Justine (1969) User Reviews

Based on Durrell collection

[blanche-2 · 6/10 · 20 March 2009]

In 1938 Alexandria, a British schoolmaster (Michael York) befriends the wife of a banker named Justine (Anouk Aimee), a mysterious woman whom he meets through a British officer (Dirk Bogarde). She's actually a prostitute and political activist.

Darley, the York character, finds out that Justine is heavily involved with an anti-British plot to give arms to the Jewish underground in Palestine.

This uneven film is based on Lawrence Durrell's collection, "The Alexandria Quartet." The film is pretty unsuccessful, though there are still signs of director Cukor's hands - he took over from the original director. The film seems like it starts in the middle. Nice photography, good music, but it doesn't hang together. Michael York, Dirk Bogarde, and John Vernon are all good; Aimee does okay. Apparently she and Cukor didn't get along. She gives a somewhat confusing performance.

Can't really recommend it.

Is it TOO enigmatic?

[JasparLamarCrabb · 4/10 · 5 March 2010]

Is it too enigmatic to be filmed or is this production just malformed? George Cukor's film of Lawrence Durrell's "Alexandria Quartet" stars Anouk Aimée as Justine, the seemingly amoral wife of a wealthy Egyptian, biding her time in 1930s Alexandria with a slew of lovers. There's a lot more going on, as young Irish poet Michael York slowly (perhaps too slowly) realizes. The film is never dull, but it does have a heavily edited feel to it, which is perhaps inevitable when collapsing four books into one screenplay. Cukor, who took over direction from Joseph Strick, offers up many colorful scenes full of many colorful characters. Unfortunately the film's lack of cohesion dooms it. Aimée is perfect for this role, she's always had a vacancy about her. York is a bit dull, but the supporting cast, including Dirk Bogarde, John Vernon, Jack Albertson (as a furrier with a very big secret), and Anna Karina, is terrific. Robert Forster plays a revolutionary and he has some of the best scenes. The great music score is by Jerry Goldsmith.

Why on earth did they bother?

[brogmiller · 3/10 · 30 January 2021]

Despite its occasional passages of purple prose and its labyrinthine plot Lawrence Durrell's 'Alexandria Quartet' has never ceased to cast its spell and is rightly considered one of the finest works of the twentieth century. I would however venture to say that it belongs to a select group of literary works including Joyce's 'Ulysses' and Heller's 'Catch 22' which are frankly unfilmable.

Director Joseph Strick had previously had a go at 'Ulysses' and was hired to direct 'Justine' which is the title of the first part of Durrell's tetralogy. By all accounts his crackpot notion of casting Glenda Jackson(!) in the title role got him the old heave-ho. In came George Cukor. A safe pair of hands one would think? Think again!

The resulting film is an absolute mess and an unmitigated disaster from which the paying public stayed away in droves. The appeal of Durrell's novel lies in the setting of which he had first hand knowledge when working there for the British government and in the fascinating, complex characters he has created. In fact his second wife, a Jewish Alexandrian, was the inspiration for the character of Justine. Sadly, even with Leon Shamroy behind the camera the film is utterly devoid of atmosphere whilst Anouk Aimee, in attempting to be enigmatic as Justine, is just plain lifeless. Michael York as Darley takes blandness to a new level. Philippe Noiret as Pombal is a caricature and Dirk Bogarde as Pursewarden turns in another of his 'tortured soul' performances. Anna Karina is totally miscast as Melissa. Best to draw a discreet veil over Jack Albertson as Cohen. The only actors who emerge relatively unscathed are John Vernon as Nessim and George Baker as Mountolive. There is some distinctly dodgy dubbing going on here and one has a sneaking suspicion that the atrocious editing is due to severe post-production snipping. Cukor himself was reticent regarding this which of course speaks volumes.

One dreads to think what Mr. Durrell thought of this monstrosity and he deserved a profound apology. Apparently he much admired Henry Miller's novel 'Tropic of Cancer', yet another 'unfilmable' that was released in 1970 and directed by..........Joseph Strick! You couldn't make it up.

"She seemed to move in a golden glow...blood-sister to a thousand tyrant queens!"

