Stuffy old film lore has her pudding-proving moment down as her depressed ballerina to C Chaplin’s down and out comic in Limelight, but we know the real test came the following year, when she was one of the magnificent seven who descended on an unsuspecting French capital in Innocents in Paris, and held her own with the veteran likes of Alistair Sim, Jimmy Edwards and Margaret Rutherford. From then on, it’s motorway all the way: Look back in Anger, The Buccaneer, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Charly, The Illustrated Man… you get the picture. The presence of the odd misfire, such as her alky nympho in ludicrous Kinsey Report ‘dramatisation’ The Chapman Report, merely add to the overall impression of a first rate job of screen work.
FINEST HOUR: ‘What would you call this place? Funorama?’ Yes, her clairvoyant lesbian in superlative old dark house nightmare The Haunting is well nigh unmatchable.
Matt Patton
April 5, 2010 at 3:42 pm
Actually, Bloom was quite good in THE CHAPMAN REPORT–the script was crap, and the tendency to “signal” her character’s nymphomania by having her hair perpetually mussed and her jackets forever on the verge of falling off, but she gives the character the “morbid obsession with sex” (Oxford Dictionary definition of nymphomania) that was necessary. Actually, just about everybody in that movie was good–and it’s still glossy shite.
George White
May 21, 2023 at 10:11 am
Of course, the Chapman Report costarred Rick ‘the Fireman’ Dalton (who died two days ago according to Quentin Tarantino’s podcast twitter).