D: John Boorman. S: John Boorman, Bill Stair. Story: George Tabori. P: Robert Chartoff, Irwin Winkler. Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Billie Whitelaw, Keefe West, Graham Crowden, Vladek Sheybal, David de Keyser, Calvin Lockhart, Keefe West, Gwen Ffrangcon Davies. DVD dist (Spain): Regia Films.

A film little-seen since its original release, John Boorman’s Leo the Last is a real aberration, seemingly predicated on the desire to make a film with zero commercial prospects. In this it’s not unlike Polanski’s What? (1973), which also remained hard-to-see for many years – and also, coincidentally, stars Marcello Mastroianni (and a lot of tits and bums). While Polanski’s film is an erotic revamp of Alice in Wonderland, Boorman’s Leo the Last is much trickier to pin down. It’s an abstract musical fantasy, punctuated by oddball songs by Fred Myrow, shot with a rigidly-controlled colour palette (black, white and grey) that gives the film an undeniably strange monochrome-in-colour feel. Set in a grim cul-de-sac in a fantasy London, the film takes as its subject the exploitation of black families by slum landlords, with Boorman drawing on his own youthful experience of life in a West Indian community. Mastroianni is the unwitting heir to his slumlord father’s estate, who takes up residence in a posh townhouse at the end of the street, there to observe his neighbours’ lives through the lens of his pocket telescope. Here Boorman refers back to his early career as a documentary filmmaker, peering into the lives of strangers – and, unable to maintain an objective stance, finding himself increasingly drawn into their world…

While Antonioni painted a street bright red for Blow Up (1966), Boorman paints his jet-black: buildings, pavements, tarmac. It’s a film packed with Felliniesque excess (large-breasted middle-aged ladies bounce up and down in a swimming-pool, the underwater cameras eagerly recording the balloon-like deformations of naked flesh; elsewhere, a nauseating food orgy turns into an abstract sex party, whose topless women and gauze veils seem to anticipate the future-chic of Boorman’s Zardoz), absurdist effects (the soundtrack begins like a fractured audio collage, even including comments from an exasperated audience member – “What the hell is this movie about, anyway?!” – and explanatory notes from the director himself) and beautiful visuals – including some kaleidoscopic in-camera effects involving mirrored reflections, a technique recently revived in Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy (2014). In other words, a highly disorientating mixture of arty experimentation and Brechtian satire, which many will find highly indigestible. As an example of the film’s wildly scattershot approach, try this: Mastroianni is welcomed by a cellar-full of his father’s shareholders, all chanting “Saragossa, Saragossa, Saragossa”; later, his shady lieutenant (Vladek Sheybal) relates the story of his own father’s suicide, using a bullet fashioned from a silver strawberry on a sugar-bowl lid. Few viewers will likely grasp that this is an oblique reference to Count Jan Potocki, author of “The Manuscript Found in Saragossa” (1815), whom legend has it took his own life with a silver bullet melted down from a tea-pot. The relevance? God knows. The cast is great – Graham Crowden, Billie Whitelaw, David de Keyser, Calvin Lockhart – but their roles are subordinate to the director’s carnivalesque improvisations. The satire is heavy-handed, and the comic antics quickly cease to amuse. The film bombed on release in 1970, though Boorman did win the Best Director award at Cannes that year – which I’m sure went down well with United Artists, the film’s out-of-pocket backers.

Footnote: Though Leo the Last repelled audiences , it does at least seem to have had some minor influence with at least one of Boorman’s fellow filmmakers. Just as Robin Hardy surely clocked Roddy McDowall’s Ballad of Tam Lin (1970) before shooting The Wicker Man, so Lindsay Anderson adopted Leo’s “musical commentary” approach for his epic O Lucky Man! (1973) – though with far greater success, in every sense.