Bloodline (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Jan 13, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
Terence YoungRelease Date(s)
1979 (October 29, 2024)Studio(s)
Paramount Pictures (Vinegar Syndrome Labs)- Film/Program Grade: C
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: A-
Review
“All these ghastly things, one after another.”—James Mason as Sir Alec Nichols
A contender for the worst movie with the greatest cast, (Sidney Sheldon’s) Bloodline (1979), the penultimate theatrical starring film of Audrey Hepburn, isn’t quite as bad as its reputation, though overall, it’s certainly mediocre, a thriller bereft of thrills. She gives an interesting performance, the cinematography (by Freddie Young) is attractive, the locations are interesting, Ennio Morricone’s music is generally good, and it’s fun to see so much great talent interact. But the source material is trashy, even unseemly, the screenplay (by Laird Koenig) never coalesces, and Terence Young’s direction is flaccid when not also derivative.
Like Billy Wilder’s Fedora, this is a mostly West German production populated by international talent, hence the many Germans in supporting parts. Though slick and attractive, the sound recording and mixing is rather substandard and distracting.
Sam Roffe, the president of Roffe Pharmaceuticals, a billion-dollar empire, is murdered while mountain-climbing. His position within the company is inherited by New York paleontologist Elizabeth (Hepburn), his daughter. In the original novel, Elizabeth was in her early 20s, but more age-appropriate actresses turn the part down. For the star’s benefit they upped the age of the character to 35, and while Hepburn was still quite beautiful at this point, she looks every bit her real age, nearly 50 at the time.
Elizabeth’s various cousins assume the inexperienced new company head will agree to go public with the firm; all are anxious to cash in their stock to pay various debts. They include Sir Alec Nichols (James Mason), a member of the British Parliament whose much-younger wife, Vivian (Michelle Phillips), is a gambling addict; Ivo Palazzi (Omar Shariff), who’s married to Simonetta (Irene Papas), but has a secret second family on a sly, including lover Donatella (Claudia Mori); and Hélène Martin (Romy Schneider), whose husband, Charles (Maurice Ronet), is also in dire need of quick cash.
Elizabeth learns that her father has a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, Dr. Joeppli (Vadim Glowna), stashed away in a secluded lab who’s on the verge of completing an anti-aging drug. Armed with this information, along with support from the company’s CEO, Rhys Williams (Ben Gazzara, hardly Welsh), and faithful executive secretary Kate Erling (Beatrice Straight), Elizabeth proves her grit and mettle by securing an extension on loans from Swiss banker Julius Prager (Wolfgang Preiss).
Soon after, however, Elizabeth is nearly killed in a series of “accidents.” Inspector Max Horung (Gert Fröbe), investigating Roffe’s murder, believes one or more of her relatives or maybe Rhys Williams is now trying to murder her to force the sale of the company.
Director Terence Young was a jobbing director of mostly ordinary British films in the 1950s, his career made when he directed three of the first four James Bond movies: Dr. No, From Russia with Love, and Thunderball, and while Young certainly contributed to the series’ earliest entries, they were dwarfed by the contributions of others, particularly editor Peter Hunt, production designer Ken Adam, and composer John Barry. Young followed those hits with the pretty good adaptation of the play Wait Until Dark with Hepburn, but soon after retreated to European continental films, where his uninteresting direction and lack of any discernible visual style dragged down several promising movies, including Red Sun and The Valachi Papers. Like those, Bloodline is routinely directed. Bloodline is also quite derivative, drawing from earlier, better thrillers, including Hepburn’s Charade and, most obviously during the climax, Wait Until Dark.
Like trashy novelist Sidney Sheldon, previously best known as the creator-producer of the sitcom I Dream of Jeannie, screenwriter Koenig had come from the world of American television, writing episodes of Flipper and The High Chaparral before partnering with Young on several films, including Red Sun and, after this, the notorious Inchon. Oddly, he also wrote the novel and screenplay adaptation of The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, the latter unusually good. Bloodline, however, is almost schematic in its telling, jerking from one set piece to the next, leaving enormous plot holes unfilled, and never generating any momentum or suspense. There are pointless flashbacks to Sam Roffe as a young man in a Krakow ghetto and, particularly extraneous, a subplot involving the murders of several women in the creation of “snuff” films, whose connection with the main story is tenuous at best.
Nevertheless, all this great talent tossed in salad-style can’t help but be intriguing. Hepburn and Gazzara have real chemistry, reportedly off-screen as well, though their reteaming for Peter Bogdanovich’s troubled production of They All Laughed... was more fruitful. In underplaying, Gazzara is quite credible as Elizabeth’s key handler, and she’s very good in the board meeting scenes. Goldfinger aside, Gert Fröbe most frequently played wily police inspectors like this one, often in the Mabuse film series of the 1960s, but here he’s saddled with a trite, talking computer the police detective concedes as superior to his “little gray cells.”
The international cast, all speaking English, are almost randomly dubbed. Romy Schneider’s voice is heard on the soundtrack, but Maurice Ronet, looking ill and much older than his 52 years—he died of cancer soon after—seems re-looped. The many German actors in the cast generally aren’t, such as Wolfgang Preiss, but Friedrich von Ledebur, who appeared in some American movies, is denied his great gravelly voice and anonymously dubbed. The sound mixing is poor, with variable on-set “live” sound crudely cut with the post-dubbed material.
Vinegar Syndrome’s Blu-ray, licensed from Paramount, is excellent. Presented in 1.85:1 widescreen, the transfer sources a new 4K scan of the original 35mm camera negative. The image is razor-sharp with spot-on color and with excellent contrast. The Region “A” encoded two-disc set offers the 117-minute theatrical version on one disc, a 141-minute television version on the other. The DTS-HD Master Audio (2.0 mono) is also very good, and supported by optional English subtitles.
Besides the heavily-altered, expanded TV version, extras consist of an audio commentary track with film historians Troy Howarth and Nathaniel Thompson; a 53-minute interview with second assistant director Clemens Keiffenheim; a 23-minute interview with stunt driver François Doge; a trailer, and reversible artwork.
Though definitely Not Good, Bloodline is a movie I had been curious about for decades, and am glad to have finally seen it, particularly the fine video transfer presented here. The movie is, in one sense, a tremendous waste of talent, but to see all that talent collected here is unavoidably fascinating.
- Stuart Galbraith IV