The movies starts off like a comedy, with 9-yr-old Natalie Wood spending 15 minutes pestering the men who come to hook up the family's new television set, but things soon turn somber.
Joan, the middle sister, is extremely jealous of the older sister, Gail, and has the hots for Gail's handsome boyfriend. She flirts openly and outrageously with him every chance she gets, and at Gail's 18th birthday party goes so far as to expose her bare shoulder to him! Jane Wyatt, the girls' mother, says to the father, "Joan is acting horribly. I must speak to her about it," and chastises her daughter about her abhorrent behavior, but if you don't listen carefully you'll think she's discussing the weather or the latest fashions because I never heard anyone get such a calm and polite scolding.
By accident, Joan has found out that Gail was (gasp!) adopted, and in a fit of jealousy and anger over being chastised at the party, blurts it out.
Now you would expect some sort of reaction by Gail -- a slap across Joan's face, an exclamation of "No! It can't be true!", fainting, crying, anger, ANYTHING -- but all we get is a blank stare and then Gail trots off to bed, and the parents just stand there.
Meanwhile Natalie Wood has all but disappeared from the story, and when we finally do get to see her again she is no longer the yakkity funny little pest, but reflective and quietly concerned about her sister's state of mind. Nice, but not true-to-form. Joan no longer envies Gail for her good looks or her boyfriend but respects her and becomes her protector, and once again we get a character who does an unbelievable 180-degree turnaround. And the parents? All they do is tell each other, "It'll be all right. She'll get over it." Gail asks about her birth parents and immediately gets all the information about them, just like that, and within a few days has made arrangements to meet the mother. No legal red tape, no closed files to worry about, no privacy restrictions, no impediments of any kind.
This is real life? I think not, not even in 1950. People have always had emotions, but you'd never know it by Ann Blythe's robot-like portrayal. She suffers silently with the shocking news of her adoption until one night, after an ugly (by her standards) meeting with her natural mother, she stays out late and when she comes home her father asks, "Do you know what your mother has been going through?" and she snaps back, "I just left my mother. She's fine." At which point Daddy slaps the bitc -- I mean, Gail -- in the face and I stood up and yelled, "Bravo! That bitc -- I mean, Gail -- has had that coming for a long time!" In conclusion, it takes too long to get to the main storyline, and once it gets there it goes nowhere, and takes a long time to say absolutely nothing. The characters were one-dimensional, unemotional and ultimately too uppity to make me care anything about them or want to sympathize with their plights.
Joan, the middle sister, is extremely jealous of the older sister, Gail, and has the hots for Gail's handsome boyfriend. She flirts openly and outrageously with him every chance she gets, and at Gail's 18th birthday party goes so far as to expose her bare shoulder to him! Jane Wyatt, the girls' mother, says to the father, "Joan is acting horribly. I must speak to her about it," and chastises her daughter about her abhorrent behavior, but if you don't listen carefully you'll think she's discussing the weather or the latest fashions because I never heard anyone get such a calm and polite scolding.
By accident, Joan has found out that Gail was (gasp!) adopted, and in a fit of jealousy and anger over being chastised at the party, blurts it out.
Now you would expect some sort of reaction by Gail -- a slap across Joan's face, an exclamation of "No! It can't be true!", fainting, crying, anger, ANYTHING -- but all we get is a blank stare and then Gail trots off to bed, and the parents just stand there.
Meanwhile Natalie Wood has all but disappeared from the story, and when we finally do get to see her again she is no longer the yakkity funny little pest, but reflective and quietly concerned about her sister's state of mind. Nice, but not true-to-form. Joan no longer envies Gail for her good looks or her boyfriend but respects her and becomes her protector, and once again we get a character who does an unbelievable 180-degree turnaround. And the parents? All they do is tell each other, "It'll be all right. She'll get over it." Gail asks about her birth parents and immediately gets all the information about them, just like that, and within a few days has made arrangements to meet the mother. No legal red tape, no closed files to worry about, no privacy restrictions, no impediments of any kind.
This is real life? I think not, not even in 1950. People have always had emotions, but you'd never know it by Ann Blythe's robot-like portrayal. She suffers silently with the shocking news of her adoption until one night, after an ugly (by her standards) meeting with her natural mother, she stays out late and when she comes home her father asks, "Do you know what your mother has been going through?" and she snaps back, "I just left my mother. She's fine." At which point Daddy slaps the bitc -- I mean, Gail -- in the face and I stood up and yelled, "Bravo! That bitc -- I mean, Gail -- has had that coming for a long time!" In conclusion, it takes too long to get to the main storyline, and once it gets there it goes nowhere, and takes a long time to say absolutely nothing. The characters were one-dimensional, unemotional and ultimately too uppity to make me care anything about them or want to sympathize with their plights.