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 (now co-starring with Barbra Streisand in A Star Is Born) 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 combines elements of Last Tango in Paris with the intellectual rigors of Lord of the Flies. Kristofferson's sailor destroys "the perfect order" of existence by forsaking his anchorless life at sea for a sensuous, landed 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 bisexual, family man, fanatical bodybuilder (he liked posing nude) and actor in gangster movies, Mishima was also a prolific literary genius (three times nominated for a Nobel Prize for his novels, plays and short stories) 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 exhilarating trip for movie audiences only now discovering that the world of Mishima reaches to far-out aesthetic shores.
During ten weeks of shooting through unreliable English weather in Dartmouth, the community's lady mayor declared herself gratified to find people at work on "a nice family picture." The mayoress, when and if she sees The Sailor, will be 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 be quite the same after playing host to The Sailor'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 of Don't Look Now.
