"Film is a dog: the head is commerce, the tail is art. And only rarely does the tail wag the dog."
~ Joseph Losey

Stanley Baker, a staunch socialist, made several notable British films with American Blacklist exiles Cy Enfield and Joseph Losey and both directors benefited from his brusque, working-class charm. Eva, his third project for Losey, teams him up French Nouvelle Vague sensation Jeanne Moreau to great effect but it is La Moreau who walks away with the chocolates, owning the screen as the haughty, mysterious call girl character who mesmerizes and humiliates Baker’s brusque writer.

Tyvian Jones (Stanley Baker) is a successful Welsh author and a fraud, living it up in Europe on the back of a book his dead brother secretly wrote but was published under Tyvian’s name. After being feted by the beautiful people Tyvian goes to his Venice home to discover a couple had broken in, seeking shelter from a storm. The woman Eva (Jeanne Moreau) has made herself at home and is put out by Tyvian’s surly attitude to the home invasion. The hapless Tyvian becomes besotted by ‘Eve’ and puts aside his pursuit and marriage to the steady Francesca (Virna Lisi) to continue his forlorn longings for the beguiling chimera that Eva represents. The film fairly screams ‘no happy endings here.’

Losey came to the project after a bumpy decade, starting as a promising newcomer in Hollywood before beginning again in exile after being blacklisted for his communist affiliations. He scratched around Britain on projects of various worth before finding a sympathetic ally in the working class Stanley Baker. Baker had worked his way to the top of the heap the hard way, but by the early 60s was one of the biggest stars in British cinema and was coming off the box office hit Guns of Navarone when he tapped Losey to direct. Baker's macho appearance belied a sensitive, thinking actor and his tone and pitch here is spot on, holding up his end at least against the luminous Moreau.

The film opens with a Bible quote, ‘And the man and the woman were naked together, and were unashamed,’ visually accompanied by an image of Adam and Eve. This 'Eve' is definitely unashamed, as she metaphorically picks every apple from the forbidden street, bakes them into a poisonous pie and serves them to eager, salivating men swooning at her feet. One wonders what women at the time made of her character in a pre-Women’s Lib era, where Second Wave Feminism was just beginning and before widespread access to the revolutionary contraceptive film was even a thing. The notion of a woman in charge of her own sexuality and using it to wield power over men was certainly a shocking idea at the time and not one Losey could have explored in American cinema at least to the extent he could here.

This was a notion Losey himself agreed with, counting his ‘blessing in disguise’ exile as the factor that led him to blossom as an auteur in a way Hollywood would not have allowed. After several British ‘filler’ films he’d worked his way up to working not only with one of the biggest British stars of the day, but with a woman at the peak of her fame and Nouvelle Vague glory, and Eva was the film she made after the runaway worldwide hit Jules et Jim, which would further seal her reputation as one of the finest actresses of her generation. Prior to Truffaut’s masterpiece she’d starred in La Notte for Antonioni and had a self-referential part in Godard’s Un Femme Est Une Femme, so Losey was working in rarified air. Eva served as a link piece from fine, solid jobs of work like The Criminal and Blind Date to a career as an auteur in serious art cinema that would see Losey produce an astonishing run of quality films for over a decade, including The Servant, King and Country, Accident, The Go-Between, Mr. Klein et al.

Moreau stated that she worked hard with Losey to give Eva an interior life and that she and the director knew everything about the character prior to filming – ‘Losey gave me total freedom. We worked long before we started shooting. We knew where this woman came from, we knew where she was born, and what happened to her. With a great director like Losey, you don't speak when you shoot. We created Eve together.’ 
Losey commented, ‘I wanted to make her a woman who said virtually nothing but whom one sensed through the way she dressed, where she lived, what she had round her house, how she behaved privately, what she read, where she went when she was alone, etc.’
It was this approach that allowed Moreau to inhabit the part, and paid off in extended takes where we observe ‘Eve’ in the ‘garden’ - curious, playful and unguarded - like a cat feeling out its space and calculating the angles of advantage or when and where it might be fed. 

If Eva feels like a companion piece to Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte and L’Eclisse, then it is in no small measure due to Losey using Antonioni’s regular cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo - who sadly was to die young at 45 some four years later. The film is also enriched by a superb score from Michel Legrand, then at the beginning of a stellar career that would see him win 3 Oscars for his work. Virna Lisi is lovely as the much put upon wife struggling with Tyvian's obsessive interest in Eva and James Villiers and Giorgio Albertazzi are fine support. 

The only sour note in the release of the film was Losey’s experience with the Hakim brothers who produced the movie. Losey provided an initial cut that was two and a half hours long and the producers ended up cutting nearly an hour out of it and Losey never forgave them. Still, the 104 minute Eva is a masterpiece of sexual obsession and gender power plays and plenty of Losey is left to make us ponder just what could be missing that is essential? Baker is excellent as the emasculated alpha, revealed to be a fraud in his professional and personal life as Moreau glides along, all ennui and sangfroid but with Baker’s nuts in a vice, to an ending that is truly devastating as it contrasts his ugly ruin and humiliation with the eternal beauty that is Venice. Joseph Losey took the opportunity to elevate his artistry and find his European voice with Eva, and it rightly is considered one of the key films of a seminal era.