Jerzy Skolimowski‘s Deep End (’71) is a highly absorbing, smoothly composed British noir about a withdrawn kid and his obsessive feelings for a co-worker. It’s more than a bit creepy, unsettling, perverted. But coolly stylish. It’s being restored by Bavaria Media for re-release as a DVD. It’s crudely viewable right now on YouTube.
Skolimowski clearly had a thing for Jane Asher, the fetching red-haired actress who’d become famous in the mid ’60s for being Paul McCartney‘s girlfriend. Her character, a duplicitous swimming-pool attendant, has an affair with an older guy, etc.
The Skolimowski flick I’d really like to see given a full restoration and a high-def digital remastering on Criterion is Moonlighting (’82), the Polish-laborers-restoring-a-London-townhouse allegory with Jeremy Irons. It was said in the ’80s that there are two kinds of people — those who hear Moonlighting and think Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepard, and those who think Skolimowksi, Irons and Polish communism.