Let It Come Down: The Life Of Paul Bowles


Release Information: November 30, 1999; Toronto; Library and Archives Canada - Canadian Feature Film Database (LAC); November 30, 1999; Toronto; Library and Archives Canada - Canadian Feature Film Database (LAC); November 30, 1999; Toronto (Bloor); Library and Archives Canada - Canadian Feature Film Database (LAC); November 30, 1999; Toronto (Bloor); Library and Archives Canada - Canadian Feature Film Database (LAC); February 12, 1999; Toronto; Library and Archives Canada - Canadian Feature Film Database (LAC); February 12, 1999; Toronto; Library and Archives Canada - Canadian Feature Film Database (LAC); February 12, 1999; Toronto (Bloor); Library and Archives Canada - Canadian Feature Film Database (LAC); February 12, 1999; Toronto (Bloor); Library and Archives Canada - Canadian Feature Film Database (LAC)

Budget: Actual cost: $300,000; Budget: $300,000

Production Details


Executive Producer: Daniel Iron; Daniel Iron; Daniel Iron; Daniel Iron; Daniel Iron

73 minutes, 1996

Paul Bowles, who has lived in Tangier, Morocco, for over fifty years, is the quintessential iconoclast. He left the United States for good in the 1940s after building an illustrious career as a composer, rejected the heroic identity requisite to expatriate American writers and buried himself in the culture of North Africa. A writer’s writer, his associations span the elite cultural circles of this century. At twenty, he was an intimate of Gertrude Stein and Aaron Copeland; at thirty the peer of Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal; at forty, literary godfather to Beat writers William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. His unorthodox marriage to writer Jane Bowles - both were gay and had significant relationships with others throughout their marriage - is legendary. Together they formed the magnet which drew an extraordinary group of writers and artists to the exotic freedoms of Morocco before independence.
In this film biography the notoriously laconic and reclusive Bowles finally speaks out on the subjects he has remained silent about over the years. Lying in bed at his home in Tangier and smoking kif with an elegant black cigarette holder, he reflects on his life, his work, Jane, love and his friends with unprecedented candour. Here 87 years old, his tone is almost omniscient, as though he is surveying both life and death from some lofty interim vantage point. The film is built around this self-revealing monologue, with various voices breaking in to comment, dispute and clarify. Chief among these is William Burroughs who acts as a sort of commentator on Bowles’ version of his life.

Source: Library and Archives Canada - Canadian Feature Film Database (LAC)

Contributed Notes

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Let It Come Down: The Life Of Paul Bowles

Production Details

Contributed Notes