Although set in England, not Japan, the movie's story comes from the 1963 novel, Gogo No Eiko, by the famous Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. Mishima, a poet before World War II, became one of Japan's greatest novelists after the war and was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize. However, his life ended bizarrely after his nationalistic views led him to form a private army called the Shield Society dedicated to restoring Japan to its pre-war, pre-Western ways. In 1970, Mishima and his Shield Society attempted to seize a Japanese military garrison to spark a coup. When it failed, he committed ritual suicide.
His life story sheds some light on the meaning of violence in this story. A sailor falls in love with a widow in the Japanese port city of Yokohama, not realizing their lovemaking is being watched by the widow's son who idolizes him as a pure expression of nature. The son falls in with a gang known only by numbers and whose leader commits acts of cruelty to animals in order to discover the pure essence of life. When the sailor decides to leave the sea behind and accept an ordinary life on land as the widow's new husband, the son and his gang decide to restore him to "the perfect order of things."
Lewis John Carlino, later the director of The Great Santini (1979) and Class (1983), decided to adapt this story to England, setting it in the port city of Dartmouth on the Devonshire coast. Otherwise, the story plays out much as in the original story. Sarah Miles is the English widow, Kris Kristofferson is the American sailor who becomes her lover and Jonathan Kahn is her peeping-tom son.
Unfortunately, despite the careful transplanting of the story halfway around the world, the tale dies in its new setting. Some critics put the blame on the difference between Japanese and English culture but more of the problem seems to stem from Mishima's writing style. His interior, often highly philosophical arguments about violence work on the page, but coming from an actor's mouth, especially that of child actor Earl Rhodes who plays the gang's leader, they sound horribly stilted and unbelievable. A second problem is that when the story is viewed without the philosophical underpinnings, it succumbs to easy explanations: the boy's spying on his mother and disliking the sailor are expressions of an Oedipus Complex; the gang are another group of sadistic English schoolboys out of Lord Of The Flies (1963). A third problem comes from the style of the film. The story is filled with many shocking, sometimes stomach-turning events, and yet it is full of beautifully filmed images and languorous dissolves. One taboo after another is broken but always in the glossiest, most tasteful style. This might be acceptable if the intent was one of subtlety. Subtlety, however, was evidently not on the director's agenda. The sailor and the widow barely meet before the movie jumps to the boiler room to watch the ship's pounding pistons.
Even with that assessment, Image Entertainment's DVD of The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea features a beautiful color print that well displays the excellent camerawork of Douglas Slocombe, who shot Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones movies, and comes in letterboxed and 16 by 9 formats. Unfortunately, there are no extras or commentary track. It is a worthwhile purchase only for fans or those who remember the film's famous Playboy magazine pictorial.
For more information about The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, visit Image Entertainment. To order The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, go to TCM Shopping.
by Brian Cady
