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The film begins with the irresistible "grabber" of a dead Hollywood star spoken over in the authoritative tones of Bogart's character as a Hollywood writer who has seen too much not to be cynical. But looking past all the stiff rhetoric spoken by the film's 3 storytellers (the device used so memorably in "Citizen Kane"), we come back to the image of Gardner as the Contessa. We've been told she's conquered Hollywood and the world with her beguiling beauty, but where's the evidence?. Where's the vibrant spirit of this beguiling creature who has been exploited by the media system, then wafted away by a storybook Count who replaces Hollywood's false fantasy with his own illusory view of social royalty? Gardner's Contessa does not even manifest the vulnerability of a woman exploited first by the Hollywood system and next by a wounded patriarchy posing as the rescuing prince of the Cinderella story. The picture might have been redeemed by a younger, more vulnerable face--perhaps Audrey Hepburn's. As it stands, the movie--like the life-sized monument of Gardner (now in Frank Sinatra's garden)--is a statue, capable of arousing curiosity but not satisfying our need to know its inspiration. The film, like the statue, is an ambitious, provocative attempt at capturing a life-like beauty that is ultimately a meaningless--if not lifeless--totem.

This movie, which I first saw 65 years ago (!), held me in its grip during and long after my time in the movie theater. Still a high school student, I quickly went to the novel and consumed it in mere weeks, not months (including the section on "The Grand Inquisitor," which is missing from the film. The images of the movie stayed with me while reading the novel (after which, the same author's "Crime and Punishment" was slow, drawn-out, thoroughly boring.)

One of the themes of the movie is the classic Oedipal struggle between father and son, which entails manliness, money, religious faith, and sex. I was struggling with my father's meek ways (like the sick little boy whose father is humiliated by Dmitri (Brynner). I didn't realize it at the time, but as a father today I recognize a similar rebellion and rejection in my relation with my own "grown-up" son.

But the film's under-appreciated performance is that of Maria Schell as Grushenka. Within seconds of meeting her, Dimitri is smitten--and the audience must feel the same for the story to work. Schell lights up the screen with the most memorable, expressive face--signifying joy, sensuality, carelessness, indifference, ironic detachment, total commitment--all in the language of cinema--not of the theatrical stage (the problem with the negative review quoted in the film's Wikipedia entry). Rumor long had it that the part was first offered to Marilyn Monroe. Though I'm also an M.M. fan, Maria Schell is the one and only Grushenka--the heart of this remarkable film.

The film starts with John Payne's last match as a prize fighter, soon exposed as the memory of a "has-been" who, like Brando in "On the Waterfront," laments that he "could have been the champion" within hearing distance of his pretty but unsympathetic (and unfaithful) wife. He was sucker-punched after his opponent's count of 9, but the same won't happen in this under-dog's last fight--which occurs not in the ring but on the waterfront against criminals who have framed him and threaten to finish him.

The film would not rate ten stars for its conventional, crowd-pleasing ending or even for the believable performance by Payne as the hounded and harried, wronged and manic fighter. It's the captivating, dominating performance of Evenlyn Keyes in cooperation with a camera that one moment uses angles, dark-lit scenes, and split-second cutting (with the virtuosity of Hitchock's shower scene in 'Psycho") and, the next moment, goes to soft-lit, long takes that serve as a perfect complement to and showcase for the extraordinary acting skills of Keyes and perhaps the most expressive eyes ever seen on the silver screen (ironically, it's Payne who is blinded hot only by hard luck and poor choices but by the threat of permanent physical bllindness by his last fight . But there's more . . . It's not only Payne's character that gets sucker-punched by Keyes' eyes. In an amazing scene set in an apparently empty theater, Keyes gives a performance that continues for minutes without a single cut yet rivets our attention, making us her susceptible if not captive audience no less than her apparent auditor, Payne's character.

The only problem, for both Payne and the spectator, is that once we've been drawn in, or "sucker-punched" and "fooled" by Keyes' performance (suggestive of Circe's magical hold on not merely Odysseus but all the men who are attracted to her), neither Payne nor the spectator can trust her. Is she acting (the answer for the spectator is easy-- certainly an incontrovertible "yes"!) or is she being honest in her apparent conversion from actor to Payne's best friend and sincere supporter, bound to him by unqualified love?

Of course, it doesn't really matter. She's an actress who has proven that she can not only faithfully deliver but "transcend" any script. Next time I hear the familiar reference to "Betty Davis' eyes," I will instantly react with: "Wait until you see Eveyln Keyes' eyes." They're capable of replacing the cutting knife of the film's editor and the pan and tilt of the camera as well as the choreography of flying fists and falling bodies.

In short, this film manages, like only a few others, to penetrate the "4th wall" in Keye's singular scene in a theater where she speaks directly to and affects the fictional audience as well as the actual audience--the spectator of the film. Only one comparison comes quickly to mind. It's a sciene in which Maureen O'Hara plays a stripper in a burlesque theater from the 1940 romantic "comedy" "Dance, Girl, Dance," directed by the first woman filmmaker accepted in Hollywood, Dorothy Arzner.