The Very Edge Movie Review
Among my favorite not-so-guilty pleasures is watching the early films of television's most iconographic heroes. Before his image congealed into sterling saintliness on the small screen, Raymond Burr was one of the toughest thugs you could ever find on the late, late, late show. And you haven't lived until you've seen William Talman play a vicious killer or a religious maniac. Although it sickened him to play the role, Basil Rathbone was chillingly effective as mean Mr. Murdstone, brutalizing little Freddie Bartholomew and delicate Elizabeth Allan in David Copperfield. Rathbone's successor as Sherlock Holmes, Jeremy Brett (1935–95), was the most monastic of Victorian sleuths. Not even a marginal hint of attraction to the opposite sex crept into his interpretation. Like a chess master at the top of his form, he was rather dry, brittle, precise, and obsessed. What a surprise, then, to discover The Very Edge, a dark little British film from the year 1963 in which Brett, then 27, played a full-fledged sexual psychopath, terrorizing gorgeous Anne Heywood. She is “happily” married to Richard Todd until Brett, who has been stalking her for some time, attacks her in her home while her husband fiddles helplessly with the latch key. She loses the baby she is expecting, and tries hard both to cooperate with the police and to rebuild her shattered marriage. Her wonderful husband, it seems, expects her to instantly recover from the incident without a mark. If she can't, well, there's always Nicole Maurey, his stunning French secretary, lurking in the wings. The intriguing element about The Very Edge, under Cyril Frankel's assured direction, is that Heywood has more of a psychic bond with her attacker than she does with her own husband. It isn't that she wants him or anything like that, but she has compassion for his illness, and she is, ironically, less of a victim around Brett than she is around Todd. Both men desire her for their own reasons, but in a life-and-death situation, her fighting spirit emerges with her obsessed stalker in a way that it never does within her marriage. Brett is riveting as the tortured psycho, and your real hisses will be reserved for Todd and the so-called normal life to which Heywood must return again and again; it is a tribute to her expert performance that you can appreciate why her struggle with Brett gives her such an authentic grip on life. The ending, in which the police ignore the poor tied-up handyman played by Patrick Magee, and focus their energies on the folks from a higher social order, is VEDDY, VEDDY British.
1963 90m/B GB Anne Heywood, Richard Todd, Jeremy Brett, Jack Hedley, Barbara Mullen, Maurice Denham, William Lucas, Gwen Watford, Patrick Magee; D: Cyril Frankel; W: Elizabeth Jane Howard; C: Robert Huke. VHS