Reviews

Despite the poor script's many holes, it's not hard to guess whodunnit. But the thirty-second Tell-Don't-Show explanation at the end never unravels the dubious motivations of who did what and why. Joel McCrea and Gail Russell are obviously meant to end up together, but it takes a lot of bad manners on Joel's behalf and long-suffering patience on Gail's to actually get them into each other's arms. We can only suppose that his chauvinism will continue to leave her entangled in an unhappy marriage or relationship. All the other characters, major and minor, are smitten by Gail's beauty. Joel's curious bad manners and his bewildering comings and goings can only be explained by a tip of the hat to reverse psychology.

Both actors were very good. He spent 11 years in the NFL, switched to acting. Quite a feat!

Good movie with one grievous fault: 1957-1963 were the apex years of jazz: recording (the heyday of Blue Note & Prestige), festivals, club date, world travel. No way a B flat player, acknowledged by Miles Davis, with a reputation and with his experience would have had to take a job in an auto plant. Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Miles Davis, Mingus, not to mention Big Bands were always developing new talent. He needed an agent; his wife would have been a good one as her career developed along those lines as a TV Producer. At least, she could have pointed him the way.

If he had showed up at Blue Note Records with his own compositions, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, the two German Jewish owners, would have immediately put together a band of the worlds greatest.

I know it's a plot device. Romantic comedies keep pulling the lovers apart and bringing them together until the very end and they need a plot point to separate them so they could end up together at the end. Voila the welder job!

If it had been 1973, that a would have been another matter. Under the influence of rock, jazz kind of lost its way in the 70s.

This film's convoluted and confusing futility is compounded by the fact that it's one of those movies made for streaming release whose many scenes are poorly lit. There are long stretches where all you see and hear is a lot of thrashing about, gunshots, muzzle flashes, cursing. You don't know who's doing what.

Why can't directors and DPs light these films creatively so viewers can see what's happening? Laziness or budget?

...but you do have to light night scenes so viewers can see what's going on.

Not only is the film's premise, purpose, andtheme never revealed or explained, you can't see what's going on.

It's not just this one film; many of the made-for-Netflix films suffer from poor lighting, not only in night scenes, many day scenes in these Netflix movies suffer are badly lit.

In the Hollywood studio days, classic DPs could light night scenes so you could not only see what's going on, their lighting did not destroy the drama, it enhanced it.

Open your pockets Netflix; provide your crews with a sufficient lighting budget!

People keep comparing this film with "A Fairwell To Arms" (1932). If that is true, then it can also be seen as a stepping stone to "The Americanization of Emily" (1964) — highlighting how changing American attitudes toward war have become gradually more cynical.

Seems like the "Emily" team — writers and director — might have been influenced by Sgt. Joe 'Pete' Peterson (Holden character), transposing Garner's Charlie Madison to be an updated version of same. 1932 > 1951 > 1964.

All three successfully integrate Romance and War, ably supporting the theme that Love is the stronger force. So why do we keep on making war?

Eerily similar in storyline and backdrop to William Wyler's 1936 masterpiece, Dodsworth. It's not so much the script or the direction that doom this film, it's the premise and its execution. Don't get me wrong; I like the film. However, it could have been much better. As other reviewers stated, the actors, their chemistry were excellent. It's the character development that's faulty.

Whereas in Dodsworth the triangle is played out logically, along the lines of solid character development so that the hero ends up in Naples with the other woman; in September Affair (1950), love takes a back seat to 1950's morality, or "family values" which state that if you sin, you must pay.

To represent this on the screen, the screenwriter uses the deus ex machina device of having the wife morph from shrew to martyr, not by showing us, as a film should do, but by telling us, in a letter no less, that she won't agree to a divorce. But when we actually see her, she doesn't seem all that bad a person. She's not like the woman in the letter and she's not the woman Cotten makes her out to be. With Ruth Chatterton (star of Dodsworth), the character development progressed faultlessly. In September Affair, the wife's character arc is unbelievable. Which is she? A shrew or a noble, long-suffering wife? If the latter, the film couldn't end with Joseph Cotten walking away from that sort of woman. He would have lost favor with the audience.

That means forcing credibility to depend on us buying the unbelievable character arc of the wife who somehow morphs from meanie to martyr.