[moonspinner55 · 3/10 · 11 July 2007]

With very little exposition, we are unceremoniously plunked down into this muddle of a tale set on the coast of the Mediterranean sea in Alexandria, just north of Egypt. Michael York stars as a schoolteacher and writer in the 1930s who is returning to Alexandria on a "fool's journey", having an affair with a belly dancer but just as quickly dumping her for a tempestuous politico named Justine, a married prostitute (and former Jew!) who is panicked by the British takeover of the Muslims. Adapted from Lawrence Durrell's celebrated collection "The Alexandria Quartet", this indifferent, wayward drama shows no signs of a decisive captain of the ship. Filmmaker George Cukor (of all people) took over after the first director was fired; how much of the original work remains is unknown--but, no matter, the whole misbegotten venture is terrible from start to finish. York (who also narrates, seemingly under duress) approaches every scene with the same expression: a quizzical blank. Anouk Aimée teases him by licking crumbs from his lips and dashing into the ocean naked, but when York gets physical, she freezes up like a Hollywood heroine from the 1950s and tells him, "Don't!" Leon Shamroy's cinematography is fine, Jerry Goldsmith's music is lively, and John Vernon is surprisingly cordial and handsome as Justine's husband. All the rest is cinematic cabbage. *1/2 from ****

A muddled mess

[strat-8 · 1/10 · 14 July 1999]

This is either a very good "bad" movie, or a bad "good" movie. Either way. Cukor's master touch is still visible even though he phoned this one in. Fine cinematography. As with so many films, the actors gave first rate performances but it was not enough. It's a cliche but it's true. The problem is with the story, or more specifically, the screenplay. We see love affairs and parties and characters appearing and disappearing all for no apparent reason. Another failure of trying to squeeze a complex novel into a two hour drama. By the time the secrets are revealed at the end, we really don't care. It is no reward for our having sat through 110 minutes of mish-mash-mush. To pawn this off as a "character study" is a poor excuse for a poor movie.

A strange mix

[BandSAboutMovies · 3/10 · 3 April 2024]

No, not Jess Franco's Justine which came out the same year.

This is a bigger movie.

Maybe not better.

Directed by George Cukor and Joseph Strick and written by Lawrence B. Marcus from the novel by Lawrence Durrell, Justine takes what is seemingly an impenetrable source and turns out, well, something.

Why two directors? The pre-production was done by Strick, who intended to shoot the movie in Morocco. He did some location filming there, but battled Fox execs and star Anouk Aimée. When he did not hire along with the studio's wishes - and fell asleep on the set while working - Cukor was brought in. Instead of shooting on location, the rest was shot in Hollywood.

It ended up losing $6,602,000, which in today's money is $55,824,857.00.

Let's go back a bit. The book that this was based on is part of The Alexandria Quartet, a tetralogy of novels by British writer Lawrence Durrell. The first three books are a Rashomon-like telling of three perspectives on a single set of events and characters in Egypt, before and during the Second World War. The fourth book is set six years later. Justine is the best-known of these books. The author saw the four novels as an exploration of relativity and the notions of continuum and subject-object relation all within the theme of modern love.

Seems like a blockbuster, right?

In the book, the narrator - unnamed but revealed as a man named Darley in later novels - tells of his time in Alexandria and his tragic romance with Justine, a mysterious Jewish woman who was once poor and now married to the rich Egyptian Nessim. Darley is quite similar in background and life to the actual writer of this book.

I love the way that Justine herself is described: "alluring, seductive, mournful and prone to dark, cryptic pronouncements." Feels like my dating history. There's also another book within the book written by another lover of Justine, as well as her diary, all of which tell of her many lovers and teh dark hurricane that she brings into the lives of men.

There are also bits about the study of the Kabbalah and secret political games.

As for Durrell, he was born in India to British colonial parents and spent much of his life traveling the world. He worked as a senior press officer to the British embassies in Athens and Cairo, press attaché in Alexandria and Belgrade and director of the British Institutes in Kalamata, Greece and Córdoba, Argentina. He was also director of Public Relations for the Dodecanese Islands and Cyprus. Yet he resisted only being listed as British and didn't even have citizenship, needing to apply for a visa every time he came to the country, which was embarrassing to diplomats. Also, he may have had a relationship with his daughter Sappho Jane, who was named for the Greek poet whose name is associated with lesbianism.

It's hard to sum up an artist's complex life in one paragraph but there you go.

Anyways, this movie feels cursed. Even people who left it worked on bombs. For example, Joseph L. Mankiewicz was working on the screenplay when he was approached to take over Cleopatra. Speaking of that movie, it's failure led to original producer Walter Wanger being fired and original star - and the person often blamed for Cleopatra - Elizabeth Taylor being replaced.

The actress who was picked to play Justine, Anouk Aimée, was so upset at being separated from her lover Albert Finney that she wanted to leave. The actor had to visit her and tell her to complete the movie. In the book Conversations with My Elders, Cukor was asked who the worst actor he had ever worked with. He answered Aimée, saying "That picture could have been much more than it was allowed to be." He said that the problem was "Attitude. Intractible. Like Marilyn Monroe, but without the results. Let me tell you, that girl knew she'd probably never work in Hollywood again, or she'd never have defied me like that."

