Reviews

Fantastically good TV movie shedding light on one of the most fascinating episodes of American history. I saw the flick sitting on a shelf and was suddenly seized with a compulsion to know: "Why did he do it?" Since seeing the flick I've read and read about Arnold and I've concluded that this well-cast, well-acted film is very accurate. Besides, I was impressed by the passionate portrayal of Arnold and the refreshingly human Washington. But the lady who played Peggy stole the show; she did a brilliant job of showing how personal history can become. I don't think Arnold's treason would have happened without Peggy's influence. Wonderful film.

May I enter a minority report? I hate this film as much as Nevil Shute (author of the novel On the Beach) did.

Shute's biggest complaint was the film's distortion of the character of Commander Dwight Towers. In the novel, Towers' "coping mechanism" is an alternative reality: the conviction that "when all this blows over" he was going to return to his wife and family in Connecticut; he even buys them presents to take home. "You may think I'm nuts," he tells Moira, "but that's how I see it." Moira's greatest achievement is to enter into his alternative reality and to promise to visit him in Connecticut. Indeed, to Moira's sorrow, the two do not consummate their relationship; Towers will not, cannot, cheat on his wife. The mercenary Stanley Kramer would have none of this: the film, he decided, needed sex. Gregory Peck, to his credit, tried to argue Kramer out of this distortion, but Kramer wouldn't budge.

Like all Shute's novels, On the Beach is about ordinary people triumphing over an impossible situation. The characters in Shute's story talk of simple pleasures and go on with their lives, planting flowers and beautifying their homes, talking of "the situation" and "when it comes" in careful euphemisms, not in denial but quietly aware that soon and very soon they must make their plans about how they are going to spend the end. My favorite scene is in the furniture store, when Peter Holmes says "Can I pay with a checque?" The clerk answers in the affirmative, and they exchange their documents with dignity, like gentlemen, without bitter recriminations or snide end-of-the-world jokes and with no pathetic attempts to utter profundities. The movie, I fear, betrays the mood of the novel: in the movie, the characters do nothing from start to finish other than moping, moping and moping. This makes the film sentimental, corny and downright mushy. The novel has none of those qualities.

Kramer made the mistake of imagining this story to be about nuclear war, or the aftermath thereof. He's utterly wrong. The story is about the triumph of the human spirit over impossible odds.

The Glass Menagerie is to plays as Beethoven's "fuer Elise" is to music: it's short and it's seemingly easy to present (it has two female and two male roles, and its author is famous), so it often ends up being done by amateurs, and one gets used to not-very-good versions. So a generally well-done performance, such as this one, is refreshing.

To boot, if you're a fan of Katherine Hepburn, Sam Waterston, Michael Moriarty, or Joanna Miles - and what person in his right mind isn't a fan of all four? - then you need to be familiar with this production, which shows you not only the legendary Hepburn in an interestingly off-type role, but also three more of your favorite actors when they were budding.

Not that this production is perfect. Hepburn, as Amanda, dominates the action entirely too much for my taste, at times reducing the other characters to leaves swirling around the tempest she creates; Waterston sometimes alternates weirdly between a detached Hamlet-like cerebrality and raging tantrums worthy of a young Lear. In other words: the production does not well balance the two characters whose opponency is central to the drama. (It might be argued that Amanda is supposed to dominate the action, and that Tom is supposed to be wimpy, but I disagree. I think Tom's frustrated and repressed manhood needs to be portrayed in such a way as to convey a prodigious, if chained down, load of energy. Remember, this is a self-portrayal of the man who became Tennessee Williams!) True, if you concentrate you can catch some of the subtlety for which Waterston later became justly noted. But he is, so to speak, shouted down by Hepburn, who is entirely too much in focus. It is almost as if this production had been planned as a vehicle for her, and the character of Tom had been treated as a prop.

For my money, the real star of this show is Moriarty's masterful portrayal of the Gentleman Caller. Moriarty does not show us the power-tripping, manipulative bastard often associated with this role, but rather a nice guy who found himself in a compromising situation he never sought, and who tried naively to make the best of his ill-starred encounter with Laura, with the result that he bites off more than he can chew, and hurts Laura all the more by not intending it. The performance here really shines; I was very moved by his awkward feelings of guilt when he realizes his error.

This is indeed an awful production, and it has nothing to do with Verne.

The five castaways in Verne's book are Cyrus Smith (the brilliant military engineer--who for some reason or other is called Cyrus Harding in most of the English-language versions), Gideon Spillett (the newspaper reporter), Neb (ex-slave still working for ex-owner Smith, who freed him), Pencroff (a sailor), and Harbert (youngster, son of Pencroff's late captain, for whom Pencroff is acting as guardian). Verne is very good at sketching these guys' personalities and making them come alive for us, and all his careful nuancing is thrown out the window in this production.

Why these female characters? The novel has NO female characters, and it assumes five men can live on a deserted island for three years and never think about women or sex---the subject never comes up. If the producers didn't think that believable, they should have written their own damn story and not pretended to be dramatizing Verne's.

Yes, Captain Nemo does appear in the novel, but he's absolutely nothing like he is in this production.

There's a reformed pirate named Ayrton in the book, but other than that he has nothing in common with the reformed pirate Blake in this version.

My respect for Stewart is a lot less after knowing that he would consent to be in this ridiculous production.

