Bridge of San Luis Rey (1944)
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List Price: $19.98
Features
• Black & White
• Original recording reissued
• NTSC
In Theaters : 11 February, 1944
Video Release : 06 April, 1999 |
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Bridge of San Luis Rey (1944) Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
Worth Watching Even In Truncated Form
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Rowland V. Lee screwed up many motion pictures but this isn't one of them. How often do you see the screen legends Akim Tamiroff and Nazimova together in one film? At the very end of her long, illustrious career, Nazimova girded her loins and lent her indelible presence to a final bunch of films (after what amounted to a blacklist on account of her wayward sexuality). THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY is one of her better projects and its decadent sensibility is a good match for the cagaries of her screen image. As he did his later novel, THE EIGHTH DAY, Thornton Wilder used the apparently simple story of five people meeting by accident and dying together to ask some thought-provoking questions about fate and chance. Why do we do the things we do? Are we moved by some higher (or lower) purpose? Is destiny irreversible? If we all meet the same death, what is the sense in leading a good life? Do individual lives have any meaning? Wilder's themes spoke to a wartime audience as few other authors. (His play OUR TOWN was the most performed American play during World War II.)
Lynn Bari is just as lovely here as she was in HELLO, FRISCO, HELLO. I never could understand why she never became a bigger star! Now we remember her only vaguely as the woman who married Sid Luft before Judy Garland did. In THE BRIDGE ON SAN LUIS REY she has what amounts to the leading part, and she acquits herself admirably, her Spanish accent soft but convincing. Watch for Abner Biberman in a small part. Biberman's name doesn't mean much now as an actor, but after the actual, McCarthy inspired blacklist, he rose to the occasion and directed the notorious SALT OF THE EARTH, one of the few independent pictures of the early 1950s worth watching today.
This DVD edition is nothing to write home about; it has long been rumored that more of Wilder's novel was actually filmed, then cut to keep the movie under a trim 90 minutes. But lovers of the novel have never felt Lee's film version to be an adequate representation of the rich character development of the book. |
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