Lilith
Lilith
by Warren Beatty
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Few actresses are adored by the camera as much as Jean Seberg is in the brooding, 1964 psychodrama Lilith. The legendary American and European star (Godard's Breathless), playing Lilith Arthur, fixes one's attention on her every nuance in Robert Rossen's tale of a beautiful, sexual omnivore and psychotic patient at a New England mental hospital. Withdrawn into her small world of dolls and fantasies, Lilith responds to the attention of a laconic, Korean War veteran, Vincent Bruce (Warren Beatty), who is trying to find himself by working as an occupational therapist. Burdened by a murky, guilt-ridden past (involving his mentally ill mother), Vincent gradually falls into an unnervingly passionate affair with Lilith--much less a romance than a shared journey toward mutual implosion. Rossen's severe, sincere, stark black-and-white drama is sometimes lost in a muddle of undefined character motivations, but it's quite a ride toward the film's last-minute epiphany. Watch for Gene Hackman in a small role. --Tom Keogh
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