When you’re young and your parents forgot to spring for a babysitter, you’d occasionally get dragged to a movie that is of zero interest to you. Tarantino experienced this at some point, presumably, in the late 1960s when his mother and stepfather took him to see Karel Reisz’s “Isadora,” a biopic about the aforementioned artist starring Vanessa Redgrave in the title role. I’ve never seen the movie, but while I adore Reisz’s work as an adult (particularly “The Gambler,” “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” and “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”), I don’t think I would’ve gotten a great deal out of the film. Save for the end.
If you don’t know how Duncan died, here’s how Tarantino described the final scene of Reisz’s film on “Late Night with Seth Meyers”:
“So, the ending is, she’s in the back of a roadster and she’s wearing this long, flowing scarf that’s just hanging down. And– ‘Ha ha ha ha ha!’ They’re driving around. I think she even has a champagne glass in her hand. ‘Ha ha ha!’ And then the scarf gets caught in the wheel of the roadster and [pantomimes choking] strangles her to death.”