Hard to believe, perhaps, but this film was denounced as immoral from more pulpits than any other film produced prior to the imposition of the bluenose Hayes Code. Yes indeed, priests actually told their flocks that anyone who went to see this film was thereby committing a mortal sin.

I'm not making this up. They had several reasons, as follows:

Item: Jane likes sex. She and Tarzan are shown waking up one morning in their treetop shelter. She stretches sensuously, and with a coquettish look she says "Tarzan, you've been a bad boy!" So they've not only been having sex, they've been having kinky sex! A few years later, under the Hays Code, people (especially women) weren't supposed to be depicted as enjoying sex.

Item: Jane prefers a guileless, if wise and resourceful, savage (Tarzan) to a civilized, respectable nine-to-five man (Holt). When Holt at first wows her with a pretty dress from London, she wavers a bit; when Holt tries to kill Tarzan, and Holt and Jane both believe he's dead, she wavers a lot. But when she realizes her man is very much alive, the attractions of civilization vanish for her. And why not? Tarzan's and Jane's relationship is egalitarian: He lacks the "civilized" insecurity that would compel him to assert himself as "the head of his wife". To boot, he lacks many more "civilized" hangups, for example jealousy. When Holt and his buddy arrive, Tarzan greets them both cordially, knowing perfectly well that Holt is Jane's old flame. When Holt gets her dolled up in a London dress and is slow-dancing with her to a portable phonograph, Tarzan drops out of a tree, and draws his knife. Jealous? Nope. He's merely cautious toward the weird music machine, since he's never seen one before. Once it's explained, he's cool.

Item: Civilized Holt is dirty minded. Savage Tarzan is innocently sexy. As Jane slips into Holt's lamplit tent, Holt gets off on watching her silhouette as she changes into the fancy dress. By contrast, after Tarzan playfully pulls the dress off, kicks her into the swimming hole and dives in after her, there follows the most tastefully erotic nude scene in all cinema: the pair spends five minutes in a lovely water ballet.(The scene was filmed in three versions--clothed, topless and nude--the scene was cut prior to the film's release, but the nude version is restored in the video now available.) And when Jane emerges, and Cheetah the chimp steals her dress just for a tease, Jane makes it clear that her irritation is only because of the proximity of "civilized" men and their hangups. Where is the "universal prurience" so dear to the hearts of seminarians? Nowhere, that's where. Another reason why the hung up regarded this film as sinful.

Item: The notion that man is the crown of creation, and animals are here only for man's use and comfort, takes a severe beating. Holt and his buddy want to be guided to the "elephant graveyard" so they can scoop up the ivory and take it home. They want Tarzan to guide them to said graveyard. You, reader, are thinking "Fat chance!" and you're right. He's shocked. He exclaims "Elephants sleep!" which to him explains everything. Jane explains Tarzan's feelings, which the two "gentlemen" find ridiculous.

Item: Jane, the ex-civilized woman, is far more resourceful than the two civilized men she accompanies. Holt and buddy blow it, and find themselves besieged by hostile tribes and wild animals. It is Jane who maintains her cool. While the boys panic, she takes charge, barks orders at them and passes out the rifles.

Item: Jane's costume is a sort of poncho with nothing underneath. (The original idea was for her to be topless, with foliage artistically blocking off her nipples, which indeed is the case in one brief scene.)

Lastly, several men of the cloth complained because the film was called "Tarzan and His Mate" rather than "Tarzan and His Wife." No comment!

Of course, Tarzan, who has been nursed back to health by his ape friends, comes to the rescue, routs the white hunters, and induces the pack elephants and African bearers to return the ivory they stole to the sacred place whence it came. The End.

So there you have it. An utterly subversive film. Like all the other films about complex and interesting women (see, e.g., Possessed with Rita Hayworth and Raymond Massey) which constituted such a flowing genre in the early 30's and which were brought to such an abrupt end by the adoption of the Hays Code.

The joie de vivre of this film is best expressed by Jane's soprano version of the famous Tarzan yell. A nice touch, which was unfortunately abandoned in future productions.

Let's hear it for artistic freedom, feminist Jane, and sex.

When it became obvious that this series, which obviously aspired to be the next Star Trek (not just a TV show but a cult, complete with movies, action figures, conventions, t-shirts, books, calendars, etc.) had die-hard fans but not enough of them to sustain the phenomenon, I recall that CBS started running a little promotional blurb for it. The blurb was not very well done, but in any case concluded with the remark: "Are you ready for a different kind of passion?"

For good or ill, most people weren't. There's a lesson here, or several. I wish I knew what that message was. But here are some thoughts.

(1) We are told that the audience was heavily female. This is not at all surprising, since it's women who read what is called "romance", which its opponents call "mush": the lovers talking in flowery, quasi-religious language about their relationships; no development or change in the characters; and an absolute lack of humor. You find this sort of thing profound or silly, and in our society it seems the majority find it silly. Statistics suggest that significantly more women than men find it profound. This says something weird about our society, although (I repeat) I don't know exactly WHAT it says. That cheesy popular guru who writes about Mars and Venus appears not to know the half of it.

(2) On the other hand, a significant portion of our population likes "fantasy" (as opposed to "romance" in the narrow sense), as is proved by the popularity of the Lord of the Rings films. This series is just about the only unashamed fantasy (for adults) which TV seems to have produced with a mass audience in mind and without intending satire, a takeoff, or "camp." Which is, I suppose, why the promoters of this series thought they had a chance.

