SnoopyStyle Gruff Richard (Lionel Stander) drives his heavily wounded companion Albie to the English seaside. He finds George (Donald Pleasence) and his flirtatious French wife Teresa (Françoise Dorléac) vacationing at their island castle and takes them hostage. As Richard waits for his gangster leader, George's annoying friends surprise them with a visit.This is black and white, and Roman Polanski's second English film. Jackie Bisset has an early minor role. This is an art house film with an eccentric blend of surreal comedy and thriller horrors. Everybody is a little off-center but not quirky enough to be funny. There is tension but it never really rises. Lionel Stander is terrific with his powerful presence. It does need George and Teresa to cower in order accentuate the terror but they are odd characters. They don't act right but it's not surreal enough to be intriguing. This is an eccentric indie.

Art Forman I favor dark comedies bordering on the surreal & Polanski does best. Well deserved kudos from Berlin, which I managed to see shortly thereafter in Philadelphia's wonderful Bandbox Theater which was almost empty, IMSMC. I have seen it once again since years ago in Boston & was delighted to see MGM's digital version on cable, which seems an excellent reproduction. Some of the other reviews here sorely missed the point. The setting is Lindisfarne, a holy island in northern England. Ms. Bisset has a line, which is one of my favorites. This is a very dark comedy indeed that was way ahead of its time, which even today confuses many viewers, including some reviewers here. A pity Françoise Dorléac went the James Dean route shortly after filming this, her best role.

Adam Gai Samuel Beckett refused to give Polanski the rights to film Waiting for Godot and so the director created with Gerard Brach a script with strong echoes of the famous play (and some by Harold Pinter). A mixture of Gothic horror picture, black comedy, and classic gangsters American pictures, Cul-de-Sac is a parody of all these genres and also a tragedy. Hopelessness, humiliation, perversion - constant motifs of his films -, are presented here below a thick veil of grotesque. The arrival to the castle of a wounded gangster who tries to be rescued by his boss, and his immediate physical and mental domain of the hostages, untie openly the woman's despise of her husband, the cowardice and vulnerability of him and both dependence on the intruder. The couple breeds chicken and the chicken seem fulfill the function that had the chorus in the Greek tragedy, Polanski is mocking in this way the solemnity of the serious genre that notwithstanding has adopted. Like in others of his films, the director remits to scenes of his former works and make also homage to some admired creators - Hitchcock's The Birds, for instance (when some birds descend on the courtyard of the castle in the manner of the mentioned picture, but without the expected consequences (another game of Polanski). The Godot of this story, Katelbach, like that of Beckett, will never appear and, in this case, shall leave a message exempting himself of any responsibility. Nobody expected shall come to rescue, the woman will escape with a new lover, the gangster is murdered by the landlord and the landlord will lament, sitting on a rock in the sea, his infinite misery. Counting with a suggestive photography by Gil Taylor, who plays smartly with shadows and lights, Polanski likes to pursue the spectators with sudden movements of the camera that show the characters withdrawing from or running over the spectators, who sometimes serve as the supposed mirror where the fictional creatures are looking at themselves. The formal perfection of many scenes could not dissimulate some serious downfall of rhythm and excessive stereotype of characters and not few dialogs. The film is perhaps too much long and repetitive, but this apparent fault contributes to intensify the atmosphere of obsession and dismay, which are considered principal marks of the director's pessimist vision of world.

Ben Larson When many hear Donald Pleasance, they immediately think of Dr. Loomis in Halloween. It is a shame that they have not seen one of his early roles where he does some fantastic comedy.He and his wife, played superbly by Françoise Dorléac, elder sister of Catherine Deneuve. This film was released the year before her tragic death at 25 in a car accident. She showed great talent here, and would have probably risen to great heights had she lived.Lionel Stander, who was derailed from his acting career for 10 years after being branded a communist, came back in time to do this film. He is hilarious as a dumb criminal Stander is best know for his long run on Hart to Hart. He is really funny.One of Polanski's best.