Audrey Hepburn was so selective in the final
years of her screen career, often letting years lapse between projects, that
it’s disappointing most of her latter-day output is rotten. She returned from a
long hiatus to play Maid Marian in Richard Lester’s wonderfully melancholy
adventure/romance Robin and Marian
(1976), and it was downhill from there, beginning with this overstuffed
potboiler adapted from one of Sidney Sheldon’s lowest-common-denominator
novels. As always, Hepburn comes across well, her natural elegance and poise
allowing her to rise above even the silliest scenes, but Bloodline does nothing to embellish her well-deserved reputation as
one of the most magical performers ever to step in front of a movie camera.
The
story’s hackneyed inciting incident is the death of a pharmaceutical tycoon
named Sam Roffe, which pits his only child, Elizabeth Roffe (Hepburn), against myriad
cousins who want to sell the family’s massive international operation for some
quick cash. Naturally, each of the cousins is some gradation of Eurotrash,
plagued by adulterous entanglements, crushing debts, impending scandals, or all
of the above. Just as naturally, Elizabeth is the only saint in the family, so
not only does she block attempts to liquidate the company—the better to honor
her beloved father’s wishes—but she becomes an active participant in the
investigation of her father’s death. Oh, and during all of this, she falls in
love with an executive at the family company, chain-smoking smoothie Rhys
Williams (Ben Gazzara at his most intolerably smug). Yet that’s not quite
enough material for Sheldon’s voracious narrative appetite, so Bloodline also follows myriad subplots
relating to the cousins. Ivo (Omar Sharif) tries to keep his wife and three
children separate from his mistress and his other
three children. Alec (James Mason) digs himself into a deep hole with gambling
losses, even as his beautiful younger wife, Vivian (Michelle Phillips), whores
herself out to placate creditors. And so on. All the while, intrepid European
cop Max (Gert Fröbe, the Artist Forever Known as Goldfinger) pieces clues
together with the help of a supercomputer—as in, during many of his scenes, Max
chats with the computer, which responds in a mechanized voice.
Anyway, let’s
see, what are we forgetting from this recitation of the film’s major elements?
Oh, right—the subplot about the bald
psycho killing women in snuff films.
Yeah, Bloodline is that sort of picture, a semi-serious but simple-minded
piece of escapism that periodically and ventures into the realm of exploitation
cinema, resulting in dissonance. Picture a Ross Hunter movie suddenly morphing
into a William Castle production, and you get the idea. To be clear, director
Terence Young does his usual slick work within scenes, but the task of
reconciling all of Bloodline’s incompatible
elements would have defeated any filmmaker. Still, it’s impossible to
completely dismiss Bloodline for a
number of reasons, Hepburn’s presence being the most important of those.
Furthermore, the cast is rich with talent, and Ennio Morricone’s score is
characteristically adventurous, at one point going full-bore into a Giorgio
Moroder-type disco groove. There’s always something
colorful happening in Bloodline, good taste and logic be damned.
Bloodline:
FUNKY
