Reviews by JxSxPx

Here’s a weird mix. Park Chan-wook’s first English film is arty to the point of distraction, positively drunk on maximizing slow-motion and disjointed editing to create and needlessly decorate a thin story about violence in a rich family. It pouts and strikes poses like some southern gothic Vogue fashion spread, and it all leads up to nothing much in particular.

This is pretty generic material any which way you want to stretch it out and making it as ornately decorated as possible is not going to help it out. Paying attention to eye lines is the least problematic area in this film’s overblown sense of style. The basic beats owe much to Shadow of a Doubt but it lacks Hitchcock’s masterful hand in directing such material. It generally concerns a young girl who is predestined to be a violent killer, incestuous feelings for her uncle and a complicated relationship with her mother.

In telling this story, it was decided along the way that turning up the sound effects and music was a great idea. A quick bit involving India Stoker drinking a tiny bit of wine is so overwrought that it might blow out a speaker in the process. Her breathing sounds like Darth Vader and her drinking sounds like a waterfall. It’s needless and distracting. The same could be said for the scenes in which she makes a horseshoe (or coffin, I guess) around herself out of shoeboxes. Or strange dissolves like eggs to eyes, and so on. And the scene where India is masturbating and recalling the murder of a classmate she did with her uncle is so melodramatic it reaches a level of campy hysteria I didn’t think was possible going into the film. I laughed at the whole enterprise in that one scene.

The only saving grace is the uniformly excellent work from the main cast. I applaud Nicole Kidman and Mia Wasikowska for choosing such challenging and dark material, but their gifts have been put to better use elsewhere. And Wasikowska is starting to look a little too old to be effectively portraying a high school student. And Goode’s icy cool and deceptively attractive exterior masks depths of monstrous feelings that he plays beautifully. Jacki Weaver is essentially wasted in a thankless glorified cameo, but her neurotic aunt adds a certain spark to the proceedings that’s highly entertaining.

But what was the point of it all? The title, and family name, is a symbol that goes nowhere, and a complete head-scratcher. If Bram Stoker, Dracula’s creator and godfather of all vampyric mythology in the modern Western world, is supposed to be the obvious symbol, the film never does anything explicitly vampyric or interesting with the blood-sucking imagery it conjures up. But that is the film in total. There are plenty of pretty images and dense symbols that are undecipherable because they lead nowhere and mean nothing. It’s stylized but thin, a very sophisticated visual palette working triple-time on a narrative that was an afterthought of an afterthought.

It’s a folly of spectacular proportions to try and recapture the magic of L. Frank Baum’s texts. MGM’s lavish and beloved musical is a milestone of special effects and makeup while simultaneously being a perfect example of big budget (musical) entertainment operating at the highest level. Any and every endeavor to recapture it has only ended in diminished artistic returns or lack of audience interest, or both a great deal of the time.

So, where does that leave Oz the Great and Powerful? Stuck in-between two different films, each fighting to top the other at any given moment, but it at least winds up be passably entertaining and very cute. If that seems like faint praise, well, it kind of is. Sam Raimi’s darker impulses are so much juicier and lively than the rest of the film surrounding them that it’s a pity Disney commanded him to rein it in.

For much of Oz, Disney clearly has given the orders that the tremendous amount of money that they spent to make the thing be placed on the screen. Each time we’re introduced to a new town or part of the forest in Oz, it unfolds for like five minutes as flower’s bloom and all the various fauna emerge. It’s pretty the first time it happens, as in, when our future wizard is introduced to the Land of Oz, but even that scene wears thin. There’s no point to half of the wonders on display, and too much of a good thing becomes dull and trying after a time. There’s more life and spirit in the matte painting and plastic-looking trees and leaves in the original than in all of the technical profundities on display here.

When Raimi is allowed to unleash his inner kitsch loving darker dramatist, Oz is wickedly entertaining. Mila Kunis’ transformation, Rachel Weisz’s sweetly monstrous witch, the pure dread the flying monkeys can generate or the remnants of an attack on a China doll village linger in the imagination. Disney used to know this and I found it be profoundly true, tales and images that generate terror in childhood linger in the imagination far longer than anything soft and sweet. The original film’s fairy tale simplicity, in which the Wicked Witch is possibly the most memorable character in the whole film, attests to this. When Disney let Raimi let his freak flag fly is when Oz proves to be something more than piggy-backing on a classic.

