vocalistbob

I'm not sure why I was disappointed with this film. Maybe because it was too stage-y or maybe it was Dorothy McGuire's performance or maybe it was because, when you get right down to it, the 3 basic themes of the film have all been handled better in other films. To me, the script seemed contrived.

Robert Young's performance is the opposite of Dorothy McGuire's - she is unconvincing and overacts at every opportunity (and there were lots of opportunities), while he gave a nice, nuanced performance filled with genuine emotion. I found Ms. McGuire's character and performance annoying to the nth degree. Had this film not gotten good reviews, I never would have watched it all the way through. The best scenes were when Ina Claire and Robert Young were interacting.

Maybe it's a chick film and that's why I didn't find myself enjoying it as much as I anticipated.

One of the cable stations ran this series a few years ago. Like so many comedies from the 50's, it was genuinely awful - the plots, stories and jokes just weren't funny - and the actors weren't either. There was no chemistry between them. This was the era when Newton Minnow called TV "a vast wasteland" and he was so right.

Over the years, cable brought back a number of comedy shows that I loved as a kid - Gale Storm, I married Joan, Our Miss Brooks, etc. - and they were all really awful. The same was true for most of the westerns and cop shows. Recently, one station has been running Highway Patrol" with Broderick Crawford. Just awful. It must have killed a talented guy who won a best actor Oscar to do that sort of drivel.

I guess it makes me appreciate the shows that were well done all the more - The Honeymooners, The Rifleman (some episodes, anyway), Maverick, Perry Mason, The Untouchables, Naked City, etc. The quality of most of those were "hit and miss", but at least they had some style and charm.

I've tried to watch this film 3 or 4 times, but I just can't get past the fact that everything about it is just awful. I'm sure it was a courageous move by somebody to cast Jack Palance as the protagonist, but there is not one single fiber of my being that believes that he could act at all, much less act against type.

Yes, I understand that Clifford Odets was a brilliant author, but it's not evident here. This odd and forced mish-mash of 50's hipster dialog seems to obfuscate any genuine meaning, which explains why none of the actors, even the good ones (Steiger, Ida Lupino, Shelly Winters, Everett Sloane) seems to know how to deliver their lines - it's as though they don't understand the meaning of what they are saying. And in the meantime, Wendell Corey and Palance stage a terrific contest to see who can be more stone-faced.

The direction is amateurish and completely overwrought. The physical interaction between the characters is as stilted as the dialog.

And can we discuss that hideous set? It's so busy, ugly and contrived that it adds to the robotic, disconnected quality of the characters, the dialog and the portrayals.

This film seems to suck the energy right out of me. It looks like everybody took an overdose of Valium each morning when they arrived on the set. It takes a pretty lousy movie to make Rod Steiger and Shelly Winters look bad, but this one succeeds.

I can see that it might have been effective as a play on or off Broadway, where intellectuals and beats could have congratulated themselves for appreciating the power of the plot and the artsy flourishes of the pseudo-hip dialog.