, perhaps the best, tenderest, if not precisely the most real sex scene in cinema history.

Famously, Roeg constructs a sequence in which their love-making is interspersed with their getting dressed again and preparing to go out to dinner. Generally, sex scenes in the movies are between couples who are having sex for the first time. This shows a couple having sex for the nth time – having married sex in fact. And it is the disappearance and reappearance of clothing that is so startling: first naked and then clothed and then naked and then clothed, Laura and John demonstrate the routine of married sex, and tacitly make a claim for the intimacy and excitement that triumphantly survives the accomplishment of the sex act itself. Roeg even shows the man post-coitally zipping himself up: that unglamorous, faintly absurd post-sex moment. Don't Look Now is drenched with sex and displaced sexual longing, given a dark eroticism by the shadow of death. Roeg and his screenwriters Allan Scott and Chris Bryant made important changes to the original short story: the sex scene was entirely their invention, and it was originally John's wife Laura who wore a red coat, not Christine or the dwarf serial killer.

When John sees a vision of Laura in his own future funeral procession in Venice, after she has left for England, it is this red coat that stands out. Sex and fear are embedded deeply within the film's DNA in ways that even the movie's biggest fans perhaps might not quite grasp. For Daphne du Maurier, "Venetian" was her private word for lesbian, and she herself had a lifelong struggle to come to terms with her own homosexuality, never far from the surface. Furthermore, "going to Venice" was her private code for having a lesbian sexual adventure. Crucially, Du Maurier herself, long before this story was written, went to Venice to get over the death of someone dear to her – her lover Gertrude Lawrence – and it may have been on this visit (although she made a number of literal visits to Venice) that she herself mistook a dwarf for a child. Denial and fear and excitement are transformed, in this story, into a tale of supernatural longing and horror.

The movie shimmers with Du Maurier's ghost, and the ghosts of other stories and other connections: she in fact wrote another story set in Venice, entitled Ganymede, about a gay man addicted to his rapture at boys, a story obviously influenced by Thomas Mann's Death In Venice, and Roeg's film has perhaps inhaled some of the unwholesome, narcotic atmosphere of Luchino Visconti's movie version, in which a child is obsessively tracked, in the shadow of death. In Don't Look Now, Roeg is careful to exclude, as much as possible, the colour red from his screen, so that Christine's red mac becomes even more starkly visible. In fact, there is one important moment where he permits another red garment to be visible: and that is the cardinal's red hat. It is the cardinal who oversees John's restoration work on the church, an apparently kindly, worldly, enigmatic man who senses some unnamable catastrophe is approaching but can do nothing but pray. The church, like the police, are ambiguous figures of authority, at best watchfully neutral in the calamity that John is facing. The colour red has its own history in Venice.

In the 16th century, Jews were forced to wear red as a distinguishing mark, a law changed to yellow when it became clear that it made them too much like cardinals. John's agonised glimpses of Christine's red coat has another literary echo: in Proust's Remembrance Of Things Past, the narrator has a famous journey to Venice, and it is in Venice that he sees, in the distance, the distinctive cloak of an aristocratic fraternity, and with a stab of pain it instantly reminds him of the elegant gown worn by his lost love, Albertine – a red gown. Director Roeg, his writers Scott and Bryant and, perhaps most importantly, his costume designer, Marit Allen – who went on to work on Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut and Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain – created a shape-shifting garment in that sinister red item. In its two guises, the child's mac and the serial killer's coat, it exemplifies Joyce's two faces of tragedy, pity and terror, the one showing us the effects of our unhappy condition, the other showing its source.

The child has died, but the horror of the situation isn't that we are left grievingly alive but that we must join her, and sooner than we think. The red coat conceals someone terrible, a non-child, an anti-cherub of mortality, grinningly shaking her head as she slashes our throat. The awful truth about what's in store for all of us is stripped naked at last. Super Reviewer ½ A chilling thriller that parallels climactic highs with psychedelic horror, this film uses its understated source material to drive the tension forward superbly, and remains artfully directed and shot the entire way through. Using an original short story from the queen of literary gothic horror, Daphne du Maurier, we meet a family in a British country home, the father working on church restorations. Tragically their daughter drowns while trying to retrieve a ball in the creek behind their home, their son unharmed. The couple are obviously devastated, but the husband, John (Sutherland) feels the burden even more because he had a psychic vision of the incident before it happened.