While James Franco tries his hardest, and it’s not really his fault that his performance is lacking a certain ingredient, he is slightly miscast as our hero. The character needs a very specific fast-talking snake-oil salesman charm, and Franco is too earnest, artsy and indie to project that kind of swarm. Mila Kunis gives it her all, but her witch ends up lacking and coming across as too one-note. Weisz and Michelle Williams are divine in their roles. Weisz seems to take great joy and be having a lot of fun in playing someone so bad and who enjoys being that way. Williams is a pallid beauty who finds the perfect combination between determined and ethereal as Glinda, and makes her eventually transformation into Billie Burke’s sweet and majestic version easily accessible.

However flawed and unnecessary Oz the Great and Powerful may be, it is still an incredible amount of fun. Perhaps if I was exposed to this as a child, I would be in absolute heaven and forgiving of its faults. But I can only view this film, tonal inconsistent and only too happy to help you gorge on eye-candy, as an adult. There’s a minor charm and a good deal of fun to be had, but it’s neither great nor powerful.

Two decades after he originated the role in Red Dust, Clark Gable reprised it in the loose remake Mogambo. But a funny thing happened on the way to Mogambo, Gable was no longer the prime, alpha-male radiating star that he once was, and his presence is outshone and out-acted by the two female leads, Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly.

It’s not just that Gable looks a little too old to believably play this role and inspire the erotic yearnings for the youthful Kelly and street-wise Gardner, but most of the magic in Red Dust was the palpable chemistry between Gable, Jean Harlow and Mary Astor. Red Dust featured a commentary on class and power being a part of sexual attraction – Gable’s rubber plantation runner idealizes the owner’s wife for being a real lady and seeing their affair as a possible way for upward mobility, totally ignoring the lower-class hooker-on-the-run who loves him for who he is. Mogambo, by contrast, is purely about the cinematic aura of Gable as romantic ideal, filled to the brim with MGM’s pure spectacle.

The tired, creaky script plays everything far safer than the wilder and kinkier pre-code classic; the script’s not very good. Never truly becoming awful, but only mildly maintaining our interest. Part of the fun in watching Red Dust is to see the three leads interacting, with Astor’s brittle high-society woman and Harlow’s tough-talking dame providing as many dramatic sparks as the love triangle. Gardner and Kelly don’t provide the same amount of thrills in their scenes together, but deliver perfectly fine performances.

Gardner in particular makes the whole enterprise worth watching in the first place. Mogambo provided her lone Oscar nomination, and it’s very strong work. She lands all of her jokes, capably handles the dramatic moments, sells the little bit of sex thrown in for good measure and promptly walks away with the movie. When she’s not on the screen the film becomes a frightful bore. Kelly, for her part, is more uneven, but the scene where she and Gable stare at each other with passion and yearning before she frighteningly runs into her room is greatly played by her.

By this point in his career, Gable could play this type of role in his sleep, and that’s exactly what it looks like he’s doing here. He frequently seems bored in his love scenes with Kelly, manages a nice chemistry with Gardner and only comes alive when the film dips into the adventure story.

Red Dust focused primarily on the love triangle, Mogambo pads that story with a safari excursion that’s almost laughably bad. Much of the film was shot on location in Africa, and the scenery is gorgeous and atmospheric. The problem is whenever the film has to match it with studio work, it never matches. The overgrown jungle looks barren and plastic on the set, and the continuity between the shots dips into high-camp it’s so bad. Stock footage of animals threatening the stars or being glimpsed by them from afar is obviously edited in with a noticeably different grade of film stock.

But this is John Ford, and there are a few directorial decisions that he made which keep Mogambo from being totally awful. The on-location stuff is great, he got a career-best performance from Gardner (although The Killers and The Night of the Iguana are close on its heels), and chose to soundtrack the film only with African tribal instrumentation. It gives the film an exciting and atmospheric vibe which stands out in a positive way for being something different from MGM.

I have a bit of a love/hate feeling towards MGM, for every star and movie that they gave the big lush treatment to, they would turn around and give it to another project that couldn’t possibly support it. Mogambo is that kind of film. If the adventure story had been removed, if someone other than Gable had been chosen for the lead, if this, that and the other, not every movie needed to include so many mega-watt stars, and romance and adventure, sometimes scaling back is for the best. Red Dust remains the definitive version of this story because it managed to create so much atmosphere, heat and drama in a studio and gave them a good story with memorable interactions between the characters. Mogambo is pure spectacle without much heart, but it’s never completely terrible, which makes things all the more frustrating when you get right down to it.

