A Sexy, Painful Film With One Beautiful Scene
They don't show "The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea" much on TV (to my knowledge.) It is not much of a classic, though in many ways, it is compelling.
The title was a great one, if a bit too long for the marquees("The Sailor" was the shorthand way to put it up there.) For this film would be about a sailor(Kris Kristofferson, the country singer turned leading man who never looked more handsome and macho than in this movie), and he does fall from grace with the sea, and it is sad and tragic when he does.
The film had the selling point of very graphic, if loving and sensual, love scenes between Kristofferson and randy British beauty Sarah Miles. It was too bad, really. In the 70's, so often sex scenes in movies were rape scenes, or scenes of "sex object" womanizing. But Kris and Sarah were playing good people, kind people, sad people (she a young widow with a son, he a man who must go to sea alone for long stretches) who temporarily salve their pain and loneliness with joyous and intense sex.
What was too bad was that it was as if because the sex in "The Sailor" was so kind, lusty, and loving...the rest of the story had to be horrific, sadistic, excruciating. THAT was the story of Sarah's beautiful young pre-teen (and Oedipal) son and his adventures with a privileged group of Boy's School misfits led by a stone cold psychopath. This bully led his group on missions of animal cruelty(more implied than shown) which spun "The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea" right out of the reach of adult audiences who might have otherwise warmed to its sensuality. And the psychopathic attacks on innocent animals were, of course, the prelude to the hunting of human prey.
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I remember "The Sailor" as being too hard to enjoy -- the ending really hurts, and not in "warm" way -- but I also remember a wonderful, wonderful scene in the middle of the picture which will survive for me in this post:
It is a wordless montage sequence set to the plush, lush, and sad orchestrations of one Johnny Mandel -- one of those sixties/seventies movie music composers who knew how to touch the heart while maintaining a kind of jazz hipness.
The scene is scored to music called "Sea Dream," and is about how Kristofferson must go back out to sea with his merchant ship -- for weeks, as I recall -- while Miles waits for him. The wide-screen Panavision shots of the sea, the ship, the coastal village where Miles waits...and the palpable pain of these separated, lonely lovers...well, it is just one of those mergers of image, music, and acting that you always remember.
They showed "The Sailor" on cable TV about a year after it came out, and, in the pre-video age, I AUDIO-taped the music of that scene off of the TV(no picture) and committed it to memory. As for the rest of the movie...frankly, I tried to forget it. I always wanted a sequel where Lee Marvin led a mission of revenge to kill all those animal-torturing snotty boys.
Anyway, if you can ever see this movie...skip it. Except for that beautiful scene.
P.S. To publicize "The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea", Kris Kristofferson and Sarah Miles did a nude layout together in Playboy magazine, assuming "Joy of Sex" sexual positions that were pretty graphic for that magazine. Kristofferson said he was drunk while posing for them. Kristofferson was married at the time. His wife, singer Rita Coolidge, saw the "Playboy" layout...and divorced him.