![]() Previously, having only seen the severely truncated THE LOVES OF ISADORA (which is now beautifully restored in a British produced DVD and recent Blu-Ray under the title ISADORA)I watched it both times and remember it well. NBC broadcast the complete roadshow version over two nights twice in the early 1970s. "Great movies are rarely perfect movies." It went on forever.īut, inexplicably, not "Isadora." The film that, arguably, contains her single greatest screen performance was absent. Voluminous clips from just about all of Redgrave's important films preceded the award itself. The final nail in "Isadora's" coffin came at The Orange British Academy Film Awards in February of 2010, when Redgrave was awarded its highest accolade, the Academy Fellowship, to an approving crowd at London's Royal Opera House. The film then disappeared from the landscape until it was incarnated, briefly, in the 1990s when a "director's cut," running 153 minutes, was released on VHS (a version which was televised by the Bravo cable channel, with some minor editing of nudity) and then it disappeared again. Presumably, the original version was screened at Cannes, given that it played there as "Isadora," not "The Loves of Isadora." (This conflicts with reports that put the edited version at 131 minutes but, really, what's three minutes when 40 have been cut?)ĭespite its already troubled history, Universal gave Reisz permission to screen the film in competition for the Golden Palm at The 22nd Cannes Film Festival (held May 8-23, 1969), where Redgrave took home the best actress award. ![]() Anyway, based on this one review, Universal panicked, recalled the film and deleted some 40 minutes (shade of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil," a future Universal victim here).īy the time it opened in New York on April 27, 1969, it had a new title - the generic, TV-movie-sounding "The Loves of Isadora" - and, according to Vincent Canby's dismissive review in The New York Times, it ran 128 minutes. Misunderstood, it was promptly panned by The Los Angeles Times (shades of Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" here), although Vanessa Redgrave did get her Oscar nomination, losing - unbelievably - to Katherine Hepburn and Barbra Streisand (oy!) who won in a tie vote that year. Universal, with Oscars in its eyes, rushed the 168-minute art film into a single Los Angeles theatre for one week in December of 1968 to qualify for that year's Academy Awards. Unfortunately, the film was undermined by its studio even before anyone, critics included, got to see it. ![]() Duncan, a solopistic, sexually uninhibited artist who experimented with dance, liberating it, was also a defiant free-thinker, and the like-minded Redgrave tore into the role as if it were a raw piece of meat and she was starving. What's difficult to grasp is a major movie that seems to fall off the map.Ī prime example is Karel Reisz's brilliant, messy Isadora Duncan biopic, "Isadora," which provided star Vanessa Redgrave with her most emblematic, self-defining role. ![]() Invisibility is the trademark of a lost movie. Such films usually come in under the radar. The general personality profile of a lost movie is that it is small and that its original release came with little fanfare. Redgrave's Isadora Duncan entertains herself while her distracted lover James Fox concentrates on his art in Karel Reisz's lost masterwork "Isadora" (1968)
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