Leo the Last (John Boorman, 1970)

It's quite hard to believe how Boorman could have conceived this between the muscular Hell in the Pacific and the iconic Deliverance. An end-of-the-'60s bender of colossal proportions would not explain the fey and stumbling mess presented here. It is somehow hung on a perpetually confused Marcello Mastroianni as the titular character, an ineffectual idealist and last scion of some defunct European monarchy Boorman doesn't bother to specify, much as the blighted Notting Hill setting is a cloud cuckoo land one, presumably complacently meant to signify 'everywhere'. He turns his twitcher spyglass to peeping on the poor black ghetto locals instead as he sits in his mansion, surrounded by toadies, and suddenly sprouts a social conscience, which rather goes against the grain of what his untrustworthy entourage, composed tokenistically of a doctor, lawyer, major domo, conniving girlfriend and nanny, wish for him.
There are impressively atrocious original songs by some self-styled poet of the people and laughably pretentious theft, through voiceover babble, of T.S.Eliot's 'He Do the Police in Different Voices', amongst numerous other objects of 'homage'. Presumably it was meant to be as incendiary as 1968's If..., but is somewhat hindered in this by having as little spine or sense of purpose as its ennui-stricken protagonist. Its limp-wristed stab at upsetting the establishment with hippy nihilism also falls short of the same year's spaced-out Zabriskie Point, in which the final demolition scene at least looked cool. Yet, in its high-flown airs, it even fails to attain so-bad-it's-good status.

2/10