Contempt (1963)

Contempt is about seduction, but also about falling out of love. Its visuals, and especially its music, are so engrossing that it’s a very hard movie to stop watching once you’ve started.

Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli) is invited by a swaggering American movie producer Jeremiah Prokosch (Jack Palance) to write a new adaptation of the Odyssey for a German director (Fritz Lang, playing himself).

But Prokosch has his eye on Javal’s stunning wife, Camille (Brigitte Bardot), who is quickly losing interest in her husband. Georges Delerue’s “Theme de Camille” is so passionate and engrossing that Martin Scorsese used it in Casino, where it provides a kind of cinematic shorthand for the crumbling marriage of Robert De Niro’s Sam “Ace” Rothstein and his wife, Ginger (Sharon Stone).