Film

User reviews of this film

• M. Miyagawa said...

  Posted on Jun 04 2011 01:09 Worthy themes in a cultural-specific (Quaker) context. Unfortunately, these receive typically tepid Hollywood treatment in a movie that fails to develop dramatic force. Lacking narrative momentum, FP is distracted by inconsistent tones and ill-balanced, secondary story lines. It can't decide what it wants to be: either a 'Ma and Pa Kettle' outing or a family drama with serious socio-historical bite and distinctly memorable characters. Its objectives are fractured rather than focused, diluted instead of distilled. And its ample humor often too cutesy. In a movie lacking coherence, the lighter moments fail to relieve or punctuate the dramatic aspects in an effective manner. What should be a resonant climax in the film is thus never achieved. Overall, a simplistic, basically decent and well-meaning, but sugar-coated production. Too bad it squandered some genuinely compelling themes: pacifism, slavery, the threat and reality of rape in a time of war, religious freedom in American history, individual and state sovereignty, natural equality between the sexes in private and public life, etc. For more discriminating viewers, FP's structural and thematic failures are central to its disappointments. Even for 1956, more could've been ably risked and better, more credibly achieved. Overall, it's a conspicuous fizzle from the otherwise terrific director William Wyler. As it is, the movie's good points: undeniably, a solid performance by Anthony Perkins, who definitely shows presence as a youth struggling to come to terms with moral responsibility in a time of war. Clearly, Perkins loves the camera. Some might say too much here. At times, he indulges easy, puppy-dog adorability at the expense of weighted psychological nuance. He shows inner conflict, but more than a display, however intense, of mere emotional fragility is required for such a pivotal role. Gary Cooper -- who purportedly requested Jess Birdwell be toughened up in the script -- is the movie's prime asset. He makes the best of a weak and muddled enterprise, adding irony, heft, and effortless, natural humor to the proceedings. There's a nice, non-villainous turn by Robert Middleton, as neighbor and hoof-speed enthusiast Sam Jordan. And Dorothy McGuire is competent as a strong, not unyielding woman in a thoroughly safe and predictable role. Sadly, Joel Fluellen, as Enoch the runaway slave and hired hand, whom we'd like to know more of, is treated as little more than an after-thought, as much an awkward reflection of Hollywood's reticence about race as of the clouded conscience and moral duplicity and cowardice of much of white 1950s America.

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• Mar said...

  Posted on May 27 2009 02:13 Worth seeing, specifically for the impressive intensity of Anthony Perkins' performance.

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• ippolit23 said...

  Posted on May 23 2008 16:33 Stock characters, humour beside the point, endless exposition, stiff and literary. Forgettable.

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