If Green Fire doesn’t do anything wonderful, then it also doesn’t do anything terribly. It’s serviceable movie formula from the MGM movie factory – part romance, part adventure, exotic setting and photogenic movie stars, plot be damned! Who needs you anyway?

You get the full rollout with lovely cinematography and lavish sets, but they’re populated by the faintest sketch of characters and given nothing of interest or wit to say. The basics of the story concern two miners looking for emeralds, a haughty heiress who runs a coffee plantation and some local banditos in the Colombian wilderness. Throw in some natural disasters and a few man-made ones and what you’re left with is a glorified B-movie (maybe even a C-list one).

The parts work fine, but nothing really shines brightly. The stars all seem miscast for this kind of film and for their roles. Grace Kelly was a hard actress to put into a believable role – she always seemed too glamorous, serene and chic to be a real woman, and making her a plantation owner in Latin America only highlights the artifice of her persona. Stewart Granger is workman-like if unremarkable, attractive but dull as a leading man. And the romance between the two of them lacks serious heat. Paul Douglas was a great character actor, but he excelled in urban melodramas and light comedies. Granger and Douglas generate some minor comedic back-and-forth, and in a better film that showcased their talents they may have made a pleasing duo to spend two hours with. Sticking these three in the wilds of Columbia leaves them obviously adrift.

And the direction is decent, but never sparkles or adds anything new to make this film standout. No matter how much money went into the window-dressing, Green Fire practically squeaks with the formula machinations moving along on a rusty track before finally winding down. A few suggestions to have improved the film: keep the location and the bit about the emeralds, ditch the love story, re-cast the two male leads.

Sometimes little known B-movies can unearth some solidly made gems, and 14 Hours is one of those movies. It may not be perfect, but it is highly entertaining, well-acted and smartly written. Roughly 90% of the film is about a man on a ledge threatening to jump and the various efforts to get him back inside. 14 Hours only stumbles when it briefly leaves this main narrative to craft vignettes of the on-lookers experiencing the drama unfold before them.

Grace Kelly and Jeffrey Hunter, in some of their first film roles, are attractive enough to gain attention from the camera, but they add nothing of value to the story besides breaking from it and muting the tension. Hunter is one half of a couple who meets during the chaos on the street and fall in love. Why the filmmakers decided that the film needed this story is anyone’s guess, it fills in time that would be better spent with Paul Douglas, as the beat-cop who spends most of the film working as a therapist and negotiator, and Richard Basehart, as the man threatening to jump. Kelly’s storyline is particularly useless, of only any value to hear something closer to her natural speaking voice before she adopted that affected faintly British way of talking. She’s wooden, which is of no surprise, and glamorous even in this embryonic form, but her two scenes could have been exorcised with no repercussions to the main story.

The only times that 14 Hours effectively cuts away from the main drama is when we witness a series of cab driver’s taking bets about when and if Basehart will jump. This cruel and uncaring world, this microcosmic glimpse at people finding entertainment in the misery of others adds to the film’s worldview of the big city as a cruel, uncaring place. Or the evangelist who keeps interrupting things to use this moment as an opportunity to peddle his wares, reflecting the base instinct to sensationalize a story for our own ends.

So why did I think that 14 Hours was so well-made? Paul Douglas and Richard Basehart deliver some great performances and are tasked with some tricky emotional material to play. Douglas in particular has to be someone trust-worthy and calm, even as he is cracking under the pressure of a job far outside of what he normally does. And Basehart is all twitchy impulses and exposed neurosis. They create a real connection as actors and exploit it to the fullest dramatic effect. The movie’s docu-drama style is the most gripping when we simply sit back and observe them.

Douglas isn’t the only character actor who gets a gripping role for this film – Agnes Moorehead and Robert Keith play Basehart’s parents who did a number on him by manipulating him with their personal vendettas against each other, and Barbara Bel Geddes plays the girl he ditched because of his parental issues and feelings of self-worth. Bel Geddes is a quiet, warm presence in the film, she doesn’t have much screen time, but she does equip herself well to get maximum impact.

14 Hours does so much so well that its faults can be forgiven. Sure the happy-ending is pure Hollywood, and a quick ten minute edit would have made it better, but in its brisk running time it lands several powerful blows and manages to be more suspenseful and exceptional than many major A-list films. Pity it’s become something of a forgotten film – seek it out.

Grace Kelly only made eleven films before becoming Her Serene Highness, Princess Grace, and in a handful of them the films would have been better if the stuff concerning her character was removed. The Bridges at Toko-Ri is the perfect example of this. A Korean War film about a soldier’s fatigue over military service could have been much better if the women had been stricken from the plot.

