the grass is singing of what did mary's brother and sister die

The way he mastered his apparently inexhaustible resources, the amazing emotional availability and concentration power, the perfect sense of timing, the mind-boggling blend of intensity and restraint, especially in the end sequence with the girl in the swimming pool (played by Jane Asher, an adorable actress who should have had much more visibility in films), everything in his performance invited comparison to the highly selected group of actors, perhaps best represented by Gérard Philipe, who at a very early age could display the kind of accomplishment that normally takes decades for an actor to develop. All I know is that as soon as it began I was taken aback with the absolutely stunning performance by the actor playing the lead, a 15-year-old boy going through the pains of troubled adolescence in what, back then, people used to call 'swinging London.' It was hard to believe they could have found someone that young to play so effortlessly a subdued character of such tragic dimensions.

I suspect it must have had something to do with the fact that it was showing at a near-by theatre and I always liked walking to the movies. Quite honestly, I don't remember what made me want to see it in the first place. That's how, in 1972, Deep End had its countrywide Brazilian release. Made in 1970 and generally released one year later, its only appeal to Brazilian exhibitors was the fact that, largely on account of Antonioni's Blow-Up having been such a big hit, films having to do with modern life in London had a huge following. It was just the kind of film that might easily have remained unreleased in Brazil. Not only did I see Deep End without any tips, but nothing about it could be expected to generate much anticipation. I hadn't even seen the director's previous films, the truth being that I was only vaguely familiar with the name Jerzy Skolimovsky. I hadn't seen the trailer or read any reviews. I'm afraid I'm fast becoming one of those diarists who have a certain number of topics to which they come back from time to time and start writing about as if it were the first time, until people start sending messages warning the author that he might as well see a psychiatrist, or perhaps even a psychic, to check the possibility of this absolutely maddening tendency to repetition having to do with either premature onset of dementia or the milkman not having got his money for the last month of delivered milk in a previous life.Īnyway, I had just finished high school and was beginning to attend drama school in Rio when I chanced to see a film called Deep End without being told anything about it. (The author of this journal entry can be contacted at in this journal I have already written about the extraordinary British actor John Moulder-Brown.

The grass is singing of what did mary's brother and sister die