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The first hour of this moody, sometimes self-consciously arty effort by writer/director Jack Garfein is generally fine, with a touching, shell-shocked Mary Ann (Carroll Baker) caught in an emotional limbo after being raped. You might not completely understand some of her actions at first, but somehow the film and her character have their own kind of workable logic to them.

However, once the Ralph Meeker character enters the scene and become increasingly bizarre, the film goes completely off-kilter. Meeker's performance is a Method wallow and the film really doesn't create or explore any semblance of a convincing relationship between them. The final 10 minutes is simply unbelievable IMO - nothing preceding the finale provides a reasonable clue to Mary Ann's behavior. It's apparent what you're supposed to feel at the end, but the script doesn't set it up at all.

It's fun seeing Jean Stapleton and Doris Roberts in early small screen appearances, and for the most part, Baker does very well. It's one of her better roles before she trashed her career trying to be a sexpot for Joseph E. Levine.

As others have noted, Frederic March's superb performance is the centerpiece of this well-done drama of the ups and downs of a romance between a 56-year old garment manufacturer and the 24-year old receptionist at his firm. Another plus is the seamless integration of location shooting in NYC and in the studio.

This piece was originally done on Broadway with Edward G. Robinson in the March role and Gena Rowlands in the role played here by Kim Novak. Martin Balsam and Lee Phillips (as the young woman's musical ex-husband) repeated their stage roles in the film. For me, Novak's performance is sometimes good (her scene with Lee Grant, for example); other times you can see the effort and calculation she brings to the scenes and her acting comes off as artificial. Big emotional scenes always seem to tax her as an actress. I've never been a big fan of Novak's, and while this is one of her better efforts, she was never a first-class actress (and certainly not in Rowlands' league).

However, I don't think Novak really hurts the film much, and March and the rest of the cast more than make up for it. Of course, Balsam's big scene where he tells off his wife/March's daughter (played by Joan Copeland, Arthur Miller's sister) is Chayevsky at his most obvious - you can see it and the wife's hypocrisy coming a mile away. But there's not a false note in March's performance, which is certainly one of his finest ever. It's hard to believe he didn't at least get an Oscar nomination for this film - especially considering who won that year (Heston for "Ben-Hur").

Despite some fine scenes and special effects here and there, "The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe" doesn't quite scale the heights of film fantasy to which it aspires. There's a kind of dramatic flatness to the story, at least as adapted here.

Granted, the original isn't particularly complex emotionally even compared to Lord of the Rings. Director Andrew Adamson has only directed the animated "Shrek" films before this, so that could also be a reason for the one-dimensional quality of the drama.

Also, the acting is very uneven. Among the children, the wonderful Georgie Henley as Lucy and Skandar Keynes as Edmund are fine, but Anna Popplewell is a dull Susan, and William Moseley is a stiff Peter whose transformation into a soldier is impossible to take seriously on any level. Tilda Swinton has a imperious coldness as the White Witch - I liked her though you could say that she isn't quite terrifying enough. Another highlight is James McAvoy as Mr. Tumnus - his scenes with Lucy are among the best in the film.

The final battle scene - not explicitly described in the novel - is Lord of the Rings Lite, but it works well enough. One disappointment is the voice of Liam Neeson as the lion Aslan. Obviously it was recorded separately, but Neeson's line readings aren't very engaging and the sound has a disembodied quality that exposes the artificiality of the special effects. Some of the other voice performers (Ray Winstone and Dawn French as the beavers, and Rupert Everett as the fox) fare better. This film gets its job done well enough, but classic fantasy film it isn't.

It'll be interesting to see when/if the rest of the Narnia books get adapted. Unlike "Lord of the Rings" or the more recent "His Dark Materials" trilogy, the remaining Narnia books are extremely variable in quality (and increasingly preachy), the final volume being downright dull.