He goes back to his wife and I'll bet the first thing she does is revert to her original persona (you can't escape that easily) — her Ruth Chatterton ways, emasculating Cotten out of spite, and he'll end up with no way back to the woman he loves, who loves him because she's also foolishly played the martyr to the point of NO return.

The film is a cop out. No film should hinge on the changes in a minor character; it should be the leads whose actions set the course. In fact, the ending even goes against common sense:

1) the wife's new persona has accepted the split, so has the son. That he's alive is enough for her.

2) As for Joan, he loves her and Joan loves him. They've taken it to another level — like John Huston and Mary Astor in Dodsworth, a level the wife can't understand. They are clearly superior in their maturity, their lifestyles, their tastes.

Why not let them fade into the Florence sunset together, she with her piano, him with his engineering projects?

Plot has more holes than a golf course.

So they had to spend the last 20 minutes explaining what had gone down in the first 110. Too bad the plot became so tangled that the screenwriters were unable to show what happened and were forced to explain it instead, by locking two guys in a room. Two guys who take turns threatening each other with a pistol, even though you and I know that neither will shoot. If they did, we'd never get the explanation, and they owed us that much, quand meme.

Not that we couldn't guess what was coming! I mean a politician at a horse show, an eminence grise, is a giveaway. Why show the guy if he doesn't figure in somewhere? And where will he figure in? Duh, that's right, down the line we'll discover he's the bad guy. The French version of the evil senator we've seen so many times before.

So the filmmaker's challenge is to make us feel like we're in good hands as he unravels the story. It's not about acting (yes, its good), production values, or direction; it's about story telling. How to get the characters to the ending we know is coming in an absorbing, suspenseful way?

Guillaume Canet should see LA Confidential (1997). Oh what Curtis Hanson might have done with this story!

I give it a NINE as a 12-year-old. As a mature person, I can't say because it's not available, even on Netflix. At the time, I thought it a great adventure film. So they scrambled history a bit and the lines were corny; but with costumes, intrigue, and romance, plus Rex Harrison and the always impeccable George Sanders, what more could a kid want?

Especially loved the part "where King Richard meets Saladin and shows him 'the strength of English steel' by cutting through an iron mace placed across the backs of two chairs. Saladin responds in kind by throwing a silk veil in the air which separates as it falls across his scimitar, and he replies that 'sometimes it is not the strength of the steel but the sharpness of the blade.'"

Didn't you ever like some film as a kid for reasons known only to a 12-year-old?

I agree with the previous reviewer's insightful comments (15 January 2005), except for some inaccuracies and misinterpretations. This is an excellent TV movie that uses a French provincial town in the 1890s to examine the enduring nature of social issues. However...

1) The movie never states that the doctor's father is "a plantation and slave owner." Rather it implies that his father is THE ADMIRAL, whose bank reference letter he bears in order to effect the loan necessary for purchasing the white doctor's practice, and whose portrait he keeps on his bedroom dresser.

2) Nor is it stated that his father "had married a slave." His mother was merely one of the slave-owning father's black mistresses.

3) It doesn't appear to me that he has a "strategy is to first conquer the mayor's trust." Ostracized because of his race by everyone except the schoolmistress, Léa, he's about to pack up and leave when the Mayor's daughter is accidentally shot.

4) The local bourgeoisie — and consequently the townspeople — accept him only after he saves the Mayor's daughter's life. And even then his relationship with the Mayor involves a certain amount of hypocrisy on both sides.

In the scenes where he's feted by the Mayor and other dignitaries and pursued by the Mayor's libertine sister he allows himself to be seduced by their hypocrisy to the point that he begins to agree with their opinions, deftly symbolized by his parroting their anti-Dreyfusard sentiments, even though he has a lot more in common with the plight of Dreyfus than with the bourgeois clique that runs the town.

The only person who understands how the rich use him as a kind of pet "nègre" — although his maidservant, Clémence (wonderfully played by Miriam Boyer), recognizes the game the bourgeoisie are playing — is the woman that truly loves him, Léa (Barbara Schulz). But he's on a roller coaster ride of inflated self-worth, basking in their supposed approval, and she can't get through to him.

