Joseph Losey, UK, Spain, USA, 1970, 110m.
This edition of Composing Cinema celebrates the experimental musician and three-time Oscar nominated composer Richard Rodney Bennett’s score for Joseph Losey’s unique (and rarely screened) Figures in a Landscape. The screening will be introduced by regular host, composer Gary Yershon.
Joseph Losey returned to his roots in genre filmmaking in this minimalist reinvention of the paranoid political thriller so popular in the 1970s. Robert Shaw and Malcolm McDowell are two anonymous fugitives, just escaped from an unknown prison in an unnamed country and relentlessly pursued by a malevolent police helicopter. Despite their sympathy, the local population can do little to help the men and by the end it becomes clear that the two protagonists are playing out another of Losey’s rituals of power and role-playing, albeit on a more ambitious scale than usual. Losey reportedly despised the gratuitous violence of the source material and enlisted Shaw’s skill as a writer to craft a screenplay that would be a tough critique of militaristic violence. The result remains an intelligent and suspenseful film that powerfully uses the scenario of the chase as an existential metaphor.
