Sanctuary

Invited to Hollywood after Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer, Tony Richardson made only one film there before fleeing back to Britain. That film was Sanctuary a disastrous attempt to bring Faulkner to the screen: it forever fudges the issues, preferring the easy dramatics of a Tennessee Williams-like script to the mythic drama of the Faulkner novel. Richardson's diffidence in handling his story of rape and murder, eliciting nervous performances from Remick and Montand, points the way forward to the failure of nerve that characterises the majority of his subsequent films.