The previous reviewer correctly notes that the incident when the doctor sees the African tribes people caged and mistreated in a Colonial Exposition (not in a zoo) finally makes him realize that ruling clique's acceptance is not sincere. This makes him angry at everyone, including Léa. But his anger is not only about his desire for revenge; it flows from a deep self-loathing as he realizes that he's made himself ridiculous by affecting bourgeois attitudes and mannerisms in return for their approval.

The only thing left to him is trust of the common people, who, because of his skill as a doctor and his down-to-earth bedside manner, now unconditionally accept him. But he's so humiliated and angry, he lumps them in with the others.

The point the director makes here is that manipulating people into "acting (voting) against their own interests" is an old technique that basically says: if you think and act like us, you'll be rich and famous like us. We've seen it used to perfection in the modern political arena by reactionaries such as Karl Rove.

In the final Cholera sequence, there's a kind of mutual acceptance of each other's humanity as the whole town struggles under the doctor's leadership to stem the tide of the Cholera epidemic. At this point, when everybody, including the Mayor, is dying, there's not much point in maintaining pretense.

If they only did made-for-TV movies like this in the US, there might be a greater degree of self-awareness and empathy in this country, especially about social issues.

As Barack Obama said, when asked about his favorite Bible verse in a recent debate: "Well, I think it would have to be the Sermon on the Mount, because it expresses a basic principle that I think we've lost over the last six years.

Part of what we've lost is a sense of empathy towards each other. We have been governed in fear and division, and you know, we talk about the federal deficit, but we don't talk enough about the empathy deficit, a sense that I stand in somebody else's shoes, I see through their eyes. People who are struggling trying to figure out how to pay the gas bill, or try to send their kids to college. We are not thinking about them at the federal level."

That's what this TV film shows: that no matter how hard the doctor tries to deny his basic human empathy in order to be accepted by the rich, he can't do it because he isn't that kind of person.

"The greatest book in the world, the Mahabharata, tells us we all have to live and die by our karmic cycle. Thus works the perfect reward-and-punishment, cause-and-effect, code of the universe. We live out in our present life what we wrote out in our last. But the great moral thriller also orders us to rage against karma and its despotic dictates. It teaches us to subvert it. To change it. It tells us we also write out our next lives as we live out our present." ~ The Alchemy of Desire — Tarun J. Tejpal

I first saw this film in 1998 with my 6-year old son. And even though he asked a lot of questions, I could see he loved it. I believe he understood it. That's what happens when a work of art is perfectly conceived and executed. The theme, plot and message are so transparent even a relative babe can appreciate them.

Last night, now 14 and a freshman in HS, he was looking through our video collection. I was fascinated watching him make his choice. At first, he toyed with films like WILD, WILD WEST and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARC. Then he chanced to lay a hand on GATTACA, which he had not seen for eleven years, and to my mind, had forgotten.

"I want to see GATTACA again," he said. I realized his choice would open whole new levels of appreciation. Seeing it again, we were not disappointed. After, my son said, "They don't make films like this any more; there'd have to a long chase and a shootout."

Sad, because 1997 was only 10-years ago. It seems like we could have held onto decent stories for a little while longer. In fact, it seems like we could have continued to demand them. 1997 was also the year LA CONFIDENTIAL came out, another under-appreciated film with a great story line. There haven't been many recently.

I knew Chinatown; Chinatown was a friend of mine; you're no Chinatown.

Why Robert Towne chose to keep his name in the credits deserves more discussion than the movie itself. The script is really bad. All atmosphere and no substance makes it impossible for the actors to find any emotion, much less the appropriate one, to bring to the story beats. So they end up winging every scene.

Each of the actors adopts a different strategy — Raul Julia overplays, Mel Gibson charms his way, Kurt Russell out dresses everyone, while Michelle Pfeiffer just demurs. Hollow, hollow, hollow stuff. And that love scene: how does a girl with her head seemingly screwed on right suddenly go that overboard. Okay, you can make together, but "I want to marry you."? If you want a film combining substance, atmosphere, plus style, try LA Confidential. Curtis Hanson would have trashed the Tequila script and started over again, but then he's a great director who knows the secret is starting with a good script. Which brings us back to Towne. I guess he just lost his touch.