flh462002
Joined Sep 2004
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flh462002's rating
It's not a bad film and I'm not one who was turned off or offended by the prospect of a woman becoming involved with her friend's son, because people can be motivated by very deep issues. HOWEVER... the connections just don't make sense. BOTH sons cross-seducing? With the families as close as they are supposed to be, and the sons like brothers... it might make sense for one mother or the other to come on to her friend's son, and the son to respond as a young man might. But casting the sons as seducers of each other's moms is just absurd. If the filmmakers wanted to make this plausible their scenario didn't work.
It's another in the "Americans are never guilty" parade of films. The notion that US citizens are always duped victims in drug smuggling cases is naive at best. While they may not deliberately smuggle drugs in all cases, having worked in travel for many years I can declare that US citizens can be extremely gullible when abroad and equally gullible that "I'm a US citizen" immunizes them from local laws. This is a quite nicely predictable "US citizen unjustly imprisoned" film, and all the predictable people are evil and in league against the poor US citizen. That Americans are naive does not mean they are immune to legal consequences. "I was suckered" is too frequently heard abroad to serve as a defense. And being familiar with Ecuadorian government and law, I can say that they are not exactly the rampant fascists portrayed in this film
For all the complaints about Bette Davis' accent, I think the earlier version with Davis and Leslie Howard was much better at evoking the ratty edges of the story and the essence of the characters.
There seems to have been a strange "opposites day" bit of casting here. Kim Novak's Mildred appeared rather vulnerable in her ignorance and Laurence Harvey as Philip seemed much more calculating in the early scenes where he first was taken with her. Leslie Howard appeared rather pathetic in the same scenes, but Harvey seemed to have a sharper agenda. Yes it was turned on its head, but he didn't appear to be the poor little shut out clueless failure that Howard was so good at portraying.
Meh... worth watching to see how a story can be updated for more modern audiences than the '34 version, but stick with the original for the gritty stuff.
There seems to have been a strange "opposites day" bit of casting here. Kim Novak's Mildred appeared rather vulnerable in her ignorance and Laurence Harvey as Philip seemed much more calculating in the early scenes where he first was taken with her. Leslie Howard appeared rather pathetic in the same scenes, but Harvey seemed to have a sharper agenda. Yes it was turned on its head, but he didn't appear to be the poor little shut out clueless failure that Howard was so good at portraying.
Meh... worth watching to see how a story can be updated for more modern audiences than the '34 version, but stick with the original for the gritty stuff.