The Bridges at Toko-Ri hovers near greatness whenever we examine William Holden’s combat pilot and the small group of men we meet that he serves with in the Navy. Holden’s character is hovering at the cross-section of furious over having to be in more combat after serving in WWII and anemically going through the motions. Fredric March’s admiral views him as a prodigal/replacement son for the one he lost on a battlefield, Mickey Rooney is all-business as a proudly Irish helicopter jockey, and Robert Strauss has a few scenes which endear our sympathies as a comic-relief sailor.

The intrusion of an extended sequence away from the naval carrier is where the problems begin. A protracted storyline involving Rooney’s love for a Korean woman and her abandoning him for a different American sailor serves no function for the film’s wider (if muddled) message of futility in war and the lack of true reasoning for the conflict in Korea.

It is here that Kelly appears as Holden’s bourgeoisie wife, and she gives us what can only be described as her soggiest performance ever. As the wife of the main character, you’d think she’d serve a larger purpose in the story, but she’s a vacantly written sketch. She does nothing but cry, have a high society freak-out when a communal bath must be shared with a Korean family, and leave the film after two or three scenes. These stories, I guess, are supposed to show us what these men are fighting for, what drives them to eventually return, but it breaks up the tension and needlessly leads us away from the main thrust of the story.

While Toko-Ri can never come directly out and state the loudly sub-textual question on its mind, “What the hell were we doing in Korea anyway?,” it does pay a lot of generic lip-service to issues of containment and spreading democracy. Yet this is undercut by the ending, which (spoilers) sees both Holden and Rooney die in the dirt from a flood of bullets. While it attempts to keep an even keeled approach to the subject, Holden’s warrior fatigue and the violent ending tip it into anti-war ideology and empathizing with those on the ground, in air and sea fighting abroad as they dream of returning home and trying to get back to a normalized life.

No one could ever accuse me of being “soft” on Grace Kelly. I find her to be frequently stiff, affected, a hollow actress in dramatic moments but she was a luminous screen presence. Captivating in her beauty and the serenity that she projected, yet she was also hard to cast in roles for these very same positive attributes. She looks out of place in Green Fire, is too haughty and well-bred to play seriously dowdy and suffering in The Country Girl, and is too hysterical in The Bridges at Toko-Ri.

Alfred Hitchcock knew how to use her to grand effects. Her society girl in Rear Window is one of the greatest roles for a Hitchcock blonde, and her icy exterior dissolves into erotic heat in To Catch a Thief. But she was equally grand in the lightweight romantic-comedy/musical High Society, holding her own against Frank Sinatra and outshining Bing Crosby (for the second time). This is all to say that The Swan may be the perfect vehicle for Kelly, and outside of High Society and Dial M for Murder contains her greatest performance.

The Swan tells the story of a princess who loves a tutor, but must give him up for an arranged marriage having more to do with monetary concerns and transitions of power than anything resembling love. It’s a bittersweet tale, asking of its actors to be able to deliver elements of drama and comedy, and each of them delivers a delicate performance.

Alec Guinness could always be counted on to give a great performance, so that he both nails the laughs and finds the pathos and decency in his prince is no surprise. His wit is sparkling here, and he delivers some great zingers while not only keeping a straight face but maintaining his aristocratic airs. Louis Jourdan is pure charm as the tutor secretly pining away and dreaming of rising above his class to live happily ever after with Kelly. Jourdan and Kelly make for a supremely attractive couple; both blessed with an aristocratic beauty that makes the rest of us look like homeless slobs.

And yet Kelly stood out the most for me. Here that annoying put-upon British inflection fits the character like a glove. While she normally appears wooden in other dramatic films, she seems at ease and reserved because her princess would have been taught to be reserved. The snow covered volcano, as Hitchcock dubbed her, exterior masks a quick intelligence and yearning for true romance. The ending reveals why the title is of that particular avian creature, and the comparison of Kelly to a swan is a metaphor too perfect for words.

Charles Vidor keeps things taunt and appropriately delicate, and I found myself surprisingly wrapped up in the film, even if it is imperfect. It’s elegant and sophisticated, but still at times too stiff and withholding from the audience. And the romantic triangle never properly comes together or heats up between Kelly and Guinness, but I still found The Swan to be a great demonstration of why people love Grace Kelly in the first place. In this film, in this role, she seems to be born not just to play this on the screen, but in life. And seeing as how she became a real princess shortly after wrapping production on this film only serendipity can be the right explanation for the seamless merging of actress and role.