John keeps having these unfortunate visions even as he and his wife, Laura (Christie) escape to Venice while he reconstructs yet another church. While in the city the couple experience the strange and abundantly weird aura of the city, clandestine circumstances seemingly surround them starting with their introduction to a couple of sisters, one being blind and psychic. The psychic tries to reconnect their daughter to them via trances and seances, and Laura believes every word, whether it's true or not. John is hesitant to believe, and in that disbelief he becomes disenchanted, following around a small red caped figure who looks, from behind, like his deceased daughter. John goes on to see other strange things, almost dies during a work accident, and chases down the caped figure and his wife, possibly brainwashed, around Venice. The circumstances of the thriller are very chilly, because not only does John constantly experience chances at seeing who he believes to be his daughter, but he and his wife are also trying to reconnect to each other after her death. Neither believes the other is completely sane, and that lends to a distrust between the couple, us the audience, and everyone else within the film.

The mood is set as being distrustful and surreptitiously haunted, using distinct cinematography and a disconnect in language that occurs with the setting. The couple's own connection to one another is well established thanks to a very explicit and very passionate love scene, and the twist ending ties together so many miscellaneous odds and ends that it is not only strange but also brilliant. Moody and dark, this film embodies so many genre characteristics and yet remains intact as its own entity, making it one of the best horror films, and beyond genre films, perhaps ever made. Spencer S. Super Reviewer ½ A married couple mourning their child go to Venice where they meet a pair of creepy old ladies who claim to speak for their dead daughter. A thoroughly uninspired thriller, this film fails to chill or excite. The quick cuts - I call them "flash edits" - do nothing to enhance the film's suspense; rather, they just distract attention from the film's action and induce an epileptic fit. The dramatic question is supposed to be how the prognosticators' predictions will come true, but it didn't work for me.

And the ending comes out of nowhere; whereas a film like Momento made me marvel at the clever way the film's inevitable outcome came to pass, Don't Look Now just pulled some crazy shit out of its ass. The performances by Julie Christie, who is especially beautiful, and Donald Sutherland, who isn't but show it all anyway, are unremarkable, neither good nor bad. Overall, the writer of this film did Rebecca, one of Hitchcock's finest, but there's nothing touching the genius in her other work in this film. Jim Hunter Roeg makes Venice's waterways and scenery truly freaky in this classic. Graham Jones Don't Look Now (1973) - The Criterion Collection The Criterion Collection Spine #745 Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie mesmerize as a married couple on an extended trip to Venice following a family tragedy. While in that elegantly decaying city, they have a series of inexplicable, terrifying, and increasingly dangerous experiences.

A masterpiece from Nicolas Roeg, Don’t Look Now, adapted from a story by Daphne du Maurier, is a brilliantly disturbing tale of the supernatural, as renowned for its innovative editing and haunting cinematography as its naturalistic eroticism and unforgettable climax and denouement, one of the great endings in horror history.

Cast Disc Features DIRECTOR-APPROVED EDITION: New 4K digital restoration, approved by director Nicolas Roeg, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray New conversation between editor Graeme Clifford and film writer and historian Bobbie O’Steen “Don’t Look Now,” Looking Back, a short 2002 documentary featuring Roeg, Clifford, and cinematographer Anthony Richmond Death in Venice, a 2006 interview with composer Pino Donaggio Something Interesting, a new piece on the writing and making of the film, featuring recent interviews with Richmond, actors Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, and coscreenwriter Allan Scott Nicolas Roeg: The Enigma of Film, a new piece on Roeg’s style, featuring recent interviews with filmmakers Danny Boyle and Steven Soderbergh Q&A with Roeg from 2003 at London’s Ciné Lumière Trailer PLUS: An essay by film critic David Thompson New cover by Fred Davis Current Posts Let’s Talk About Sex January 09, 2016 As an online companion piece to W magazine’s annual Best Performances issue, the magazine’s editor at large, Lynn Hirschberg, sat down with thirty-one Hollywood actors for a series of . .

