VeteranLight
I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.
BeSummers
Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.
Griff Lees
Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.
MartinHafer
Michaela (Ava Gardner) is a rich middle-aged lady who lives in a mansion and filled with sycophants who don't do anything with their lives...they just party and answer to Michaela's bidding. She also has a boy-toy, Tom (Ian McShane) but when he stops worshiping Michaela and begins pursuing the local vicar's daughter (Stephanie Beachum), he incurs the wrath of his mistress. Ultimately, after LOTS of talking, they decide that the man's punishment should be death and they spend an inordinate amount of time tormenting him and chasing him about the British countryside instead of just offing him.This film was the only picture directed by Roddy McDowell and it's a bizarre product of it's times--less a movie about witchcraft and more a film about Bohemian hippies. A strange and very, very slow moving film--one that must have played much better in the drug-soaked early 70s. Today, it just seems pretty dopey and bad.
Alex da Silva
Ava Gardner (Micky) is a wealthy woman who surrounds herself with a young jet-set crew who she keeps within the confines of her huge estate. They hang out there until Ava gets bored with them and sends them away. Woe betide if you're her favoured lover, though, for if you cross her, you don't get a happy ending. Ian McShane (Tom) is in that role when he falls for vicar's daughter Stephanie Beacham (Janet).Not really sure what this film is about. It makes no sense and it's pretty boring. The director – Roddy McDowell - is also a bit all over the place with his mish-mash of styles and in particular a photo montage that goes on for too long when McShane and Beacham first get it together in the great outdoors of Scotland. What is Ava's character meant to be – we never know, it's never clear. Can she live forever, is she going to get old – this isn't thought through and we get a silly folk-music soundtrack. The original song about this tale may have a supernatural interest but judging by this offering, keep it as a song. At least make it into a good film if you're going down that route. Big fail. Complete nonsense.The whole acid trip sequence at the end is phoney – clearly, nobody involved in the film had any experience of taking LSD and we are also meant to believe that this upper-class posh set of hanger-on are some sort of savage gang of killers!! Pretty ineffectual killers if you ask me. This film sucks.
calvinnme
I stopped this film 20 minutes in to look up the Scottish ballad the film was based on, "Ballad of Tam Lin", so I could make sense out of the film. Wikipedia has a thorough article on the song and the lyrics. Everything made much more sense after reading the article.That said, this was one of Ava Gardner's few supernatural films, and was Roddy McDowell's only directorial effort. The screenplay sticks fairly close to the song's plot, with a look at "Swinging London" mod clothes, late 60's slang , and a so-so song overlaying all as an attempt at "relevance". Listen for the bits of ballad sung through the film .Gardner gave an outstanding performance as the coven leader; the film lets the viewer decide if other fairy tale terms are applicable. Ian McShane is good as the Favored One, and Stephanie Beacham is good as his Human love.AIP gave the film only a limited release. The misunderstanding arises from the fact that AIP promoted it as a horror film rather than as a poetic romance even reediting the film and retitiling it "The Devil's Widow" from the original "Ballad of Tam Lin" to try and achieve this effect. As a result, no one was happy, and the film sank without a trace, predictably losing money.McDowell didn't direct another film, which is a real shame, because this one has startling photography, the music is interwoven to maximum effect, and McDowell did well by the actors.This is one of Ava Gardner's least-seen, most underrated films. My opinion is that if you feel lost in the beginning, stay with the film anyways as it improves as it goes on.
macnemo
Based on Robert Burns' version of the Scottish folk tale "The Ballad of Tamlin," this modest but mesmerizing 1971 thriller concerns a young man, Tom Lynn ( Ian McShane), who becomes the romantic prisoner of an evil enchantress Michaela Cazaret ( Ava Gardner ). In a particularly arrestingly eerie and phantasmagorical set piece during which Tom, stoned out of his mind, is pursued by murderous acolytes of the bewitching Miss Cazaret, McDowall effectively punctuates the story's fairy tale quality with an entirely harmonious nightmarish and hallucinogenic tone that forever reflects the psychedelic sixties. McDowall's laudably creative panache as a filmmaker was embellished by a seductive performance from his star Ava Gardner. Though past her prime, she is nonetheless sultrily convincing as the irresistible, vampiric dominatrix insatiably commanding her hapless lovers to their eagerly desired doom.Tam Lin (aka The Devil's Widow ) was also McDowall's solo directorial effort. Based on the splendid result (especially the aforementioned set piece), it was a great pity that Roddy did not pursue a career as a film director because - as with Charles Laughton, who blessed us with his only turn as a director, the superb "The Night of the Hunter" - he possessed a definite flair as a filmmaker. Produced in 1969, his film sat on the shelf for two years. In 1971, McDowall returned to his film to do some post-production work on it but 'twas all for naught because it was poorly distributed and sank into relative obscurity. In 1998 Republic Home Video, in collaboration with Martin Scorsese and McDowall, restored "Tam Lin" and rescued it from oblivion by releasing a stunningly superb widescreen print with an introduction by McDowall.I highly recommend this stylishly directed and unjustly neglected gem to lovers of the macabre and mysterious. To all such, I strongly encourage you to seek it out.
