Forgotten Films: LEO THE LAST (dir. John Boorman, 1970)

As you might expect, the late 1960s and early 1970s gave us many films that indulged in dreamy scenes of hippy-dippy expressionism playing off the drug culture of the era. On one side you had movies like Joe Massot?s Wonderwall (1968), which didn?t really bother to tell any stories and grooved on their own stoned-out stylization. On the other, works like Michelangelo Antonioni?s classic Blow-Up (1966) tried to incorporate such indulgences into more traditional narratives. Perched somewhere between the two extremes is John Boorman?s Leo the Last, which, despite a Best Director award at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival, has rarely been heard of since.The Leo of the film?s title is the last in a line of exiled Eastern European monarchs, played with submerged longing by Marcello Mastroianni. Our shy scion arrives in London, to a mansion-like family home that lies at the end of an impoverished cul-de-sac, a hotbed of poverty, thievery, rape, and various other social ills. While his father was reportedly a man of grand bearing and historical presence, an associate of the likes of DeGaulle and Churchill, Leo himself is not good around people. Though attended to constantly by servants, a socialite girlfriend (Billie Whitelaw), and shifty assistants, he would rather stay by his window and look through his telescope at the pigeons on the rooftops. Aloof, unable to connect with the world (?He feels nothing,? his people murmur behind him, like a Greek chorus), Leo is at once a symbol of both rotting privilege and bourgeois modernity: Bits and pieces of T.S. Eliot?s ode to alienation, ?The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,? regularly float by on the soundtrack. While observing his birds, Leo becomes involved -- vicariously, of course -- in the desperate lives of an African family living in a crowded flat across the street. He spies on excitedly as the oldest daughter, Salambo (Glenna Forster-Jones) and her boyfriend Roscoe (Calvin Lockhart) execute an elaborate plan to steal a turkey from the local grocer. He watches helplessly as Salambo is almost raped by a local thug, which in turn leads to Roscoe?s arrest. Leo gradually becomes more and more involved with his neighbors, trying to help them by buying them groceries and finally intervening personally, when Salambo is driven into prostitution. (Her pimp, by the way, is played by a young Louis Gossett, Jr.) By inserting himself into the drama across the street, Leo faces down his own social neurosis. (One could compare him to Jimmy Stewart's character in Rear Window, and it's hard not to think that Boorman had Hitchcock's film in mind when making this one.)On paper, this will seem impossibly bleak. But Leo the Last is not some gritty piece of neorealism. Boorman brings to his characters? lives a lyrical grandeur that feels more like a piece of music than anything else. In fact the soundtrack, by Fred Myrow, is full of musical commentary on the goings onscreen: A scene where Roscoe tries to capture a bird with a net gives us the symbolic, haunting image of a man reaching for the skies while a voice sings, ?Where do the hopes go/With all of the longings/You thought were lost?/But they?re only waiting/Up in the sky/For someone to find them.? If this sounds almost painfully earnest, that?s because it is. But it?s all masterfully redeemed by Boorman?s ability to infuse even the smallest gesture with a unique poetic energy, a talent that had already served him well in Point Blank and would again in films like Excalibur and The Emerald Forest.If it wasn?t so damned cinematic, Leo the Last could have probably made for an insane stage musical. It?s built almost entirely of setpieces, some of which feel more like avant-garde dance works than anything else. A hilarious scene where Leo?s family doctor tries to get the household to relax through nude water therapy is filmed largely underwater, where Boorman?s camera can focus lovingly on the subjects? naked, gelatinous, hypnotically undulating rear ends. The finale, in which Leo and Roscoe lead the poor of the neighborhood against the barricades of Leo?s own mansion, feels as much like a grand theatrical finale as it does a cinematic climax.But I fear I?m making Boorman?s film sound a bit too much like an opaque piece of avant-garde street theater and not enough of a real movie. Nothing could be farther from the truth. With Mastroianni?s performance as an anchor, Leo the Last is a thoroughly involving, heartbreaking little film. Of all the directors to emerge in the 60s, I?m not sure anyone was better than John Boorman in melding the stylized, revolutionary aesthetic of the period into a narrative framework. I?d say he took it to an extreme in Leo the Last, but I?d be lying; he took it to its real extreme in Exorcist II: The Heretic and paid dearly for it. In Leo, one could say he found the ideal blend. The result is a fascinating time capsule that still makes for a compelling, heartfelt drama today.So, how do you see it? Leo the Last has never been available on video, pretty much never gets shown on TV, is rarely screened theatrically, and is not currently available on DVD in the US. But those with multi-region players can enjoy this Spanish DVD release of the film, which actually looks and sounds surprisingly good.--Bilge EbiriPrevious Forgotten Films Columns:- October 30, 2006 -- 7 WOMEN (dir. John Ford, 1966)- October 16, 2006 -- REIGN OF TERROR (aka The Black Book) (dir. Anthony Mann, 1949)- October 3, 2006 -- MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON (dir. Bob Rafelson, 1989)- August 18, 2006 -- LUNA (dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, 1979)- August 28, 2006 -- OUR MOTHER?S HOUSE (dir. Jack Clayton, 1967)- August 14, 2006 -- THE CHOCOLATE WAR (dir. Keith Gordon, 1988)- July 31, 2006 -- THE STRANGER (dir. Luchino Visconti, 1967)- July 17, 2006 -- WALKER (dir. Alex Cox, 1987)

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