Eva (1962): All About Eva (Review)

In 1945, the proclaimed king of thriller writers in Europe, James Hadley Chase penned his novel, Eve. Set in the seamy side of the Hollywood film industry, this psychological thriller told the story of Clive Thurston, a shipping clerk who stumbles upon a talented but TB-stricken writer who subsequently dies of his condition, leaving Clive with a valuable manuscript. Seizing his chance, he passes the play off as his own and is soon elevated to the high life and glamour of Hollywood. With the world at his feet, Clive finds himself becoming infatuated with a sex worker called Eve, who does not reciprocate his feelings because, as she says, she only meets men for money and because she has an estranged husband. Sceptical of both claims and unable to get Eve out of his head, Clive continues his pursuit for her affections, despite already being in a relationship himself. Courted by filmmakers for a follow-up to ‘his’ hit, Clive decides to write about Eve, but his shortcomings as a writer, the mounting debts of his lifestyle and his overwhelming desire for his would-be muse threatens to rock the already shaky foundations of his successful life.

Meanwhile, in the very Hollywood that James Hadley Chase wrote about the shaky foundations of many of its most creative artistes were beginning to bear the devastating effects of the House of Un-American Activities (the HUAC) all-consuming ‘Red Scare’ and their subsequent root out of anyone it suspected of having communist sympathies. One of the 151 individuals labelled “Red Fascists and their sympathizers” in the 1950 report on Communist Influence in Radio and Television, Red Channels, was the American theatre and film director, Joseph Losey. A Communist Party member since 1946 and an associate of previous HUAC target, Bertolt Brecht, Losey had long since been a person of interest. Having made his feature film directorial debut with the 1947 political allegory The Boy With Green Hair, Losey found himself in the peculiar position of being under an RKO contract, yet being assigned no actual work – an early, soft approach in what became the infamous Hollywood blacklist. Released from his contract in 1949, Losey was signed to a three-picture deal with Stanley Kramer at Paramount when he discovered that the HUAC were going to subpoena him to appear before them and give evidence. Abandoning his work and indeed the life he knew, Losey and his family fled to Italy and eventually settled in England as of 1953. His early work in the British film industry was varied, with projects ranging from the neo-noir of the Sleeping Tiger (1954) and The Criminal (1960) to the regency melodrama of 1958’s The Gypsy and the Gentleman. Initially, the exiled Losey worked under the alias of Victor Hanbury for fear the stars of his films would be blacklisted under guilt by association.

By 1956 however, Losey had dispensed with the pseudonym and was slated to direct the horror X the Unknown, his first film for Hammer (the second being 1963’s The Damned), but the protestations of its star Dean Jagger, who refused to work with a Communist, saw Losey leave the shoot someway through and be replaced by British director Leslie Norman. Not all of Losey’s relationships with his actors would prove to be fractious however and a fruitful one developed with Stanley Baker on the set of Blind Date in 1959 which was to be replicated a year later with The Criminal, the film that was arguably Losey’s breakthrough movie which left audiences and critics with no alternative but to sit up and take note. Originally, Losey was decidedly unimpressed with the project. Speaking to The Guardian‘s Peter Lennon around the time, he revealed the extent of his distinctive relationship with Baker, recalling that the script “was a concoction of all the prison films Hollywood ever made. Both Stanley Baker and I refused to work until they let us write our own script. Which is what we did.” A huge hit in France, The Criminal would go on to define the point in which Losey stopped being a gun-for-hire director in exile and started to become an auteur – his next project, what was to be his third with Baker, came from the French-based Egyptian producers Raymond and Robert Hakim; an adaptation of Eve, the novel by James Hadley Chase.

