Review of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1976) by Roger T — 27 Dec 2013

To westernize The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, a novel by the late Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima, producer Martin Poll and adapter-director Lewis John Carlino changed the Yokohama setting to a seacoast village in Devon. They then teamed England's provocative Sarah Miles with Kris Kristofferson as ill-starred widow and able-bodied American seaman whose headlong sexual collision is no secret to a gang of dangerously precocious British schoolboys. Anglicizing does little to inhibit Mishima's heady blend of romance, eroticism and horror in a movie that takes liberties (occasionally startling ones, even in the present permissive era) to flesh out the unique, decadent spirit of an author, too little known in the west, who was once hailed by The New York Times as "a master of gorgeous and perverse surprises.".

In story terms, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea combines elements of Last Tango in Paris with the intellectual rigor of Lord of the Flies. Kristofferson's sailor destroys "the perfect order" of existence by forsaking his anchorless life at sea for a sensuous lady - a crime that the woman's son and a band of wayward chums judge punishable by death. The climax of this strangely tangled tale reflects the credo, as well as the kinkiness, of Mishima (a Japanese nationalist who committed hara-kiri in 1970, at the age of 45, to dramatize his political views). Though a self-absorbed, bi-sexual, family man, fanatical bodybuilder (he liked posing nude) and actor in gangster movies, Mishima was also a prolific literary genius who dreaded old age and called hara-kiri "the ultimate masturbation." The first English-language film based on his work catches his undertones of cool violence, played against some of the hottest love scenes in nonporn cinema history, and may prove an exhilerating trip for viewers only now discovering the world of Mishima.

During ten weeks of shooting through unreliable English weather in Dartmouth, the community's lady mayor at the time declared herself gratified to find people at work on a "nice family picture." The mayoress, if she ever saw the movie, would've been surprised to learn that Miles, Kristofferson, Carlino and a company of ruddy-cheeked pubescent lads have used a slew of local landmarks as background for a drama richly garnished with sex, sadism, voyeurism, exhibitionism and ritual murder. Thomas Hardy country may never quite be the same after viewing The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. It's lusty co-stars, who all but shiver the timbers in several sequences that add graphic body English to Oriental erotic art. There's been no comparable breakthrough by big-name actors since Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, making it, made a sizzling bedtime story in Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now.