Monsoon

[or woman] who has seen this movie and [the hard part] remembers it. I refer to it as the "least discussed movie in th IMDB."

Anyway, I wouldn't remember it except that at the time, I thought it was the strangest pic I'd seen. The plot was straight TV fare, but the characters seemed to all be in a different movie. They seemed to only cooperate where it was necessary to move the plot along. When it showed up on TV years later, I watched it a few times to see if I'd remembered it's strangeness... I did, and about that time I added the Peck/Basehart version of Moby Dick to the "strange" list.

In Moby Dick, the characters seemed to move through the story as do the characters in Monsoon. Of cours, they had the advantage that we all knew the Moby Dick story, so in trying for a "fresh" presentation, a lot of what the characters did they did without any motivation that I could figure out. So I watched Moby Dick a few times, but I just never "got it."

The movie begins without much promise but at least it's tolerable as Diana Douglas arrives by bus at a village in India along with her fiance, George Nader, and his mother, Ellen Corby. She wants to introduce them to her father, Philip Stainton, and brother, Myron Healey. Then Ursula Thiess arrives on the scene. She's supposed to be Diana's younger sister but looks nothing like her and speaks in a completely different accent. George and Ursula go for a walk and -- shazam! -- fall madly in love. They take shelter from a storm that night in an abandoned building and talk and talk and talk. It's all very dull and pretentious in the manner of a bad off-Broadway play and even George Nader taking his shirt off and walking about bare-chested can't save it.