(3) I'm not a fan of what is called "romance" (few men are, as I've pointed out); in fact, the overly solemn Winter's Tale is the only Shakespeare play I don't like. And I don't especially like "fantasy", with a few exceptions. But I found this series strangely watchable, and others of my temperament have said the same. Few of the episodes had a plot worthy of the name, but it was often pleasant to hear Ron Perlman reciting poetry. The dialog had a kind of elegance to it, not at all common in TV, which I admit to enjoying. Sort of like enjoying opera, maybe. And Perlman (who from all accounts did take Beauty and the Beast very seriously) did a wonderful a job of acting, through all that getup.

(4) One fine day, Linda Hamilton decided she wasn't going to spend the rest of her life playing this goody-goody role, trying to breathe life into what she must have begun to see as rather bland and stilted dialog and a relationship which never changed or developed. I suppose it was at this point that the producers made a desperate effort to save the show by altering the whole thing to a dark, moody piece with suggestions of "The Shadow" or the "Dark Knight" side of Batman. And BANG, the last season was a totally different concept, in these terms: (a) there is violence and villainy, the nocturnal creep Gabriel, and in one episode Gabriel's Terminator-style henchman, all of which a lot of the original fans found disturbing; (b) Vincent and Catherine have a baby, which again grated on fans' nerves after they'd been hit over the head for two seasons with how platonic their relationship had been (c) bad symbolism, as when Diana the policewoman announces "This is Catherine Chandler's gun!" before shooting Gabriel in cold blood, as if Catherine had been the type who would have wanted revenge in any case; and so on.

So what is "A different kind of passion"? Well, for one thing, the platonic nature of the Vincent-Catherine relationship, which recalls such images as the knight who prefers to worship his lady chastely, from afar, rather than "defile" her. When women want their horny male companions to leave them alone, they say things like "Let's not ruin our friendship" and "You're making me uncomfortable." Well, maybe men should brood on that a little, and ask why so many female reviewers of this series are saying things like "Vincent is the greatest", "I'd love to have a man like Vincent", etc., and follow that up by asking what Vincent's got that we haven't. I'm serious. (A Don Juan could be defined as a jerk who PRETENDS to be "like Vincent" in order to control women, wouldn't you say?)

The last season, with its overthrow of many of the series' basic assumptions, shows how confused things can get when you wed a concept like Beauty and the Beast (which inherently caters to a niche audience) to TV (which inherently seeks a common denominator in its fans). The irony is that this show still has such a following. Not hard to understand, but ironic, that the fans of this series still hold their conventions, StarTrek style, and still hope for a movie. I wish them well.

And I hope that if someone who does figure out the significance of this series' failed attempt to "catch on" will be kind enough to enter a review at IMDb.

Indeed, maybe there's a good reason why Vincent and Catherine never kissed (leaving aside the last season, which doesn't count). What a drag it would be if the kiss turned him into a handsome prince! He would simply cease to be The Beast and would no longer concern us. Who would want Don Quixote without his delusions, or the Flying Dutchman with no curse on him? ... So here, at the end of my comments, we come at last to the beginning of the subject.

"Beauty and the Beast will be continued"? No kidding.

I have read altogether too many reviews of this film which bash it all to hell because the reviewer doesn't agree with Brook's reading of KING LEAR. To all such folk I would like to say: We Shakespeare fans should positively glory in the fact that every reader (and a fortiori every director) has his or her own interpretation of all the plays. Given Brook's interpretation, the film is wonderful.

This version of Shakespeare's greatest tragedy is not only consistent with itself, which most aren't, it is acted to a hilt. The characters are brilliantly portrayed. The interactions between them appear as the absolute and utter epitome of conflict and love, of the heroic and villainous way people act when confronted with a situation that is calculated to freak a human being out.

My favorite characterization is that of the Fool, who utterly steals the show and who becomes almost a Greek chorus. The way he interacts with Lear suggests a metaphysical mood of "We know exactly what's going on here, don't we?" The understanding between these two is too deep to be expressed in normal language; in the conversation around "The reason why the seven stars are only seven" (which would have struck any of the other characters, except maybe Kent, as a demented sequence of non sequiturs) suggests that Lear knows, at least at that moment, how the story will turn out, and that his attitude is one of "what is't to leave betimes? Let be." The Fool is here a prophet of absurdity, a Dark Age cross between a Marx Brother and Lenny Bruce.

And I challenge anyone to show me any actors who could do Kent and Gloucester better than those who portrayed them in this film. To say nothing of the wonderful job Scofield does with the title role.

Brook's Lear is almost sociopathically unfeeling until disaster begins to overtake him. To be sure, this view of Lear is not mine. But again, Shakespeare's characters are topics inexhaustible, and there is no such thing as a Lear to end all Lears. Whether one agrees with Brook or not, he carries his idiosyncratic reading off brilliantly---just as brilliantly as Laurence Olivier and Ian Holm in their utterly un-Brookish TV versions. I say: Let it ride! Let's have as many defensible and indefensible Lears as possible, and let's have them as utterly contradictory of each other as the 1945 and 1991 film versions of Henry the Fifth are.

