BY LEE PFEIFFER
Kino Lorder MGM has released the offbeat thriller Return From the Ashes on Blu-ray. It's a criminally underrated film directed by the criminally underrated J. Lee Thompson. The British b&w production was released in 1964 and filmed at MGM's old studios at Borehamwood. The intriguing storyline focuses on Stan (Maximilian Schell), a penniless but charismatic cad and gigolo who worms his way into being the boy toy of rich female doctor Michele Wolf (Ingrid Thulin) in Paris immediately prior to the outbreak of WWII. Michele realizes she is being manipulated but finds her wayward lover's charms irresistible. After the war breaks out and France falls to Germany, Stan performs what he describes as his one gallant action: he marries Michele despite the fact that she is Jewish. Predictably, the situation ends tragically as she is arrested within minutes of the wedding and sent to a concentration camp. At the end of the war, Michele never returns to France and Stan assumes she has died in captivity. Years later, he has successfully wooed Michele's stepdaughter Fabi (Samantha Eggar), a self-centered but sensuous young woman who has grown up resenting her treatment at the hands of Michele, who ignored her and kept her shuttled between various boarding schools. Now Fabi and Stan are lovers and living a seemingly blissful, if financially strained existence.
The intriguing plot begins to unwind when Michele unexpectedly appears
on the scene. Embarrassed by how her beauty has been degraded due to her
ordeal, she at first leads Stan to believe she is a woman who bears a
remarkable resemblance to his late wife. When she confesses the ruse,
Stan promises to resume the marriage- without telling her he is her
stepdaughter's lover. His main purpose is to secure the substantial
wealth the French government will return to Michele. Enraged at the
prospect of losing her man to her hated stepmother, Fabi tries to
persuade Stan to help her concoct a perfect crime scenario in which
Michele will be murdered and they will inherit her fortune. To say any
more about the plot specifics would risk giving away key plot points.
Suffice it to say that the storyline consistently surprises the viewer
by veering in unexpected directions. The cast is superb with Thulin
giving a poignant performance as a woman who can find no peace even
after the ordeal of surviving a death camp. Schell is equally good as
the charming bad boy, the type of man countless intelligent women end up
fallling for despite their intuition that such a relationship can only
lead to heartbreak. Eggar, then a hot property in the British film
industry, also registers strongly as the young woman who uses her sexual
prowess to manipulate Stan. The only other major role is played to
perfection by the always reliable Herbert Lom as a fellow doctor who
tries to warn Michele that her relationship with Stan will lead to
tragedy.
Director J. Lee Thompson, who demonstrated his skill at milking suspense from key scenes in films like The Guns of Navarone and Cape Fear, outdoes himself here. The sequence in which a murder is to be enacted will have you white-knuckled and approaches the level of a Hitchcock thriller.
Return From the Ashes is a spinetingler that ranks with some of the most memorable suspense movies of the 1960s.
The Blu-ray, which includes reversible sleeve artwork from European release posters, also contains an original trailer that you should not watch prior to the film. Not only does it unveil key spoilers but it presents the film as a hokey horror flick with bombastic titles that would have made schlockmaster William Castle blush.There is also a very generous trailer gallery presenting a wealth of previews for other KL titles.
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