. Read more » Video Two Intertwined Semi-Venetian Masterpieces By Glenn Kenny June 08, 2015 Critic Glenn Kenny reveals the connection between two classics: Nicolas Roeg’s film Don’t Look Now and Robert Wyatt’s album Rock Bottom. Read more » On Five By Eric Skillman April 09, 2015 Don’t Look Now: Seeing Red By David Thompson February 12, 2015 With its provocative ambiguities, tender compassion, and fragmented editing style, this supernatural classic is a pure dose of Nicolas Roeg. Read more » Three Reasons Don’t Look Now: Seeing Red By David Thompson February 12, 2015 With its provocative ambiguities, tender compassion, and fragmented editing style, this supernatural classic is a pure dose of Nicolas Roeg. Read more » Interviews Method Scoring: An Interview with Clint Mansell By Hillary Weston May 06, 2016 Musician and composer Clint Mansell has spent the past two decades creating some of the most unique and indelible film scores in modern memory.

Read more » Interviews The Art Form of Memory: A Conversation with Joachim Trier By Hillary Weston April 08, 2016 Ten years ago, with the release of his debut film Reprise, a spirited drama about two young aspiring novelists, Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier emerged as one of the most interesting new . . . Read more » Clippings Did You See This? April 01, 2016 Uncover the forgotten female stars of early-twentieth-century action serials. The women of these films, writes Radha Vatsal for the Atlantic, “exhibited traditionally ‘masculine’ qualities like . . . Read more » Clippings Let’s Talk About Sex January 09, 2016 As an online companion piece to W magazine’s annual Best Performances issue, the magazine’s editor at large, Lynn Hirschberg, sat down with thirty-one Hollywood actors for a series of . . .

Read more » Video Two Intertwined Semi-Venetian Masterpieces By Glenn Kenny June 08, 2015 Critic Glenn Kenny reveals the connection between two classics: Nicolas Roeg’s film Don’t Look Now and Robert Wyatt’s album Rock Bottom. Read more » On Five Don't look now: Venice, city of film, has just one cinema left | Film | The Guardian Don't look now: Venice, city of film, has just one cinema left Stars fly in for the world-famous movie festival but for residents, only one screen remains open Saturday 30 August 2008 19.01 EDT First published on Saturday 30 August 2008 19.01 EDT Close This article is 8 years old The Venice Lido is bursting at the seams this week as thousands of paparazzi, critics and stars descend for the annual film festival, putting the city at the centre of the cinematic universe for a few brief days. Across the lagoon it is a different story. In narrow streets off the Grand Canal, residents are rising up against rent increases and a dwindling headcount which has left the historic heart of Venice with just one cinema for the rest of the year.

While each neighbourhood used to have a cinema, showing everything from Saturday morning cartoons to obscure German arthouse movies, Venetians are today forced to congregate at the Giorgione, a former soft-porn cinema now reopened and showing mainstream fare thanks to city council funding. 'Under the red carpet there is nothing,' wrote Cesare Fiumi in Venice newspaper Corriere della Sera this week. 'Other cities in Italy have suffered the same fate, but it's a paradox in the home of the festival,' said Roberto Ellero, who relaunched the Giorgione. 'The only thing making money now is tourism.' As the number of tourists entering Venice every day passes the 55,000 mark, visitors are soon set to outnumber the city's population of 60,000, down from 164,000 in 1931 and destined to disappear altogether by 2046 if the decline is not reversed. As nurseries close and butchers turn into tourist trinket shops, cinemas have followed suit, with venues such as the Rossini, Progresso, Olimpia, San Marco and the Art Deco Cinema Italia all vanishing.