By the way, I am a recent convert to this position. Before I saw the light, I was (for example) utterly ticked off at Kenneth Branagh's film of HAMLET, because it portrayed the Prince as having had sex with Ophelia way back when, and because its Fortinbras was an uncultured creep who dissed Hamlet by tearing down his father's monument. Wasn't it obvious that the text utterly contradicts both notions? Yep! But Branagh would have every right to say to me, "The hell with you, go make your own film." And so would Brook to his critics.

See it, friend. I look forward to our friendly argument.

R is too mild a rating for this film. It should have been X.

I would be the first to admit that my distaste for this film has much to do with my distaste for its theology. I simply do not believe that Christ's death should be separated from his life and treated as an end in itself. I am not interested in morbidly and masochistically identifying with the Man of Sorrows; to my thinking that is bad Christianity. I am interested in applying Christ's ethical and spiritual teachings, and I believe that Christians should be more interested in his life than in his death.

Given my assumptions (for which I make no apologies), the violence in this film is tasteless and gratuitous to the point of obscenity. Even if we leave aside my assumptions about the significance of Christ, a movie about someone being tortured to death can be a lot more effective if his suffering is tastefully indicated rather than graphically depicted.

This film sends a powerful ideological message of entirely the wrong kind. I have nothing against Roman Catholics, or against people of any other religion, but it is important to note that Gibson, like his dad (against whom I likewise have nothing personal), is what is called a "Traditionalist" Catholic. In other words, he rejects Vatican II and its humane reforms, which have done so much to clear out the superstition, intolerance and anti-semitism which had so insidiously crept into the Church over the past centuries. To the "Traditionalists", the work of John XXIII is one of the worst things that ever happened.

To me, such a viewpoint seems inane. Surely Jews are perfectly justified in objecting to the insidious attitude toward their people which this film conveys, attitudes which the Church at large has long since rejected.

In addition, the film indulges in heavy-handed symbolism that would make it a mediocre work of art no matter what the subject matter. The way in which the action is made to stop periodically, so that the camera can dwell lovingly on an overblown symbol, insults the viewer's intelligence.

As if this were not enough, the film is unskillfully made. To give only one example, Gibson's insistence on translating the dialog into Latin and Aramaic does not at all impart authenticity; it is pretentious, gets in the way of such a story as Gibson manages to tell, and is done sloppily and inaccurately. For example, the Latin spoken in the film is given the ecclesiastical (Italianate) pronunciation, not the classical pronunciation that would have been heard during the period depicted. As every high school Latin student knows, the consonant V in ancient Latin was pronounced like our W, G always hard as in GO, and the diphthongs AE and OE like "eye" and "oy". Just as foolishly, there is no Greek spoken in the film, and the Greek inscription on the Cross is missing, though the Aramaic and Latin inscriptions are there, while Pilate's conversations with the local crowd and with the Christ are in Aramaic and Latin respectively, rather than in the Greek which would in fact have been the normal means of communication between Romans and their Judaean and Galilean subjects.

Did Gibson's budget run out before he could retain a Greek scholar, or a Latin scholar who could advise him on the correct pronunciation? If so, it is odd indeed, since the latter is familiar to every first-semester student of classical Latin. Considering that the Gospels tell us there were three inscriptions on the Cross (in "Hebrew"--i.e. Aramaic--as well as Latin and Greek), the omission of one of the three languages makes hash of the film's pretensions to authenticity. So, of course, do the anachronistic sounds of its Latin.

This is not mere nit-picking, since Gibson clearly intended to create the impression that his film was historically as well as biblically accurate. This is emphatically not the case. Pilate and the crowd of locals certainly didn't have their exchange in Aramaic, nor did Pilate and Jesus converse in Latin. It is beyond belief that Pilate was fluent in Aramaic, and he would have been astonished to hear a Galilean peasant speaking Latin. As we know, both conversations would have been in Greek.

Gibson's decision as to which gratuitous, disgusting details of the torture and humiliation of Christ to include and which to omit was obviously capricious. For example, he allowed Christ to retain his loincloth during his torture and execution. But actually, Romans stripped their victims naked; this final humiliation was integral to the sadistic nature of the sentence. If you really want to be educated about gruesome Roman tortures, read A Doctor at Calvary by Pierre Barbet.

The only positive note on which I can conclude this review is that the opening scene in Gethsemane was gently and elegantly done, in absolute contrast to the remainder of the film. This opening scene showed that Gibson can be a director of great sensitivity, and it is a pity that the film does not continue to show as much.

By the way, do you know that Mel Gibson is also a Flat Earther? I'm not making this up. He believes the earth is flat.

Save your money. This film is abominable.

In writing Twelfth Night (and the same goes for many other of his romantic comedies), Shakespeare showed that he was not only a genius at dark tragedy but also at light comedy. I saw a junior college production of this play which did live up to Shakespeare's intentions, which was in fact so funny I was falling off my chair.

Unfortunately, director Nunn will not allow a hilarious slapstick comedy to just be a hilarious slapstick comedy. Apparently he succumbed to the notion that everything Shakespearean has somehow to seem profound, which in this case results in an attempt to transfer this light, sparkling comedy, full of deliberately overdrawn characters and silly lines and pratfalls, into a brooding tragedy in which pompous ass Malvolio acts as if he were, or imagined himself to be, Hamlet caught in the wrong play, while clown Feste is misanthropic to the point of sadism. There is no suggestion of comic timing anywhere in this film!

