Mississippi Mermaid (1969)
Directed by François Truffaut
A tobacco planter on Réunion island in the Indian Ocean becomes engaged through correspondence to a French woman he does not know. The woman that arrives does not look like the picture he received, but he marries her anyway.
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What critics compared Mississippi Mermaid to
Based on the same Cornell Woolrich novel that Francois Truffaut had fun with in 1969's underrated Mississippi Mermaid, this Cuban-based potboiler takes longer to play out than a swim from Nova Scotia to Havana.
Movie fans will recall that Francois Truffaut had a bit more artistic luck adapting this same Woolrich novel with his 1969 French version, "Mississippi Mermaid," starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve -- even though it was one of the biggest box-office flops of his career.
We can see the bare bones of Woolrich's story and how it might have worked in some other incarnation (Francois Truffaut also filmed this novel in 1969 as Mississippi Mermaid.)
Original Sin is based upon Cornell Woolrich's (Rear Window) novel, Waltz Into Darkness, which Francois Truffaut adapted in 1969 and titled Mississippi Mermaid.
Based on the 1947 Cornell Woolrich novel Waltz into Darkness (previously filmed as François Truffaut's Mississippi Mermaid), Original Sin is a little bit exotic period piece, a lot noir, but Cristofer and his cast never quite get it together.
Cristofer's adaptation of Cornell Woolrich's "Walk Into Darkness" (which was also the basis for Truffaut's "Mississippi Mermaid") is filled with howlers like this one: "This is not a love story, but a story about love," Jolie's Julia says in voiceover narration.
Truffaut playfully employs various filmmaking techniques throughout the picture — for starters, note the iris shot that figures in one sequence — and, true to his roots as a film critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, he amusingly includes a brief scene in which the principals discuss the merits of Nicholas Ray's offbeat 1954 Western, Johnny Guitar.
François Truffaut ("Mississippi Mermaid"/"Jules and Jim"/"The Wild Child") calls his film a love story, which it is if you think about it.
François Truffaut paid homage to his hero Alfred Hitchcock with 1968's The Bride Wore Black, an adaptation of the novel by Cornell Woolrich (and reviewed earlier this year in this column).
As the second Hitchcock homage that Truffaut produced (after The Bride Wore Black), it manages to be the movie that Birthday Girl often seems to yearn to be.