Local activist Matteo Secchi, 38, who is campaigning for Venetians to stay put, said he got his celluloid education at the Moderno, now a supermarket. 'I saw all the Bruce Lee films there, and Towering Inferno,' he said. One of the first cinemas to disappear was Il Vecchio at Campo San Margherita, built inside a disused church. 'The Giorgione closed later, perhaps because its soft-porn films drew a more devoted clientele,' said Secchi, who joined fellow activists this year in erecting an electronic screen in the centre of Venice which counts down the dwindling local population in real time. Even as cinemas go missing from the centre of the city, Italian film-makers have this year enjoyed a boom at the festival out on the Lido, a short vaporetto ride away, with four films looking to follow in the footsteps of Gomorra and Il Divo, hard-hitting Italian dramas that received honours at Cannes. The city also remains an inspiration for writers.

Since director Nicolas Roeg sent a red-caped dwarf with a knife after Donald Sutherland in Don't Look Now (1973), Venice has been a byword for sinister melancholy, while more recent film-makers have preferred to collapse or blow up palazzi, notably in Casino Royale. One exception was the 2000 Italian comedy Bread and Tulips, in which a middle-aged housewife is left by her absent-minded husband at a motorway service station and starts a new life in Venice, discovering a vibrant community in a neighbourhood just inches from the tourist hordes. Sustaining such communities is the target for Emanuele Dal Carlo, a member of 40xVenezia, a group of thirty- and fortysomething residents campaigning against the conversion of private homes to rooms for rent by Venice hotels, a trend which has seen 1,000 flats turned over to tourists. 'Cinema is important for Venice, because, let's be frank, there's not much to do after dark here,' he said.

'The Giorgione cinema is great, but it's a small place and if it was not for council funds it would not be there.' Ellero, who relaunched the cinema, said it draws 75,000 people a year and promised that the council was determined to push on, with a new 50-seat cinema opening in September and the reopening of the Rossini in 2010. 'If the Rossini reopens you might see people enjoying a stroll in the heart of Venice who actually live there,' said Dal Carlo. Don't Look Now (1973) - TRAILER - YouTube Don't Look Now (1973) - TRAILER Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Published on Jun 7, 2012 See more "The 1973 film, directed by Nicolas Roeg, was adapted from Daphne du Maurier's supernatural thriller.

Sutherland and Christie play a married couple, John and Laura Baxter, struggling to overcome the death of their young daughter, Christine, who drowned at their English country home. The majority of the film is set in Venice, where Laura encounters two elderly sisters, one of whom is blind and claims to be psychic and in contact with their dead daughter, and John begins seeing what looks like a small child wearing a red coat similar to the one Christine was wearing when she died. When Laura returns to England where their son has been hurt in an accident, John imagines he sees her and the sisters as part of a funeral procession. He follows the sisters, believing they may have abducted Laura, but he learns that she has been in England all along. A final glimpse of the figure in the red coat leads him to a deserted palazzo and the realisation that his sightings have been premonitions of a grisly end".

From an article by © David Wilkes - - - Don't Look Now | Film from RadioTimes Our Score by Tom Hutchinson A fiercely erotic scene of love-making between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie forms the sensual core of this supernatural chiller, which offers a time-distorted vision of terror set in wintertime Venice, portrayed here as a hostile city of brooding silences and fog-shrouded canals. After the death of their young daughter, church restorer Sutherland and wife Christie take their grief with them to Italy, where the spectral presence of their child draws them into a labyrinth of cryptic signs and doom-laden portents. Adapted from a Daphne du Maurier short story, this is director Nicolas Roeg's masterpiece - the fear-drenched mood of alienation is sustained right up until the unforgettable climax. Summary A couple trying to get over the death of their daughter take a trip to Venice, where they are shocked by a psychic's claim that the child is trying to contact them. Although the wife believes her story, the husband remains sceptical - until he begins to be troubled by spectral visions of his own.