It appears that once Nunn decided to insist on a modern-dress version, he adopted as his mentor the let's-portray-the-messed-up-dysfunctional-household school. This is stupid. A better mentor would have been a closer modern equivalent of what Shakespeare was doing in this play. Something like I Love Lucy or Amos 'n' Andy or The Honeymooners, in other words.

One thing that entirely puzzles me is: why the devil didn't Nunn exploit the particular advantages of the cinema in depicting this gender-bender story of a girl impersonating a look-alike boy? Why in sam hill didn't Nunn have a male actor who is skilled at female impersonation, or an actress skilled at impersonating males, play both roles on a split screen? (See, for the sort of impersonation I refer to, Vanessa Redgrave as the trans-sexual tennis player in Second Serve.) In other words: Why transform a stage play into a film at all, if you're not going to put the advantages of the cinema, as opposed to those of the stage, to work? Nunn's treatment of this play is not only a mangled interpretation, it's unimaginative.

Ben Kingsley is the only performer who does very much with his part, and what he does he does very well. His acting creates a very interesting character, and his interpretation of Feste is certainly consistent, but it receives no support whatsoever from the text.

It is an irritation to read reviews of films about the life of Christ, whether on IMDb or anywhere else: most of the reviewers are ignoring everything distinctive about the film, focusing on an opportunity to deliver clever put-downs of "biblical extravaganzas." Or they're getting this film mixed up in their minds with other films on the same theme (e.g., one IMDb reviewer compliments the film for never showing Christ's face, showing that he has it confused with Ben Hur). A few realize the merits of Day of Triumph: its take on Judas is a very interesting one indeed, and the parts of Judas, Nicator and Zadok are not only brilliantly acted but brilliantly written. This film's Pontius Pilate is rather interesting too, in fact this is the second-best Pilate I have seen (after Telly Savalas in The Greatest Story Ever Told); he actually talks and acts like the racist colonial administrator Pilate was: "Sabbaths! Passovers! These Jews waste more time on one god than we do on a hundred!", he exclaims after being told that the Jewish priests want to talk to him but refuse to pollute themselves by entering a pagan's house during a holy time, so he has to come to the door to see them instead!). Exactly as in the case of Greatest Story Ever Told, there are some deftly dramatic and original touches; and also as in that case, there are loads of clichés to excite the derisive hoots of folk who are all set up to trash a "biblical spectacular". Yes, I too found the Jesus of this film rather bland and conventional, but (despite some of the comments posted on this site) Judas was certainly not "melodramatic". Indeed, I wish we could have a film combining this Judas with Max von Sydow's earthy Jesus. Altogother, an uneven film--but then, villains are always easier to make interesting than heroes are.

A slightly amusing comedy. Slightly. Or as another reviewer on this site put it: forgettable, if in some respects funny. Sort of. And all the more forgettable in that it features some highly talented actors and one genius singer. All of whose performances are mediocre because the play itself is so mediocre. A film which would by now be entirely forgotten if it had not, by some evil miracle, won a Best Actor Oscar. And thereby hangs a tale, because that Oscar will be remembered for eternity as by far the most undeserved Oscar ever awarded.

The other nominees for Best Actor were Rod Steiger in The Pawnbroker, Richard Burton in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, Laurence Olivier in Othello, and Oscar Werner in Ship of Fools. I challenge anyone of sound mind to see any of those films and then disagree that all four were stellar performances by transcendently talented actors. (Even if I believe, as I do, that Olivier's Othello was an indefensible interpretation of what Shakespeare wrote, it was a hell of a job of acting.) If you imagine that Lee Marvin's performance in Cat Ballou touches any of its four competitors with a ten-foot pole, you could imagine anything.

True, film producers can be stupid. They can come up with sticks like Heaven's Gate, Dune, and the Branagh Frankenstein, and promote them as classics for the ages. They can fail to cast Angela Lansbury as the title character in Mame, or Jason Robards as Hickey in The Iceman Cometh, or Julie Andrews in My Fair Lady, even when each is available to reprise the stage role. They can conceive the idiotic idea of metamorphosing great TV series into so-so films by kidding themselves that someone other than David Janssen or Phil Silvers or Peter Graves(respectively) can play Richard Kimble or Sergeant Bilko or Phelps. They can and did do all these things. Why, one year they even nominated the title number from What's New Pussycat for Best Song!

But the nominating committee that put this perfectly average (if that) B-grade film in the running with five such classics deserves the fate of Ixion. You can quote me.

First of all, Heinrich Harrer was a Nazi.

Secondly, Harrer was in Tibet in the first place because he was fleeing from his responsibilities to his family. The man was a complete and total opportunist.

Thirdly, the cutesy little Dalai Lama spouting kitsch philosophy like some Tibetan Kahlil Gibran is absolutely untrue to life. There is no record whatsoever of the little Dalai preaching generalities to Harrer.

Fourthly, all observers (including the Dalai Lama himself--see his autobiography) agree that the arriving Chinese were not at all the studiously rude boors depicted in the film, ordering Tibetans around with scowls on their faces and going out of their way to disrespect Tibetan customs. Even Hitler would have been polite on such an occasion, if only for the sake of his dignity.

