This Angry Age

Shot by French director René Clement on an island off Thailand with a cast that included Italians Silvana Mangano and Alida Valli and Americans Jo Van Fleet and Anthony Perkins playing French colonials in Indochina, the film suffered from its hybrid parentage and over-melodramatic moments. Nevertheless, it caught the rich hues of the tropics in Technirama, and was an absorbing enough study of a colonial family. The script obliquely suggests an incestuous relationship between siblings Mangano and Perkins, the latter in a role conceived for James Dean, killed 18 months earlier, and they have a sensuous dance number called "the Crawl". The movie later cropped up under the documentary-sounding title The Sea Wall.