genet-1 Review of Chance Meeting

Chance Meeting (1959)

Flawed crime story by socialist director Losey

[6/10 · 18 April 2010]

BLIND DATE starts out hampered by a misleading title and the miscasting of the key female role. The meeting in the Tate Gallery between penniless Dutch painter Hardy Kruger and French bourgeoise Micheline Presle is no blind date, but, superficially at least, a simple pick-up - the "chance meeting" of the film's US title. As for Presle, her advances to Kruger appear gauche, even desperate, with none of the allure that would be needed to snare him. A better actress might have accepted that her character would, in that situation, appear clumsy, and play on that, but Presle lets the lines do the work. The film only picks up with the appearance of Losey's preferred male lead, Stanley Baker, as the detective Morgan. With a broad Welsh accent, and troubled by a cold that has him sniffing repeatedly on an inhaler, Baker sketches out the role he would play with increasing assurance in later collaborations with Losey like HELL IS A CITY, EVA and ACCIDENT - a working-class outsider, in revolt against the elite of which he secretly wishes to be part, but which he knows will never accept him. Any strength in BLIND DATE resides in the confrontations between a disheveled, snuffling Baker and the Scotland Yard establishment, represented by three-piece-suited Robert Flemyng and his equally suave subordinate, John van Eyssen. By stressing that Morgan's father was a chauffeur and Kruger's a miner, Losey decisively places both on the opposite side of the social divide from these two, not to mention the awkward, chilly Presle. In a brief but significant scene, Flemyng, having hinted to Baker, none too subtly, that he should frame Kruger if he ever wants promotion, encounters van Eyssen in the corridor and reminds him they'll be meeting socially over the weekend. By contrast, Kruger and Baker languish in the cultural ghetto with losers like Gordon Jackson's PC Plod and Jack McGowran's furtive "nudge-nudge-wink-wink-know-what-I-mean?" postman. The film hammers home this point with its set design, in particular that of Baker's office, a draughty attic with exposed waste-pipes running down the wall. The office, along with Baker's clothing, advertises the fact that, by exposing the real murderer, he has incurred permanent banishment from the circles of power. Losey's supposedly socialist principles are seldom apparent in his films, which are mainly calculated exercises in style, but in BLIND DATE at least he appears to pin his left-wing colours to Baker's crumpled sleeve.