Jacqueline Bisset Movies
Born Jacqueline Fraser, in Weybridge, England, onetime model Jacqueline Bisset was vaulted into stardom on the strength of two 1967 films: In the over-produced spy spoof Casino Royale, she attracted attention as the alluring Giovanni Goodthighs; even more impressive (so far as critics were concerned) was her near-microscopic role in Stanley Donen's Two for the Road, in which Bisset plays the vacationing British schoolgirl whose sudden case of the measles makes the rest of the plot possible. (She reprised and expanded upon this bit in a film-within-a-film in François Truffaut's Day for Night in 1973.) First cast on the basis of her looks alone, Bisset later developed into a top-notch actress, as evidenced by her performances in The Grasshopper (1969) and The Thief Who Came to Dinner (1972). She came to so despise her earlier sexpot image that she insisted that no still photos of her wet T-shirt scenes in The Deep (1977) be reproduced for publication. That year, Newsweek magazine voted her "the most beautiful film actress of all time." In 1978, she played another famous Jackie (although not so named) in The Greek Tycoon, an à clef version of the Aristotle Onassis saga. A more mature but no less dazzlingly beautiful Bisset was later seen in a kinky secondary role in Zalman King's Wild Orchid (1990). The actress received critical acclaim in 2001 for her portrayal of a dying woman's search for the daughter she never knew in Christopher Munch's drama The Sleepy Time Gal. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide- 1969
- PG
Wendy (Jacqueline Bisset) is the British guest of a French couple and the daughter of the man who saved the host's life during World War II. Living with the couple is their 20-year-old son and a 12-year-old nephew whose parents were killed in an automobile accident. The father and son both try to seduce the attractive guest. The young boy retreats into his own world and dreams of being taken back to Britain by Wendy in this romantic drama. The mother spends her time bleaching her hair and is seemingly uninterested in anything that goes on with her family at the beachfront villa. Meanwhile, Wendy and the younger boy develop a fondness for each other, while his aunt and uncle fail to understand his needs. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jacqueline Bisset, Gisèle Pascal, (more)
- 1969
- R
Three teenage boys yearn for their first sexual experience in The First Time. Kenny (Wes Stern) is sent to Buffalo for the summer to visit his grandmother. Terminally bored, he writes letters back home to his friends telling them what a good time he is having. Of particular interest is a bordello called Rosie's across the Canadian border. Kenny had overheard the conversation of two men describing Rosie's and his imagination runs wild in one of his letters. Soon his pals Mike (Rick Kelman) and Tommy (Wink Roberts) arrive on their way to camp wanting Kenny to show them the famed bordello. The trio drive around until Kenny identifies an abandoned Canadian warehouse as Rosie's. They meet Anna (Jacqueline Bisset), and believe since she has no passport, she must be a prostitute. The four go back to the U.S. where they check into a motel reserved by Mike and Tommy. Comedy ensues when the inexperienced young men are reduced to behaving like scared little boys when they realize they are not ready to take the plunge. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jacqueline Bisset, Wes Stern, (more)
Frank Sinatra gives a gritty performance in the crime thriller The Detective. When Teddy Leikman, the homosexual son of a politically connected department-store magnate, is murdered, detective Joe Leland (Frank Sinatra) is sent in to investigate. Leland drags in Teddy's psychotic former roommate Felix Tesla (Tony Musante) and forces a confession out of him; for his work on the case Leland gets a promotion, which troubles him. Afterwards, Norma MacIver (Jacqueline Bisset), the widow of a well-heeled accountant, comes to see Leland. Her husband was killed after falling off the grandstand at a racetrack -- but Norma thinks he was pushed. She asks Leland to investigate her husband's death. Reopening the case, Leland discovers that the police are opposed to him scratching around any further, and after an attempt on his life, he uncovers some startling evidence that may connect the two deaths. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Frank Sinatra, Lee Remick, (more)
Robert L. Pike's crime novel Mute Witness makes the transition to the big screen in this film from director Peter Yates. In one of his most famous roles, Steve McQueen stars as tough-guy police detective Frank Bullitt. The story begins with Bullitt assigned to a seemingly routine detail, protecting mafia informant Johnny Ross (Pat Renella), who is scheduled to testify against his Mob cronies before a Senate subcommittee in San Francisco. But when a pair of hitmen ambush their secret location, fatally wounding Ross, things don't add up for Bullitt, so he decides to investigate the case on his own. Unfortunately for him, ambitious senator Walter Chalmers (Robert Vaughn), the head of the aforementioned subcommittee, wants to shut his investigation down, hindering Bullitt's plan to not only bring the killers to justice but discover who leaked the location of the hideout. ~ Matthew Tobey, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughn, (more)
- 1968
On California's Malibu Beach in the late 1960s, young people are enjoying a life with few responsibilities and plenty of romantic opportunities. Denny McGuire (Michael Sarrazin) is a beach bum without ambition. His roommate Collie Ransom (Tony Franciosa) is a professional tennis player who soaks up the admiration of other beach dwellers. Denny is attracted to Vickie Cartwright (Jacqueline Bisset), a mostly-out-of-work actress, and would like to settle down with her, but she is more enamored with a series of meaningless sexual encounters with men she meets on the beach or during acting jobs. The film turns more serious with the brutal beating death of Vickie. Denny pulls himself together and decides to become a more responsible adult by taking a job at a hardware store. Also working there is Choo-Choo Burns (Bob Denver), an off-the-wall jazz pianist. Choo-Choo joins Denny and Collie as another roommate. Pop music is provided by the San Francisco psychedelic band Moby Grape and the British balladeer Dusty Springfield. The script by Tom Mankiewicz was based on a novel by William Murray. ~ Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Anthony Franciosa, Michael Sarrazin, (more)