Fifthly, the Chinese did NOT make a diplomatic visit to Lhasa prior to the 1951 invasion, as depicted in this ridiculous film, and if they had done so, they certainly wouldn't have been stupid enough to trust the Tibetans to build them an airplane landing field, since the Tibetans had no experience with aviation. Nor, in all probability, would a Chinese plane have been lucky enough to have landed safely on a field constructed by Tibetans. Nor would the Chinese, having made it there by some miracle, have departed after a five-minute conference with their Tibetan opposite numbers.

Sixthly, Brad Pitt gives the impression that this is his first attempt at acting. He's pathetic.

The cause of Tibetan autonomy is not served by a film which creates a fantasy and invites viewers to confuse it with historical reality.

This is a pretty film to look at, but worthless as drama or as a depiction of history.

The problem with most productions of this play is that they concentrate so much on one aspect---the love-talk between the two principals---that they seriously distort what the tragedy is really about. The play's not just about hearts and flowers, it's also about the senselessness of wars and feuds for the sake of wars and feuds, pride, power-hunger, and the self-perpetuating nature of these evil forces and how they destroy everything good and beautiful that comes in the way. Now THAT'S a tragedy which the 20th and 21st centuries should be able to relate to, and it gives ROMEO AND JULIET a contemporary relevance which this film brought out beautifully.

Far too much is made of the fact that the director gave the play a modern setting. Shakespeare modernized his settings, and there's no reason we can't do the same: Shakespeare gives HAMLET, for example, an Elizabethan setting even though the original Hamlet is supposed to have lived in pre-Viking and pagan times. Modern settings are entirely appropriate to Shakespeare.

I think Danes and DiCaprio are perfectly cast, and I think the Bard would approve. Romeo is suitably impulsive, unintellectual but very plain and honest about his love, just the right combination of punky and sensitive, while Juliet is---well, Juliet. This film has by far the best Tybalt I've ever seen, while Father Laurence all but steals the show. The cast is uniformly fine (except Romeo's sidekick Mercutio wasn't there at all; Zeferelli did much better to make him into an aging stud).

Nothing's perfect. I must admit I don't see the point of moving Juliet's famous balcony scene into a swimming pool, especially since Luhrman's device of the night watchman with his searchlight could have been exploited to great effect. (At the same time, the way Romeo breathes down Juliet's neck as he says "Wilt thou then leave me so unsatisfied?", and her wary, just-a-minute,-what's-going-on-here response, "What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?", a.k.a. "Is this for real or are you just horny?", and the way in which her riposte seems to make him stumble mentally and revise his approach,was one of the film's best moments; I don't think this rather thoughtful touch could have executed by way of the traditional staging). Also, I wish the film hadn't cut the reconciliation between the Hatfield and McCoy patriarchs, with its attendant "What a lousy waste!" mood. Oddly, Zefirelli cut those few lines also. Go figure.

No one film can do justice to a Shakespearean tragedy, of course. Buffs should see Zefirelli's film in tandem with this one, just as they should compare and contrast Branagh's and Olivier's HENRY V.

This is by far the most literate, the most moving, and the most cinematically sophisticated film Disney has ever made. Those of the reviewers at this (IMDb) site who dismiss it as a kiddie movie, or who sneer at the special effects ("time has not been kind" to this film, one of them says; according to another, "the thrill is gone") seem simply prejudiced, rather like those who automatically deride any film that features Charlton Heston or deals with a biblical theme. It is indeed quite amazing that any special effects filmed in 1954 would continue to stack up so well. (I suppose Lucas or Spielberg could improve on the giant squid today, but so what?)

The acting is almost uniformily superb, although I seem to be in the minority in my opinion that Kirk Douglas' yo-ho-ho cliché sailor is rather wooden. (v. following paragraph) James Mason portrays Captain Nemo as a tragic hero in the classic sense, neither "byronic" nor a "mad scientist": a man so far ahead of his time that the world can only see his invention as a monster to be hunted with harpoons---and yet he is so tragically wounded by the whose malice and envy of lesser men that he has indeed become, in some ways, a monster. Paul Lucas is equally heartrending as Professor Arronax, the good-hearted bourgeois academician who truly believes that anyone can be made to "see reason" and become, in effect, a nice guy. Between these huge opposites are the robust common man of action, Ned Land ("Nemo's cracked", "I want to escape!"), the Professor's worry-wart servant, Conseil (Peter Lorre), and Nemo's equally devoted, spookily laconic First Mate (Robert J. Wilkes).

(I may as well say at the outset that to my mind the characterization of Ned Land, along with Kirk Douglas' stiff and utterly unnuanced portrayal, remains the major fault of the film. I would have liked to have seen an attempt at capturing Verne's taciturn Ned, half-mad from the tension between his enforced submarine claustrophobia and his romantic longing to once again swab a deck, reef a sail, or entrust himself to winds and currents; indeed, according to the novel's Aronnax, Ned's recitals of his adventures are worthy of a "Homer of the North". Most unfortunately, the wisecracking, womanizing Ned of the film seems to reflect Douglas' momentary screen persona more than Verne's character, since it bears so little resemblance to the latter. Also, the fact that Douglas out-bills Mason in credits and advertisements is as weird as the ubiquitous poster art in which Douglas' head is two sizes larger than Mason's.)

