There are reasons why movies get lost. I saw this last night at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Science was on display in the craft which restored the film. Art was nowhere present. The movie is dreadful. Trophy-wife Gloria and single Rudy spend most of it nearly kissing and then snapping their necks to face forward and look frustrated. In the last segment, her fat, rich, old, ugly husband manfully recognizes that youth must call to youth and deliberately walks into an Arab raider's bullet. I am not making that up. The audience, which had prior to the showing sincerely applauded the efforts of the restorers, giggled helplessly throughout the film. Gloria wears one stunning outfit, a Persian lamb (I think) coat with karakul (I think) cuffs and collar bigger than most emerging nations. But that's it for entertainment value. Even by the standards of the time, the plot is clunkily contrived and glacially slow-moving, and the acting is minimal (not the actors' fault--nobody actually has a character to play), and the whole project is so detached from any human reality that it approaches science-fiction rather than romance.
Review of Beyond the Rocks