I love this review from Roger Ebert: "What Cukor has salvaged from this morass is rather remarkable. "Justine" is a movie that doesn't work and is usually confusing, but all the same it's a movie with a texture, an atmosphere, that's almost hypnotic. People who go to movies to enjoy the story will be enraged, and people who go to Justine with any familiarity with Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet will be appalled. But people who go to movies to watch the way scenes work, and to relish the rhythm of an actor's performance, will like Justine more than they expected to."

There's a great cast at least. Nessim is played by John Vernon, Darley by Michael York, Narouz is Robert Forster, Pursewarden is Dirk Bogarde, plus there are roles from Jack Albertson, Michael Constantine, Michael Dunn, Barry Morse and Severn Darden. They're great actors seeking a script to work with and sometimes it works, but there's so much to get through and the first hour seemingly is formless. I don't know if this film came out today if anyone would even feel like wading through it; attention spans have changed greatly in its lifetime.

In the 60s, 20th Century Fox seemed like they were unable to get anything going. Cleopatra was such a failure that they had to release all of their contract actors just to save money and sold their studios to Alcoa. They were saved by the box office of The Longest Day, The Sound of Music, Fantastic Voyage and Planet of the Apes but would make other flops from 1969 to 1971, including Hello, Dolly! And Myra Breckinridge.

Forty-karat kitsch baroque

[matt-201 · 10/10 · 17 June 1999]

George Cukor's adaptation of Lawrence Durrell's ALEXANDRIA QUARTET forms the shape of a dial made of character traits from medieval mystery plays--Fanatic Patriotism, Sexual Cunning, Heartless Bargaining, Furtive Retreat. If Durrell sought to catalogue every human impulse, Cukor had another, lower agenda that serves the material beautifully: shifting these allegorical characters into ripe, lustrous kitsch icons who seem to have time-travelled from a Sternberg movie circa 1931.

The whole picture seems to have undergone a time-machine move from THE SHANGHAI GESTURE to swinging '69. It's Cukor's most vibrant movie visually, and each gorgeously staged and color-patterned shot finds a new way to layer an Islamic tapestry atop psychedelic poster art.

Cukor, brought in as a replacement, brings a vigor to the material you don't associate with him, and at 70, he still knew how to shape the beats of a scene like a Broadway pro. It is reported that he and the star, Anouk Aimee, loathed one another, and in honesty it's easy to see Cukor's frustration: she gives a dismally coy, incommunicative performance as the black widow whose web forms the story. She seems aberrantly at odds with the coolly dignified, taciturn style of the other performances: Dirk Bogarde, as the Graham Greene-ish diplomat with a lurid secret may never have been more creepily sympathetic than he is here. And John Vernon, an actor best known for playing pompous authoritarians in B movies, has such noble composure as Justine's long-suffering husband that he seems to turn into a folk-art engraving of a noble and besieged human soul.

Dreadfully dull.

[planktonrules · 3/10 · 25 January 2024]

Based on the IMDB trivia, "Justine" was indeed a very troubled production. It went through two directors and the second one, George Cukor sounds as if he just gave up, as he found his leading lady to be quite temperamental and difficult to direct. Additionally, the movie was an expensive production and lost a LOT of money.

The story is set in 1938 in Egypt, though if you look at Anouk Aimée, she looks straight out of a 1969 fashion magazine. In other words, the film didn't excel at trying to get the costuming right. Additionally, the film seems to be more concerned with revelry than dialog and multi-dimensional characters.

Darley (Michael York) is a Brit who is shacking up with a really messed up woman. At the same time, he falls for another really messed up woman (Anouk Aimée) as do most of the straight men in the movie. As for her, she seems consistent with a Borderline Personality...having shallow and promiscuous relationships with practically everyone even though she is married. It turns out she's working on getting guns to Palestine and you wonder if maybe her goofy and outlandish behavior might be a cover for this illegal activity. I don't know...but by the time this came out, I was already VERY bored.

Whether or not this movie does the work of Lawrence Durrell justice, I have no idea. Perhaps his book is excellent. Perhaps, like the film, it's dull and superficial. All I know is that it was a major chore to sit through it and my attention almost constantly waned. Perhaps there was some deeper meaning to the story...but I didn't notice any.

Atmospheric version of Durrell's literary classic.

[Ramjet · 9/10 · 4 October 2002]

A condensed version of Lawrence Durrell's brilliant literary classic Alexandria Quartet, Justine is about the sophisticated game of international intrigue and espionage in Alexandria, Egypt (at the time the Switzerland of Africa and the Middle East) between the first and second world war. Subtle character portraits from a range of British and European actors at the top of their game draws the viewer into a fascinating foreshadowing of the political events to come.