Ran is ostensibly a variation on King Lear, and possibly the greatest film adaptation of the Bard’s play. But it isn’t hard to see Kurosawa empathetically viewing his Lear, here called Lord Ichimonji, as a cipher for his own troubled twenty year existence in Japanese culture.

Kurosawa’s golden period was between 1950 and 1965, beginning with Rashomon and ending with Red Beard, and after that he fell upon hard times. Changing viewpoints in Japanese cultural and artistic identity found him slavish to Western techniques and a relic of an older filmmaking sensibility. Between 1970 and 1993 he made only seven films. Funding was particularly hard to come by and it took him a decade to assemble the funds for Ran.

So when we see the Lord Ichimonji’s fall from a plane of unassailable power to desperation and wandering in the wilderness, it isn’t hard to imagine Kurosawa feeling the same way. But it isn’t just the fall from grace and descent into uncertainty, at the time of filming, Kurosawa was 75, and Ran features a main character who is ready to step back from the main line of power and ruling, but isn’t about to settle out to pasture. Ichimonji is assessing his legacy, and it's easy to see this towering master of cinema doing much of the same and filling in a bit of autobiography in the sympathy we ultimately feel for the mad warlord.

This sense of autobiography merges with King Lear to produce a heightened epic variation of the story. Lear was already a grand tragedy, the destruction of a household by interior greed and an unquenchable thirst for power, and Ran finds a way to up the stakes even more.

In broad strokes the stories are very much the same, but in finite details things have been changed, characters cut or merged, and another owes more to a character out of Macbeth than anyone in Lear. Both tell the story of an elderly monarch distributing the wealth and lands to his three children, the banishment of the youngest child who loves him enough to speak out against his questionable decision-making, the fighting which not only tears the kingdom apart but sees the destruction of the family, and the monarch’s descent into madness as the he aimlessly wanders the lands seeing the decay that his pride, arrogance and power brought about.

Lear goes mad because he realizes too late that the only child who loved him questioned him, and he banished her away. Ran features that element of the story, but Ichimonji’s madness has more to do with the realization that his three sons are going to destroy each other in order to gain the most power/land. As a man who spent his entire life going out and conquering what he wanted, he has now begun to get karmic retribution for his sins and arrogance.

The acting is solid across the board, and by and large, played fairly straight. The two notable exceptions to this rule are Tatsuya Nakadai as Lord Ichimonji and Mieko Harada as Lady Kaede. Tatsuya Nakadai begins his performance in a more controlled and realistic manner, but once his character begins a descent into madness it takes on a more highly theatrical and Noh-like manner. His face becomes heavily painted to resemble a chalky living-ghost appearance and his gestures become grander and he throws himself about violently. It could dip easily into overacting, but somehow both Nakadai and Kurosawa manage to anchor it enough in the grand scheme of the film to make it work seamlessly. The fall of his character is so great, the ultimate devastation of his house and legacy so sweeping, that a highly theatrical manner of acting works.

The best performance belongs to Mieko Harada as Lady Kaede, a snake in the lotus flower if there ever was one. She’s more Lady Macbeth than anything else, and Harada makes the most of her limited screen-time. I saw this film and figured she was nominated or had won several arms full of awards, but she was empty-handed. I consider this one of the great injustices of the 1985 awards season. The scene where she seduces her brother-in-law alone is both utterly transfixing and terrifying. She uses every trick in her arsenal to get him to conform to her will-power. Not only sex, which she does use, but a hysterical fake crying fit in which she is so bored by own forced emotions that she distracts herself which squashing a bug instead. Lady Kaede is a by-product of Ichimonji’s careless war-mongering, and she has had a lifetime to fester her wounds and plan her revenge – it is she who sets up the annihilation of the household and meets her death with acceptance that her goal has been accomplished.

Kurosawa’s directorial eye was frequently grandiose in films like Seven Samurai or Throne of Blood, and this film is no different. The battle scenes, of which there are many, are filmed from a god’s-eye perspective, steadily observing the violence and bloodshed with no cuts to spare us some of the gorier details – a quick scene of a soldier holding his own cut-off arm lingers in the imagination as its treated as a small detail in a sweeping camera movement across the remains of a battle.

And the costumes are where most of the color comes from as the landscape is frequently a barren vista, monochromatic castle interiors or a scorched battlefield. The costumes appear drunk on color and textures, emotionally coded to the character’s state or nature, they make the film more grand by simply being the garments draped across this band of miserable characters.