Baker had already been signed to star in Eve (or Eva as it later became known; though as we shall see the preferred cut by Losey reverts to its original title) but was unhappy with the screenplay. No doubt recalling to mind his experience licking the script of The Criminal into shape, the ultra-masculine Welsh actor recommended Joseph Losey as the director to the Hakim brothers, who willingly granted their star’s wishes. Arriving to the project, Losey shared Baker’s sentiments. Having no interest whatsoever in Hadley Chase’s novel and inspired by the Nouvelle Vague movement of the country that so embraced his last film, Losey cast Elevator to the Gallows star Jeanne Moreau opposite Baker and relocated the film’s narrative to the enigmatic city of Venice. The first screenplay was the work of a fellow blacklisted exile, Hugo Butler, a Canadian whom Losey had previously worked with on The Big Night in 1951. Despite their previous association, Losey was as dissatisfied as Baker with Butler’s screenplay and he brought in the Jamaican-born poet and playwright Evan Jones to do the necessary rewrites. Jones had worked with Losey on The Damned, and would go on to work with hoim twice more with 1964’s King & Country and 1996’s Modesty Blaise. Eventually, the screenplay began to take shape. Clive the shipping clerk became Tyvian Jones, a former Welsh coal miner and therefore a protagonist made more in Baker’s image (indeed, the scenes of him holding court in the bars of Venice, entertaining his high class friends with stories from his Welsh childhood and youth recall the reminiscences that both Baker and his fellow Welshman Richard Burton would often enjoy when in their cups).

As with the novel, Tyvian steals another man’s work (in this case his own brother, who presumably died either down the mines or as a result of the work itself) and passes it off as his own. Likewise, the titular Eve was also changed to better suit leading lady Moreau. Her nationality was switched to French, whilst Losey hit upon the idea of mining the significance of the name Hadley Chase gave to his female protagonist. From the bones of the author’s source material, he set about crafting a modern-day allegory on the Adam and Eve story as befitting the intentions of a burgeoning auteur. As Losey subsequently said, “I made the film mine more than anything I have ever done” and its eventual release, heavily cut at the insistence of the Hakim brothers and greeted by a succession of poor reviews, hurt him deeply as a result.

Released to Blu-ray on the Indicator label, Eva is a fascinating experience. Ambitious and deeply personal filmmaking, it is a thwarted masterpiece mutilated by producers who expected a melodrama but received an arthouse movie instead. Losey initially turned in a film running to 155 minutes but, after a couple of selected screenings, he was encouraged to make cuts. Losey set about his task and reduced his vision to a 135 minute cut that he was very happy with. Not so the Hakims however who, without Losey’s consent, hacked it further down to anywhere between 120 and 100 minutes. The film was released at 116 minutes in France and, to Losey’s pain, declared a disaster. In America, under the title The Devil’s Woman, it ran to 100 minutes, likewise in the UK where it was called Eva. Naturally with such heavy edits the film lost all sense of shape and suffered from poor pacing. On viewing the film in his adopted London, Losey declared it “a common, tawdry little melodrama. Unclear, pretentious, without rhythm and taste”. In Scandinavian countries, it was released at 120 minutes and this arguably is as close to Losey’s original vision as we can get. All four cuts are available for your consideration on this release.

As established earlier, Losey’s vision is arguably a compelling modern-day Adam and Eve parable. As with Adam, Tyvian is enjoying his Eden – a paradise that is built in a patriarchal favour. Losey argues that be a success in such a society you have to reflect its values and misogyny and Tyvian, on the surface, most certainly does that. He is confident, assured and bristling with unfettered machismo. Baker plays him cocksure, literally in the crucial scene in which he first comes across Eva, who he finds to have broken into his house with a hapless punter for sex. Sitting before the man on the stairs, Baker splays his legs to prove that he is the alpha male here, complete with a far mightier phallus and big clanking balls. He scolds and belittles the man (even calling him “cock“) before chucking him out. Only him mind, as he intends to take his woman, Eva, as his own; an Adam who has found his Eve. However, Eva is more than a match for Tyvian and is arguably one of the great examples of Moreau’s screen persona. A mass of contradictions, Eva is sensual yet cold, volatile and manipulative, immodest and seemingly bent on destruction. As a character Eva is somewhat impenetrable, presented as an unknown quantity with a private agency and an independence that spells danger as much for Tyvian and the patriarchy as the Bible’s Eve was for her pursuit of knowledge. It is clear that Losey wanted audiences to decipher her true nature, laying clues in what she didn’t say, rather than the things which she did say (one scene has here admit to being abused as a child, only to laugh it off as she informs the agog Tyvian that he would “Believe anything”), her material interests and, most crucially of all, in the decision to pepper the score with tracks by Billie Holiday, Eva’s favourite artiste whose pain perhaps mirrors her own. Unfortunately, the Hakims wielded the scissors on several of these scenes, replacing the audio, which means that Holiday’s lyrics, which Losey believed were the key to an audience’s appreciation of his female protagonist, were lost.