Leaving aside my pet peeve (i.e., Douglas), there are many Shakespearean qualities here in addition to the tragedy of Nemo. For one thing, much of the action takes place inside the characters' heads: First Arronax, Conseil and Land analyze Nemo, assaying a most dangerous attempt to ferret out his motivations. Then Nemo analyzes Aronnax who, almost in retaliation, develops his own analysis of Nemo. Then Conseil and Land analyze Aronnax analyzing Nemo. Meanwhile, the claustrophobia of the submarine boat acts on their minds like an amphetamine drug, causing the latter to function more and more frantically for good or ill.

Also like Shakespeare, the dialog (and it is wonderful dialog, grave but also lively with repartee and wordplay--just see the digest of quotes preceding these reviews!) alternates with comic relief and action scenes. As to the former, worry-wart Conseil is extremely funny, one of my favorite lines being his dismissal of Ned's message-in-a-bottle idea: "That went out with Robinson Crusoe! This is the nineteenth century!" And action scenes, as the famous fight with the giant squid, serve the same purpose as the ghosts, sword fights, etc. that the Bard provided for the groundlings---so that it is indeed "family entertainment"; people of all ages can watch this film with pleasure.

Masterfully, the film contains almost precisely the necessary updating to make the story meaningful to modern audiences. The common notion that Verne foresaw atomic power is certainly apocryphal; the Vulcania scenes are adapted from Verne's novel Facing the Flag, even if his super-nitroglycerine "Fulminator" is replaced here by nuclear fission. Nonetheless, Verne's speculations on power do make a good symbolic match with the notion of atomic energy, birthing a very credible meditation on the nineteenth century in the light of its successor. The somber and frighteningly beautiful finale causes us to wonder just at what point before 1900 this or that fateful corner was turned.

On hearing that yet another film version of 1984 was in the works, and that the role of O'Brien was to be played by Richard Burton, I felt quite sure that this film would be an atrocity. Almost everybody who has tried his hand at dramatizing 1984 has been content with skimming the surface: a horrific world of the future where people are watched by "telescreens", public opinion is manipulated by the ultimate Goebellish "big lie", sexual passion is illegal, and so on. Yes, yes, yes, I've said to myself every time I see one of these superficial interpretations of this great work of literature, it's about all these things but a hell of a lot more (see the superb review on this page by Room102 from Israel, who says it better than I could).

This version is true to the spirit of Orwell's novel in a way I could never have predicted. John Hurt was born to play Winston Smith, and the rest of the cast are just as superbly fitted to their parts. Burton, whom I would have expected to ham and orate in the role of a torturer, shows a subtlety here that tops any and all of his other performances. One can get a very good picture here of why Winston can't stand the ever-chattering Parsons, but is fascinated by his other friend the Newspeak lexicographer and Ingsoc ideologue: the film establishes it in a few deft strokes.

Only Suzanna Hamilton (as Julia) disappointed me, for two reasons: (1)She showed little of the amoral adventuress of the novel, the almost sociopathically impulsive and utterly what-the-hellish aniheroine who was such an effective foil to the ever-brooding, ever-theorizing Winston, in other words she pretty much wasn't there except physically; and (2) speaking of physically, the two or three nude scenes were totally gratuitous and utterly distracting from the story. Never mind how physically attractive she is (very!). How many men, I wonder, checked out the video just so they could look at her crotch? The makers of this film should have known better than to cheapen the film in this way.

There are just a few things about the film that bug me, and I'll bet they bug other Orwell readers too. (1)There is no real attempt to deal with what or who Big Brother is; in this film, BB seems to not to be an embodiment of a neatly packaged and simplistic political philosophy but rather just a face on a screen. The whole point of BB in the novel is that he is given a personality, even if (as is almost certain) he does not really exist as a person. This could have been even eerier in a film than in a novel, if done rightly. A great disappointment and a major chance missed. (2) Ditto for Goldstein. (3)The philosophy of Ingsoc, and its origin in the process of "freezing history" at the point where the rulers realized that they were in power just for power and had no ideology---this is, in the novel, the whole point of "Goldstein's book", but it's skipped in the film. (4) Newspeak wasn't explained. O.K., you can skip that in a film, but then why is O'Brien depicted talking in Newspeak, and why are we left in the dark as to what the hell he's doing?

But altogether, a fine film.

I usually try to avoid overstating my case, but this is probably the worst film ever made. The true story of Ishi is a story of a life well lived and a sensitive ambassador of one culture to another. But this film is so full of falsehoods about Ishi, and clichés about Native Americans, that it should probably be banned. And I have never said that before about any work of art or literature.

Until his encounter with the Saltu (us), Ishi was merely a good citizen (so to speak) of his harassed and harried nation, simply doing what he was supposed and expected to do as a Yana man. Period. After that encounter, he took up his destiny as a bridge between two utterly different cultures and fulfilled it with dignity and competence. He did NOT at any time freak out and run around shouting "No! No!"---what baloney! Almost everyone who knew him commented on the low-keyed, self-controlled manner in which he conducted himself in his strange surroundings. He never lost his cool. Nor did he babble ridiculous Hollywood-Indian clichés about "our Mother Earth", etc., as appears in the film. The most insulting lie in the film is the sequence in which Pope (who was, by the way, certainly not the clownish idiot portrayed here) brings in a prostitute to service Ishi. Actually, Ishi had much too great a sense of dignity to indulge in any such thing, and was always very cool and formal in the presence of women, as his culture demanded.

