Friday, July 21, 2006
BRANDO UNO
Today's NYTimes Best 1176 Film was
It is a good story; a message picture—paraplegics. These happen to be veterans but the story is really about the medical condition and recovery.
Sounds morbid but it is not. Actually, that is the problem, it sounds morbid and it is not. People's reactions.
Marlon Brando, in his first film, steals the show whenever he is on screen. The part is demanding physically and he is up to it. Oddly, it seems more strenuous to play someone who is paralyzed and in a wheel chair than not.
Teresa Wright plays an insipid, whiny kind of girlfriend/wife; a fifties stereotype only it was the real thing then. Everyone wears ties and 'good' clothes even at home. Even putting up curtains.
We were pretty tight assed then.
The hospital business which is the real thing saves the film from the love story.
Everett Sloane, a great actor from the period, plays the doctor to the hilt. Jack Webb and Richard Erdman are Brando's buddies as well as the gorgeous Arthur Jurado who only ever made this one movie. He may have been one of the actual patients who played as extras in the film but got a main part.
The film is blunt and direct and, un-like the fifties, pulls no punches.
It is directed by Fred Zinneman and produced by Stanley Cramer.
I will give it a 4 out of Netflix5 because of the casting of Teresa Wright and the sort of stiffness of the romantic angle.