For Moreau herself, the character of Eva and Losey’s film, in general, was feminist in its intentions. She saw it as an exploration of how women survive in a patriarchy – do they comply with their surroundings or contest them? For Eva, the latter is the only option and she uses what she naturally possesses – her sexuality – to get what she wants and to play men at their own game. This endeavour runs parallel to Tyvian, whose advancement arises not from using what he naturally possesses, but stealing from someone else. For Eva, her greatest fear is that her approach has a shelf life and that her looks will fade and she will grow old and be abandoned. She is heard to remark that she dislikes or is fearful of old women and, during a night’s gallivanting with Tyvian on the streets of Venice, she drunkenly stumbles upon an elderly beggarwoman and is both terrified and aghast at coming so close to her possible future.

Tyvian’s fear is of course of found out, something which forever plays upon the edges of the film. Haunted by the memory of his brother, Losey explores the British class system arguably for the first time (he would go on to do so in greater detail in future films, starting with his next one; 1963’s The Servant) when Tyvian’s recalls his late brother’s unshakable modesty in the scene in which he confesses to Eva that he stole the manuscript. “I’m only a working man” he recollects his sibling saying; a man refusing to give himself to the airs of a writer or accept his latent talent. For the brother, there was achievement in working-class toil and the talent he possessed was something that was secondary. For Tyvian, who had no such talent, this is clearly anathema. He reveals to Eva that he knew that his hard-working brother would not live long, that he possessed a sickly pallor that came from his graft and it was clearly Tyvian’s fear that he too would suffer the same fate which is why he seized upon the gift of his brother’s writing after his demise.

Astonishingly much of this insight, so integral to understanding the character of Tyvian, was also edited out of the US and European prints. For both characters, Eden is a paradise built on sand. As Tyvian falls head over heels for Eva, his assured mask begins to slip as it perhaps always destined too, whilst Eva’s own spirited challenge towards the world around her can only last so long. Losey invites his audience to consider how similar his protagonists, forever trapped in a doomed and tempestuous love/hate relationship, actually are and he does this in a variety of ways, most notably in the inclusion of mirrors in several scenes – it’s as if he is asking the characters (and, in turn, the audience) to search for the similarities; the masculine that exists in the feminine and vice versa. Tyvian and Eva are two of a kind, revealing the Biblical influence as, after all, Eve was born of Adam’s rib.

Interestingly, in one of the Blu-ray extras, Gavrik Losey (the director’s son) posits a different reading that works beyond the Adam and Eve parable and perhaps feeds in to the rather lurid choice of title for the film’s US release, The Devil’s Woman. Gavrik Losey believes Eva to be an avenging angel, destroying the paradise he which Tyvian has created for himself because it was not his by right. He talks of Tyvian being “destroyed by his own type…someone who matches him and betters him in everything that he is, but he can’t see it” Again, this approach makes us consider the mirrors and just what Losey intended with them – was he showing Tyvian that the warning signs were there if only he looked? Losey Jnr’s take is an intriguing one and fits comfortably with Moreau’s feminist reading too. It’s important to remember that as well as class, Losey appeared to be was greatly interested in feminism and sisterhood and several of his later films that point to this, from the Jane Bond exploits of Modesty Blaise (1966), to an adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1973,) to the Glenda Jackson film, The Romantic Englishwoman (1975) and of course his final film, Steaming (1985) which featured an all female cast.

The reception afforded to Eva could have destroyed a lesser filmmaker. Instead, Losey picked himself up and began work on a film that would be more objective but would equally be 100% his movie from beginning to end. When The Servant arrived the following year, it was clearly following the same themes and preoccupations that we can still (just about) see in the butchery of Eva, but unlike this film, it was met with universal acclaim. Losey was finally crowned an auteur and important filmmaker, and he never looked back. It’s interesting though to see the groundwork for The Servant being laid here. Eva is a fascinating film, but it is also far from an easy watch. This is because you’re acutely aware at every point that you are watching a film in a manner that it was never intended to be shown. As a result, Eva ought to take its place alongside other thwarted masterpieces like Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons as one of the great ‘what might have beens’ of twentieth-century cinema. Indicator have rightly observed its importance, treating us to a truly great package. As well as the four different versions of the film, there is a version comparison extra and a selection of interviews, reminiscences and visual essays too.

Thanks for reading our review of Eva

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