Zandy's Bride

Overlooked and HIGHLY underrated.

Gene Hackman and Liv Ullman are both superb in this film. Gene Hackman's performance is especially noteworthy.

I saw ZANDY'S BRIDE years ago, shortly after it was first released. It stuck with me. It's even better than I remembered.

I had trouble hunting down a copy as it hasn't been released on DVD. Like another terrific film, THE GREY FOX, a DVD really should be produced. Locating a VHS copy was worth the effort.

I definitely recommend checking it out if you are a fan of either actor.

This is a profoundly realistic and perfectly-acted story that goes much beyond the previous commenter's assertion. It is a portrait of far west ranch life at its most primal and difficult. Love was not the issue in that world. The cinematography and direction were also great. Gene Hackman and Liv Ullman are subtle actors who deliver in this overlooked but wonderful film. Although I only saw it once, the dramatic intensity and truthfulness of the tale stayed with me. I've always remembered this film, as standing outside the norm. The visual memory is black and white, though I think the film is in color. The few but intense human connections were poignant, the imagery lasting.

Gene Hackman was so prolific that even though he has retired from acting for over a decade. You can still find a new performance from him even if it is some old, obscure film.

This is a bleak, dark but vacant Scandi-drama decades before the term came in vogue with crime mysteries.

Gene Hackman is Zandy, a rugged rancher in the Big Sur. This is an isolated and backward community. A wilderness. He has ordered a mail order bride from Scandinavia. The main reason is that he wants sons who would take over the ranch from him before he gets too old.

When his wife Hannah arrives he effectively treats her as a slave and even forces himself on her. This is a story of how it was in the old days in the 19th century.

Liv Ullmann plays Hanna and she does not take it lying down and is determined to turn the farm into a home. Turn Zandy into someone respectable.

Susan Tyrell plays a floozy, Maria that Zandy seems to have had a past dalliance with. Zandy is wary of her, this is a clannish community with hints of inbreeding. Zandy does not want bad blood hence why he has got a wife from the outside.

There is an outdoor barbecue scene where we learn a little about this isolated community and also Zandy's family life.

If you think Zandy is bad, he is a progressive compared to his father. Zandy's mother is very much aware what Hannah is going through. She knows how hard life and her own husband has been to her.

Zandy and Hannah resolve to make their marriage work and she rewards him with issue. In turn Zandy softens a little, he gets her nice clothes and even a stove from San Francisco.

The film is a slow burn drama but it does not have much action. For those of us, myself included whose only experience of The Big Sur is the coastal route to LA to San Francisco or vice-versa. This is an insight to a real community that once lived beyond those roads.

The film is rewarded with wonderful photography but it feels empty despite the rich performances.

One of my favourite actors - Gene Hackman - takes the lead as a farmer of the Old West who takes out an advert in search of a mail order bride. The lady in question, is nothing more than a mere possession in Hackman's eyes. Following the most cheerless wedding I have ever seen on film, the newly pronounced wife is subjected to all kinds of harsh treatment from her brutish and seemingly unfeeling husband. The limited and low key story, maintains its focus upon the character development of the two leads. As time elapses, the husband learns to treat his good lady with more in the way of respect, courtesy and love. The music tends to grate upon my nerves after a while and I wished for something else to be played! The direction tends to slow everything down until the narrative moves at a snail's pace. Gene Hackman puts his dramatic acting chops to excellent use in "Zandy's Bride." For me, he has never been about wearing different costumes or putting on different accents (good at the latter when he does). Hackman is an actor who is effective by his realism and by his various facial expressions and body language. That is how he creates a performance. I can't say I'm surprised that "Zandy's Bride" is a more obscure film but it is an interesting curiosity.

California in the mid-nineteenth century was a ravishingly lovely, sparsely-populated wilderness. The people of the coastal strip eked a living from their wooded valleys as small-scale cattlemen and dirt farmers. Their contact with the outside world (or with one another, for that matter) was limited.

Zandy Allan is a poor farmer and a bachelor. His smallholding in the steep hills above Big Sur is squalid and joyless. He has decided to obtain a wife because he wants sons to help him manage the livestock, and so he has answered a newspaper advertisement. His wife-to-be is a slight, attractive Scandinavian woman and she is travelling westwards from Minneapolis to meet him ...

A modest and engaging little western, "Zandy's Bride" relies solely on its two stars, Gene Hackman and Liv Ullman, for its interest. There are no stampedes or shootouts, no indian wars or lynchings. It is a quiet domestic piece, an essay on human character - no more, and no less.

"You don't know nothin' 'bout marriage," Zandy is told by his mother (Eileen Heckart), "'cept from pa an' me." And what a baleful example of conjugality the older Allans are. Without charm, verbal skills or even basic courtesy, Zandy's father treats his wife as if she were one of his animals. If Zandy is brutal and inflexible (and he is), it is small wonder. More than half an hour of Zandy's on-screen relationship with his wife passes before we even learn her name.

The only external events in the movie are the barbecue (was that term really current among Californian sodbusters 150 years ago?) and Zandy's foray to San Francisco. The barbecue's main plot function is to enable Zandy to be tempted by Maria (Susan Tyrrell). The San Francisco sojourn is the watershed in the marriage of Zandy and Hannah. When he returns, both partners have grown emotionally. Zandy has learnt to accommodate a will other than his own, and Hannah has become stronger by being a mother.

The two central performances are outstanding. Hackman in particular is terrific. He presents Zandy as a coarse, selfish thug and manages to retain our sympathy. As he sits at the table after returning from the city, his stream of different facial expressions is brilliant, his eyes flickering with conflicting feelings of bravado, hurt and anxiety to please.

The direction of Jan Troell (this being an American/Scandinavian co-production) is quiet and unspectacular but wholly competent. For example, Zandy is jostled by passers-by on the sidewalks of San Francisco, an economic way of showing us that he is unfamiliar with the ways of society. The incidental music by Franks and Carlin is superb, with its salty 'American vernacular' flavour. George Cronenwerth's cinematography is beautifully clear and attractive, capturing the feel of primitive rural life with its rich browns and ochres.

How on earth did they shoot the scene where Zandy injures his horse by driving it too hard up the slope?