Ken4Pyro

There are so many other excellent reviews here describing the plot outlines and and I won't waste anyone's time repeating those reviews. I found this film immensely warm, and believable. And the overall message is as beautiful as one could ask for.

My incentive to post this review was reading that of another member of IMDB. That review explained that he "...can't quite see see why Sidney Poitier won the Oscar for Best Actor..", and decried that the film "didn't seem to take any risks and certainly wouldn't offend."

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and I'm certainly guilty of that. My objection to this perspective is that it does not consider the mindset of the viewers when it was made. The review was written from a perspective of 2012 and didn't take into account the time period when the film was made.

1963 was a very turbulent year in the civil rights movement in this country. The unleashing of dogs and hoses on protesters in Birmingham, Alabama. The magnificent march on Washington, and it's stirring "I have a dream" speech by Dr. King and a movie plot which had a black man working for a group of white refugee German nuns would have taken any number of risks. Add into this the still unresolved anti-Catholic perspective of many people and in my view this film takes any number of huge risks.

Wondering who else was nominated for best actor in 1964, I looked them up. Rex Harrison for "Cleopatra", Richard Harris for "This Sporting Life", Paul Newman for "Hud", and Albert Finney for "Tom Jones." I have to ask - which of those performances, all of which are well done, took more risks, and was performed with more feeling and sensitivity than that of Sidney Poitier?

I think his Oscar is well deserved, and his performance in this film easily trumped that of the other nominees that year.

As my daughter, who is just now finding out who she is at 31, called us with the breathless news that this movie would give us a serious insight into the world which we don't possess, my wife and I honored her request that we view it.

I felt as though I needed to take a long hot shower after being pelted with the choppy and disconnected lunacy of this two hour epistle to conspiracy.

There are numerous examples from other reviewers of the errors and mischaracterized rhetoric in this movie, so I'll not belabor them here. I very carefully told my daughter the next day, "Do your own research from a library, not the internet, and see how many of the claims in this movie you can confirm, then call me back."

It makes me weep that the daughter I love is blinded by this propaganda.

I'm very sorry Mr. Jacobs found this movie so dismal, and incorrect. I for one found it very much a portrayal of what life was like in the late 50's and early 60's, at least for me, and my brother. Of course, we can't really speak to what Baltimore looked like since we lived in Philadelphia, but I really didn't tune this in because I expected it to be a documentary of Maryland landscape in '58 or '59, so maybe I missed something. England never much looked like what we saw in Sweeney Todd either, but what can you say?

As for the plot, I was thrilled. The story line has been described at length by others, so I won't waste the space on that. I did find a couple of scenes so riveting that I'll never lose them. The first was John Hurt describing the effect of absolute exhaustion and searing heat being assuaged by a Argentine lady sliding an ice cold beer across the bar to him. Having worked many an hour in the sun out near Barstow, CA in the summer, I could truly understand and appreciate the imagery of that dialogue with no extra effort at all.

The next was the scene where Strathairn's character has had enough of the neighborhood drunk firing his weapon into the sky in the middle of the night and walks across the street and clocks him good. A good man, pushed to the limit, can't take any more and does something about it. Well acted, and very tense exchange between the two men. And Mr. Jacobs? You think that 13 years was enough time that everyone would have forgotten a "draft dodger" and let it go? Think again. It damn sure would have been a roadblock for the little boy to play on the VFW sponsored baseball team.

My favorite scene of this movie though, with no doubt, was watching the look on the kids face when the apparatus Hurt designed begins to haul his little body up the inside of the tower in a flash. Man that was something, you could almost feel the wind in your own hair and watch the ground recede below you.

We had a similar dare target where I grew up. A huge natural gas line spanned a river, and the dare was to walk across it without using your hands to hold on to the guy wires. Up to the time we moved from there (1967) no one ever had. Maybe that's why this one resonated so deeply with me.

I thought it was wonderful, with just enough surprises and laughter to make it not too heavy, which it damn sure could have been.

I think this is one of those hidden gems that make you just delighted you stumbled across. I'm glad I saw this, and have it in my DVD library.