Nicholas Roeg's supernatural thriller based on Daphne du Maurier's short story, with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. Cast & Crew Don't Look Now (1973) - IMDb IMDb There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error A married couple grieving the recent death of their young daughter are in Venice when they encounter two elderly sisters, one of whom is psychic and brings a warning from beyond. Director: a list of 33 titles created 29 Oct 2011 a list of 47 titles created 13 Mar 2012 a list of 44 titles created 16 Sep 2012 a list of 42 titles created 01 Jun 2015 a list of 25 titles created 3 months ago Title: Don't Look Now (1973) 7.3/10 Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin.

Won 1 BAFTA Film Award. Another 8 nominations. See more awards » Photos A police sergeant is sent to a Scottish island village in search of a missing girl whom the townsfolk claim never existed. Stranger still are the rites that take place there. Director: Robin Hardy A sex-repulsed woman who disapproves of her sister's boyfriend sinks into depression and has horrific visions of rape and violence. Director: Roman Polanski A newcomer to a fancy ballet academy gradually comes to realize that the school is a front for something far more sinister and supernatural amidst a series of grisly murders. Director: Dario Argento Two young siblings are stranded in the Australian Outback and are forced to cope on their own. They meet an Australian boy on "walkabout": a ritual separation from his tribe. Director: Nicolas Roeg Edit Storyline John and Laura Baxter are in Venice when they meet a pair of elderly sisters, one of whom claims to be psychic. She insists that she sees the spirit of the Baxters' daughter, who recently drowned. Laura is intrigued, but John resists the idea.

He, however, seems to have his own psychic flashes, seeing their daughter walk the streets in her red cloak, as well as Laura and the sisters on a funeral gondola. Written by James Meek <james@oz.net> It's utter MADNESS! See more » Genres: January 1974 (USA) See more » Also Known As: Inverno de Sangue em Veneza See more » Filming Locations: Did You Know? Trivia Renato Scarpa who plays Inspector Longhi didn't speak any English. He just read the lines he'd been given without knowing what they meant, which added to the sinister quality of his character. See more » Goofs The dead woman that is hauled up from the river blinks. See more » Quotes Heather : One of the things I love about Venice, is that it's so safe for me to walk. John Baxter : That's too bad. Heather : She says it's like a city in aspic, wrapped over from a dinner party, where all the guests are dead or gone. A classic in every sense of the word.

18 January 2005 | by Boba_Fett1138 (Groningen, The Netherlands) – See all my reviews I think it is bad luck that "Don't Look Now" was released in the same year as "The Exorcist", or else this might be a better known and more appreciated one of a kind masterpiece. "Don't Look Now" is an horror movie but not one like you would expect it to be. It isn't a movie that scares you with some scene's, it is a movie that gets into you and just won't let go and builds up a nightmare like tension. The atmosphere is fantastic and gives the movie a haunting feeling. Venice really works as the perfect backdrop for this movie. The best movie set in Venice ever? Even though there aren't any scary sequences in the movie, the ending is really horrifying, it really freaked me out the first time I saw it, I think 5 years ago. On my second viewing, not too long ago I was prepared for the ending but it still was a very scary thing to watch! The storytelling might seem slow but it works perfect for the movie and its tension.

There are some brilliant moments in the movie that all come together once the ending approaches. The editing and cinematography are perfect, as are the performances by the cast. And what is a decent comment without mentioning the famous love scene? Ah yes, the love scene, it really is one of the best love scene's ever. It is brilliantly filmed and even more brilliantly edited. Quite Stylish, as is the entire movie. This classic masterpiece certainly deserves more recognition! 10/10 92 of 151 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes Don't Look Now Movie Review & Film Summary (1973) | Roger Ebert Tweet The hero of “Don’t Look Now” is a rational man who does not believe in psychics, omens or the afterlife. The film hammers down his skepticism and destroys him. It involves women who have an intuitive connection with the supernatural, and men who with their analytical minds are trapped in denial--men like the architect, the bishop and the policeman, who try to puzzle out the events of the story. The architect’s wife, the blind woman and her sister try to warn them, but cannot.

