For someone who's widely regarded as one of the most innovative and important British directors of the 1970s, Nicolas Roeg's output is shockingly underrepresented on DVD—as far as I can tell, almost everything he did after 1980's Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession (which was released by Criterion) is either out of print or was never released on DVD. (Granted, this part of Roeg's career is marked more by oddities and misfires like Cold Heaven and Track 29 than by classics like Walkabout and The Man Who Fell to Earth, but still! That's a lot of movies to have essentially vanished from the market.) I'm not sure you can even easily find The Witches, the Roald Dahl adaptation that was his last big box-office hit, on home video anymore.The exception is 1985's Insignificance, which was released by Criterion last month. It's a flawed film with a distracting 1980s score and an arguably even more distracting central performance by Theresa Russell, but the central premise—what if Marilyn Monroe spent a night with Albert Einstein?—is compelling enough to survive the occasional awkward patches. Plus, there are at least two sequences in the film that I suspect even its detractors will have to admit are pretty unforgettable: Marilyn explaining the Theory of Relativity to Einstein with the aid of some toy trucks, a helium-filled balloon, a flashlight, and a bucket of plastic army men; and a climactic fantasy sequence in which Einstein imagines a nuclear bomb going off in his hotel room, with Marilyn Monroe at the central of the explosion.
I made Insignificance the subject of my DVD Hidden Gem recommendation this week on CBC Radio, and you can listen to the segment by clicking here. Enjoy!
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