After a purse is stolen on a South African bus, this tale is set in motion--involving secret information and communist espionage. ~ Kristie Hassen, All Movie Guide
Retired after years of international espionage, Agent 007 is lured back into action to battle the evil spy organization SMERSH in this notoriously incoherent parody of the James Bond films. David Niven portrays the aging Bond, who atypically rejects the advances of a variety of women, and agrees to battle SMERSH's hold on the lavish Casino Royale only after organization head M is murdered. Also mixed up in the affair are several other secret agents, all named James Bond, played by everyone from Peter Sellers and Woody Allen to a chimpanzee. Despite a star-studded cast, a large production budget, and a hit score by Burt Bacharach, the film was universally panned as a muddled, overlong failure, with the occasional amusing sequence lost in the unintelligible surroundings. The participation of several screenwriters and five different directors, including John Huston, only adds to the confusion. ~ Judd Blaise, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress, (more)
In preparing his romantic comedy Two For the Road, director Stanley Donen decided to utilize many of the cinematic techniques popularized by the French "nouvelle vague" filmmakers. Jump cutting back and forth in time with seeming abandon, Donen and scriptwriter Frederic Raphael chronicle the 12-year relationship between architect Wallace (Albert Finney) and his wife (Audrey Hepburn). While backpacking through Europe, student Finney falls for lovely music student Jacqueline Bisset, but later settles for Hepburn, another aspiring musician (this vignette served as the launching pad for the film-within-a-film in Francois Truffaut's 1973 classic Day for Night). Once married, Finney and Hepburn go on a desultory honeymoon, travelling in the company of insufferable American tourists William Daniels and Eleanor Bron and their equally odious daughter Gabrielle Middleton. Later on, during yet another road trip, Finney is offered an irresistible job opportunity by Claude Dauphin, which ultimately distances Finney from his now-pregnant wife. Still remaining on the road, the film then details Finney and Hepburn's separate infidelities. The film ends where it begins, with Finney and Hepburn taking still another road vacation, hoping to sew up their unraveling marriage. While critics did nip-ups over Stanley Donen's "revolutionary" nonlinear story-telling techniques, audiences responded to the chemistry between Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney, not to mention the unforgettable musical score by Henry Mancini. Note: many TV prints of Two for the Road are edited for content, robbing the viewer of Finney and Hepburn's delightful "Bitch/Bastard" closing endearments. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Audrey Hepburn, Albert Finney, (more)
- 1966
The fact that there isn't a single likeable character in Cul de Sac does not diminish its artistic value in the least. Ageing, furtively kinky Donald Pleasence is married to sexy young Francoise Dorleac. The couple's hermitlike tranquility is shattered when wounded gangsters Jack MacGowan and Lionel Stander invade their home and hold them hostage. As Dorleac urges her tremulous husband to do something, the two criminals begin behaving in a fashion that can only inadequately be described as eccentric. Drawing upon two of Polanski's favorite themes-isolation and latent insanity--Cul de Sac actually improves upon each viewing, assuming that the viewer has the intestinal fortitude to sit through it once. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Donald Pleasence, Françoise Dorléac, (more)
- 1966
This uneven black comedy went into production as My Last Duchess. It then went through three title changes, representing, in the words of historian Leslie Halliwell, "a descending order of wit": Arrividerci, Baby, Drop Dead, Darling, and You Just Kill Me! Tony Curtis plays a charming contemporary Bluebeard who murders a succession of wives in order to fatten his bank account. At the beginning of the film, the 42-year-old Curtis, decked out in Buster Browns, does in his own stepmother. The remaining murders alternate between moderately amusing and just plain silly; our favorite scene is the disposal of Zsa Zsa Gabor, but that's just on basic principles. Curtis finally meets his match in a much-married widow who plots his demise (a plot point which, incidentally, was planned and abandoned for Chaplin's far superior Monsieur Verdoux). Director Ken Hughes and Ronald Harwood based their screenplay upon the Richard Deming novel The Careful Man. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Tony Curtis, Rosanna Schiaffino, (more)
- 1965
- Add The Knack ... And How to Get It to QueueAdd The Knack ... And How to Get It to top of Queue
Colin (Michael Crawford, who much later won a Tony Award for his role in Broadway's Phantom of the Opera) is an uptight schoolteacher whose housemate, Tolen (Ray Brooks) is a consummate womanizer. Colin imagines a long line of young women in tight white sweaters on his stairwell, waiting to get into Tolen's room. Jealous of Tolen's incredible success with the ladies, Colin asks Tolen for advice on how to get a girl. When Tolen's advice doesn't seem very practical, Colin decides that his first order of business is to get a bigger bed. Colin is also trying to find a third roommate to take a spare room. Tom (Donal Donnelly), who seems compelled to paint everything in sight, happens by the house, and inserts himself in the spare room without so much as saying "hello." Nancy (Rita Tushingham of A Taste of Honey) is new in town, and wanders the streets of London in a fruitless search for the YWCA. She runs into Colin and Tom at the dump, where they are procuring a gigantic bed. They offer her a ride, and proceed to race through London on the bed. Colin seems too shy to speak much to Nancy, despite Tom's encouragement. Eventually, the trio reach Colin's house, where Tolen works his gruff magic on Nancy, and havoc ensues. Capturing late 1960s London in black-and-white, Richard Lester's The Knack. . .and How to Get It was released between the director's two successes with the Beatles, A Hard Day's Night and Help. The script, by Charles Wood (An Awfully Big Adventure) is based on a play by Ann Jellicoe. Future stars Jacqueline Bisset, Charlotte Rampling, and Jane Birkin appear briefly amid all the attractive young women in the film. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Rita Tushingham, Ray Brooks, (more)