Advertisement Nicolas Roeg ’s 1973 film remains one of the great horror masterpieces, working not with fright, which is easy, but with dread, grief and apprehension. Few films so successfully put us inside the mind of a man who is trying to reason his way free from mounting terror. Roeg and his editor, Graeme Clifford , cut from one unsettling image to another. The movie is fragmented in its visual style, accumulating images that add up to a final bloody moment of truth. The movie takes place entirely on late autumn days when everything is grey and damp and on the edge of frost. It opens in the country cottage of John and Laura Baxter ( Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie ), who are curled up before the fire, working, while their children play outside. There is never a moment when this scene in the British countryside seems safe or serene. The little girl Christine, wearing a shiny red raincoat, plays near a pond. Inside, her father studies slides of Venetian churches. Her brother runs his bicycle over a pane of glass, breaking it. Her father looks up sharply, as if sensing the sound. Christine throws her ball into the pond.

Her father spills a glass, and a blood-like stain spreads across the surface of a slide--a slide showing the red hood of a raincoat in a Venetian church. Shots show Christine’s raincoat reflected upside down in the pond. Something causes John to look up, and then run from the house, and then find his daughter’s body beneath the water and lift it up with an animal cry of grief. Advertisement This sequence not only establishes the loss that devastates the Baxters, but sets the visual themes of the movie. There will be shots that occur out of time, as characters anticipate future events, or impose past events on the present. There will be sharp intakes of psychic foresight. Christine’s death by water will lead in an obscure way to Venice, where John Baxter is restoring an old church, where a killer is loose, where the police pull a body from a canal, where a child’s doll lies drowned at the water’s edge. The shiny red raincoat will be a connector all the way through. In Venice, Baxter will get glimpses of a little figure in red running away from him or hiding from him, and may wonder if this is the ghost of his daughter.

We will see the red figure more often than he does, glimpsing it on a distant bridge, or as a boat passes behind two arches. And the precise tone of red will be a marker through the movie; Roeg’s palate is entirely in dark earth tones, except when he introduces bright red splashes--with a shawl, a scarf, a poster on a wall, a house front painted with startling brilliance. The color is a link between death past and future. The marriage of John and Laura seems real and constant in the film, not just a convenience of the plot. The death of their daughter devastates them, and when we see them in Venice (an undetermined time later, but again in very late autumn), there is a sadness between them. Then in the restroom of a restaurant Laura meets two English sisters, Heather ( Hilary Mason ) and Wendy (Clelia Matania). Heather, who is blind, tells Laura she “saw” little Christine sitting with her parents at lunch, laughing and smiling: “She’s happy now!” Advertisement Laura at first doubts, then joyously believes. She collapses at the restaurant, but that night, probably for the first time since Christine’s death, the Baxters make love.

This scene is celebrated for its passion and truthfulness, but its full emotional impact comes through the editing: The lovemaking is intercut with shots of John and Laura dressing afterwards, so that they are at once together and apart, now and later, passionate and preoccupied. There is a poignancy here beyond all reason; in a movie concerned with time, this is the sequence that insists that our future is contained in our present--that everything passes, even ecstasy. Venice, that haunted city, has never been more melancholy than in “Don’t Look Now.” It is like a vast necropolis, its stones damp and crumbling, its canals alive with rats. The cinematography, by Anthony B. Richmond and an uncredited Roeg, drains it of people. There are a few shots, on busy streets or near the Grand Canal, when we see residents and tourists, but during the two sustained scenes where John and Laura are lost (first together, later separately) there is no one else about, and the streets, bridges, canals, dead ends and wrong turns fold in upon themselves. Walking in Venice, especially on a foggy winter light, is like walking in a dream. The city is old and ominous.