The portrayal of Kroeber is almost as offensive. The film makes him into a stereotype of the emotionally starved anthropologist who regards Indians coldly as mere objects of study, and allows him to really respect Ishi only after the latter is dead. Again, nonsense. Kroeber did use the kind of language that was common in his day: he wrote that when Ishi made his first acquaintance with Saltu society "he was absolutely ignorant" (of Saltu ways, that is), and used unfortunate expressions like "wild Indian." But everybody knew what he meant. He and Ishi were friends, and Kroeber made it clear that knowing Ishi was one of the great experiences of his life---Ishi, he made clear, not as an object of study but as a warm, generous and gracious human being. There is no evidence that Kroeber's wife Henrietta looked down her nose at Ishi or that she was the racist snob depicted in the film. In fact, as Kroeber's second wife Theodora recorded in her memoirs, Ishi's sensitivity and compassion helped Kroeber greatly in dealing with Henrietta's death. I guess the makers of this film avoided depicting that because it would have interfered with their disorted portrayal of Kroeber as an insensitive lout. (Speaking of Theodora, she wrote two very readable and informative accounts of the life of Ishi, whom she had never met, consulting extensively with her husband. And by the way, these two were the parents of the fantasy writer Ursula K. LeGuinn.)

If only this film had been based on Theodora's writing! This film, I say again, is an atrocity. It makes me so angry that I feel like committing mayhem.

The minute this film came out, there were a rash of snide reviews such as are customary whenever a big-screen film about the life of Christ is produced. There was an especially snide one in Time magazine--or was it Newsweek--which captioned a photo "It isn't" (get it?) and made all kinds of errors about alleged historical and biblical errors in the film, which only showed the ignorance of the reviewer. So avoiding the snide, I must say that this film has very good and very bad points.

Von Sydow is a wonderfully human Christ. The high point of his acting (and of the directing) is the scene of the resurrection of Lazarus, which makes a real drama out of an incident that most such films treat so tritely. You can tell that Jesus himself is scared to death by the implications of what he is about to do, and that Mary and Martha are wondering if he's stark raving crazy to even attempt it. The freaked-out silence of the crowd is awesome. There are several such moments and several such excellent casting choices: particularly fine is Herod (Jose Ferrer) ordering the massacre of the innocents: He happens to remember the line about Rachel weeping for her children and says "Let this be the fulfillment of the prophecy." The soldier who takes the command turns to ice on hearing such inhumanity. And let's see... why does everybody think Heston was a bad choice as John the Baptist?? My god, he was made for the part! As was Sal Mineo as a self-pitying lame man who obviously never even tried to walk till Jesus pointed a finger at him and gave him a dirty look. And Telly Savalas positively exudes Roman arrogance as Pilate---not the wishy-washy bureaucrat of most Christ films, but the cold-blooded imperial thug portrayed in the histories of Josephus. And oh yes: Dig the Temptation in the Wilderness scene; it's incomparable.

The biggest negative is the gratuitous and distracting use of several superstars in cameo: Shelly Winters and Pat Boone, for example, and worst of all John Wayne who totally ruins an otherwise beautiful moment in which the death of Jesus on the Cross is juxtaposed in jump cuts with the suicide of Judas. Thanks to Wayne's inept "trully this man is the son of gawd!", a moment which should have us brooding over a fine theological problem (which one of these two is really and truly the scapegoat who's getting the rest of humanity off the hook?), all we can do is laugh at this perfectly ludicrous example of miscasting. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

Also stupid: some of the scenes that are filmed as set pieces, rather like moving dioramas. I don't see why the film moves back and forth from this stylized approach to the realism of other scenes.

Parts of this film are better than the whole, but it's worth seeing. Perhaps it does try to do a bit too much.

I have nothing against fun and fantasy. But this piece has so little to do with Verne's story that I wonder why the writers didn't just dispense with their token analogies to it and create new characters!

Yes, Caine's performance is "intense", but also utterly meaningless: his Nemo has none of the subtlety, the pensiveness, the drivenness of James Mason's; the two can no more be compared than Kevin Costner's Robin Hood can be compared to Errol Flynn's, or Marlon Brando's performance as Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty to Charles Laughton's. The ballyhooed "intensity" of Caine's portrayal resolves itself into very little more than hypermanic nuttiness. (Maybe Caine was trying so hard to avoid being compared to Mason that he couldn't figure any other way to do the role than to toss all subtlety overboard?)

The character of Attucks, of course, is the "man of action" that the plot needs, thus totally eclipsing Ned Land and making the latter's presence gratuitous. So if the writers were so obsessed with political correctness that they needed to add a nonwhite character, why in the world not just make Ned himself nonwhite?

And haven't we had enough of upstarts trying to improve on Verne by adding a love interest? Apparently not: this version gives Nemo a daughter, who sails with him on the Nautilus and with whom Aronnax (here depicted as a young sexpot) has an affair.

Of course, the fact that this Nautilus has a multi-ethnic crew (an idea hinted at, but not developed by, Verne himself) is a nice touch, but one that doesn't take us very far because this version tells us so little about Nemo's and the crew's background. In conclusion, a lot of fine acting talent is wasted on this philosophically confused piece of work.

Verne has suffered a bewildering number of bad adaptations, but this is ridiculous.