Mademoiselle

After Tom Jones, Tony Richardson launched into a series of extremely ambitious films (The Loved One, The Sailor from Gibraltar and Mademoiselle) which were all lambasted by the critics for their pretentiousness. This one boasts a script by Jean Genet which was partially rewritten by no less than four writers (David Rudkin, Michel Cournot, Oscar Lewenstein, and Richardson himself), and the results were understandably mixed, though not nearly as awful as The Sailor from Gibraltar, which deserves its reputation as the most meaningless movie of the '60s. Here, Jeanne Moreau plays a strung-up French schoolteacher who is driven by her lust for a woodcutter to commit a series of atrocities, but the whole thing suffers from Richardson's terrible addiction to artistic overstatement (not to mention the difficulty of making an intimate drama with an international cast speaking several languages).