John struggles to raise a statue to its perch on a church wall, and then uncovers it to reveal a hideous gargoyle, sticking its tongue out at him. A church scaffold collapses beneath him. The hotel where the Baxters are staying is eager to close at the end of season; the lobby furniture is already shrouded. The canals yield drowned bodies. And John’s concern mounts as his wife listens to the two strange sisters, and becomes convinced their daughter is sending them messages. “She’s dead, Laura,” John says. “Our daughter is dead. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead.” Advertisement But it is John who has second sight. “He has the gift, even if he doesn’t know it, even if he’s resisting it,” the sisters tell one another. And after Laura is called home to be with their son, who has had a minor accident at boarding school, John sees her and the sisters standing at the front of a motorboat passing him on the Grand Canal. How can she be here and there? Those who have been to Venice will recognize it as a funeral boat. The plot of “Don’t Look Now,” if it were summarized in a realistic way, would be fairly standard horror stuff.

The identification of the red-hooded figure is arbitrary and perhaps even unnecessary. It is the film’s visual style, acting, and mood that evoke its uncanny power. Like the recent films of M. Night Shyamalan, it works through apprehension, not plot or action. The “explanation”: is perfunctory but the dread is palpable. The movie is based by a novel by Daphne Du Maurier. “Romantic sludge,” Michael Dempsey calls it in his Film Quarterly review, explaining how the screenplay extends and deepens it but does not improve on the device of the hooded red figure. Dempsey makes a key point about the film’s use of montage: Unlike Eisenstein, who suggests shots are linked, he says, Roeg and Clifford put together shots that might be linked. We are always as uncertain as John Baxter about the connections between what he sees, what exists, what will exist, what does not exist. Advertisement Roeg, born 1928, used a similar freedom of movement through time in his first two films, “ Performance ” (1970) and “ Walkabout ” (1971), and has continued to play with chronology.

He doesn’t always enter his stories at the beginning and leave at the end, but rummages around in them, as if separated moments can shed light on one another. I’ve been though the film a shot at a time, paying close attention to the use of red as a marker in the visual scheme. It is a masterpiece of physical filmmaking, in the way the photography evokes mood and the editing underlines it with uncertainty. The admitted weakness of the denouement is beside the point, and I have come to an accommodation with the revelations about the figure in the red raincoat. That figure need not be who and what it seems to be, or anything at all--except for the gargoyle that awaits us all at the end of time, sticking out its tongue. Popular Blog Posts Don't Look Now (1973) - Plot Summary - IMDb Don't Look Now (1973) Plot Summary Showing all 4 plot summaries John and Laura Baxter are in Venice when they meet a pair of elderly sisters, one of whom claims to be psychic. She insists that she sees the spirit of the Baxters' daughter, who recently drowned. Laura is intrigued, but John resists the idea.

He, however, seems to have his own psychic flashes, seeing their daughter walk the streets in her red cloak, as well as Laura and the sisters on a funeral gondola. - Written by James Meek <james@oz.net> An American architect living in Venice, Italy with his wife on a getaway after the death of their young daughter, begins to question his sanity when he begins having a series of disturbing and fragmented premonitions which coincides with a series of murders in the city. - Written by Anonymous John and Laura Baxter's daughter Christine drowns in a lake on their English estate. They decide to move to Venice for a short time so John can work on the restoration of a historic church. Before moving down, they put their son, John Jr, in boarding school. In Venice John has lunch with Laura, who still hasn't fully recovered from the loss of their daughter. Laura helps an old lady at the next table when some dust gets in her eye. Her blind sister, claiming to be psychic, tells Laura she can see her daughter and that she is happy and close by. She also announces that John is psychic and he must leave Venice because he's in danger.

Laura is happy with the revelation but John is skeptical with the elderly psychic. The couple get a call from their son's boarding school director telling them he had a minor accident. In the morning Laura travels home to be with their son. Meanwhile, John has an accident on the church scaffolding. Walking back to their hotel he sees Laura and the elderly sisters on a funeral gondola. He also sees someone wearing his daughter's red hooded cloak, the same one she wore the day she drowned. John decides to follow the gondola to find out if the sisters abducted his wife and to discover who is wearing the red cloak. A decision with tragic results.

Question: In which city is the film Don't Look Now set?
Answer: Venice