Shakespeare is a malleable artist, and it’s a commonly held belief that every generation gets a Shakespearean adaptation that it deserves – the 40s had Olivier’s veddy British, atmospheric Hamlet, 60s had the romantic, doomed, youthful Romeo and Juliet, and the 80s got this masterpiece in which a powerful man gets knocked asunder by the sins of his greed.

Paul Schrader and Nick Nolte are no strangers to essaying works on violent, abusive men who shatter under their own ego, and Affliction, while no great masterwork, fits neatly in with their milieu.

While a very good movie, the stark cinematography and overall bleak nature of the production are invaluable assets in exposing the more absorbing story of familial demons and abusive cycles in generations, Affliction is so very close to greatness that its rewards far out-weigh the few missteps.

To get the bad out of the way, Sissy Spacek and Willem Dafoe are spectacular in their supporting roles, but they’re left with little screen time despite being characters so implicitly tied to the main narrative. Dafoe in particular does nothing much besides provide narration and show up for one extended scene as Nolte’s younger brother. Spacek works magic in her minimal screen-time going from supportive girlfriend to defiantly removing herself from the situation once her dignity and self-worth have become tarnished.

And a sub-plot involving Nolte’s character becoming obsessed with an accidental death and devolving into insane conspiracy theories and vigilante justice distracts and proves unnecessary. This storyline eats up too much time and distracts from the heart of the film which is the relationship dynamic between James Coburn as the father and Nolte as the son.

Nolte always seems to be such a commanding and brute force on the screen, a man who demands our attention, one that seems capable of tackling anything head-on with his sheer confidence. So it’s disarming to see him shrink into a frightened little boy in the presence of his father. Coburn, for his part, delivers a glorious performance of a truly horrendous man. Coburn was an abusive father, leaving his two sons shattered and his daughter a born-again religious zealot. His alcoholism and lecherous nature are so despicable that we can easily see why all of his children have abandoned him. Nolte has no emotional investment with him; he’s simply going through the motions of a father-son relationship. Dafoe fled town and endures his brother’s frequent midnight calls in which he drunkenly rambles on and on about nothing of substance.

The film is at its most potent when it sits back and observes their toxic relationship and how the father’s disease and anger have slowly turned his son into a paranoid, self-hating creature who inflects his wounds on anyone in close range. Coburn deservedly won an Oscar for his performance, and in a more just world Nolte would have won over Roberto Benigni. The ending alone is enough to justify the two men making a clean sweep of any and all acting awards given out in 1998. It’s a predetermined conclusion that one day, the abuse of a child will come back to strike a parent in some way, shape or form.

Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing may have a myriad of problems working against it, but William Holden and Jennifer Jones aren’t among them. Holden in particular seems a little surprising here as he’s put a rest to his patented sardonic world-weary persona and embraced a more ebullient romanticism. Jones, for her part, was a chameleonic actress before such a thing was required for survival in Hollywood. She won an Oscar for her first time in a leading role and seemed to use that clout to reach far and wide to play a large variety of roles. Her plain dark features made it easy to believe her in roles in which she played a biracial character – Pearl in Duel in the Sun, or the Eurasian doctor in this come to mind. And they deliver a believable and pleasing chemistry. This type of weepy hokum seems a little beneath their talents, but neither one of them appear to be slumming, turning in performances that know how to maximize this material for mass effect.

But that’s also part of the problem. A biracial character seems radical enough for a mainstream film from the 50s, and sure enough their romance is treated as the kind of martyred and overwrought stuff of cheap dime store romances. Miscegenation may be the topic, but any racism they encounter seems heavily edited and watered down. Even Holden’s character seems a bi-product of racial attitudes, claiming to love her and appreciate their cultural differences while still making comments and jokes about chop sticks, her chosen identity and Chinese customs. All of this is heavily glossed over, but it’s there around the edges making their relationship seem less than ideally romantic as the film wants us to believe that it is.

It isn’t just the undercurrent of racial animosity that proves problematic for Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, but the sheer amount of effort and musical cues that have gone in to it to make sure you know when you’re supposed to cry and how hard. The film is all artifice and bombast, a dated 50s relic more remembered for the chemistry of the leads and the title song which went to become both a big hit and an Oscar winner. If someone more cynical and sardonic like Douglas Sirk had taken hold of this film we would be having a totally different discussion. I can only imagine what a true master of candy-colored melodramas like Sirk or Nichols Ray could have and would have magically spun out of this high-camp schmaltz.