40 minutes into this movie I'm thinking, "this dud has got to be over soon." I look down and check the running time and I am horrified to see that somehow it's 2 hours and 20 minutes long. 40 mins and I'm thinking omg, where is this obvious, interminable melodrama going? 40 mins in, and I'm thinking this might be a good time to settle on a genre. And I'm wondering, why on earth would DeHaviland take this degrading, 1-dimensional ethnic role?
Why do they tease this out so laboriously? How did so much star power sign on to this undeveloped, inept movie? It must be this padded and pointless, to provide each of 5 or 6 major egos their own moment; all of them are wildly unrelated to the general flow of Mitchum's "big conflict" storyline, which is of no dramatic interest. What is the point? The only possible angle I can imagine for this movie is that it was a women's movie about men; and that female viewers in 1955 might imagine this oddity spoke to them, about their situations.
Along with the unusually low quality of the script, a viewer will spend all his/her time picking the corn kernels out of the ham. And every frame of this looks like it was filmed on the cheap. Completely squandered, expensive cast.
Why do they tease this out so laboriously? How did so much star power sign on to this undeveloped, inept movie? It must be this padded and pointless, to provide each of 5 or 6 major egos their own moment; all of them are wildly unrelated to the general flow of Mitchum's "big conflict" storyline, which is of no dramatic interest. What is the point? The only possible angle I can imagine for this movie is that it was a women's movie about men; and that female viewers in 1955 might imagine this oddity spoke to them, about their situations.
Along with the unusually low quality of the script, a viewer will spend all his/her time picking the corn kernels out of the ham. And every frame of this looks like it was filmed on the cheap. Completely squandered, expensive cast.