This movie is one I'd put up beside The Last Picture Show, A Small Town In Texas and a number of other portrayals of small town life in the US circa 1950s. The difference lies with the Remick/McQueen combo, the harmony, the tension and the incredible intensity of Steve McQueen at his absolute best.
The McQueen character here is a small-town young man from a lousy homelife, grown up, gone to prison for a brief time, poor and trying to make something of his life with his young wife, Lee Remick and their pre-school daughter, Margaret Rose. McQueen's past plays heavily against him; his hangups, pride, independence and general hard-headedness lead him into troubles with the entire town and the law enforcement community while the endearing Remick and Margaret Rose watch in tender helpless desolation.
This movie belongs on the best-seller list with all the other oldies. It's a better one than most.
Lee Remick upstages Steve McQueen
This is a very accurate portrait of not quite aquiring the American Dream. An often overlooked gem, this film deals with misplaced passions and how they can affect the people you love. I have to give Lee Remick the award for this one. The long-suffering wife of an ex-con (McQueen), she portrays the quentissential southern lady who is trying to be optimistic, in spite of the hand that life has dealt her. I went to school in Houston with the girl who played their daughter (Kimberly Block) and I remember when she was absent in Kindergarten to make this film. Steve does a marvelous job in making us both feel sorry for the character and being quite repulsed at his antics. But kudos have to go to Lee Remick on this one. God bless you both!
Remick is the heart and soul of this film
Horton Foote's spare and sad drama is given deep heart and soul by the performance of Lee Remick. While Steve McQueen gives the film brawn and brashness, Remick illustrates the wonderful, small moments that make Foote's work so memorable. Remick's scenes with her young daughter -- as she shyly recalls meeting her husband at a dance and later as they suffer through the storms of McQueen's demons -- are touching, warm and finely drawn. And Remick, in her scenes with McQueen, shows the quiet strength that is so captivating in Foote's heroines. And director Mulligan is wise enough to give her talents full resonance. For the memorable combination of Lee Remick and Horton Foote, do not miss this movie.
Ranking No. 21 on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest American films, this 1940 classic is a bit dated in its noble sentimentality, but it remains a luminous example of Hollywood classicism from the peerless director of mythic Americana, John Ford. Adapted by Nunnally Johnson from John Steinbeck's classic novel, the film tells a simple story about Oklahoma farmers leaving the depression-era dustbowl for the promised land of California, but it's the story's emotional resonance and theme of human perseverance that makes the movie so richly and timelessly rewarding. It's all about the humble Joad family's cross-country trek to escape the economic devastation of their ruined farmland, beginning when Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) returns from a four-year prison term to discover... More Info about this DVD Director(s): John Ford DVD Release Date: Released the 06 April 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Days of Wine and Roses is one film not to watch if you are melancholic by nature, as this tale of middle-class alcoholism rings very true. Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick are the besotted couple who find that life is not always fun when viewed through rosé-colored glasses. He's the San Francisco business executive who marries Remick and seduces her into a cocktail culture that soon overpowers them both. It is not a pretty picture when their life shatters around them, but this film is extremely compelling for their performances. It is matched only by Billy Wilder's Lost Weekend and the more explicit Leaving Las Vegas. This was nominated for five Academy Awards and won for the title song by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer. Filmed by Blake Edwards in 1962, it is based... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Jack Lemmon - Lee Remick - Charles Bickford - Jack Klugman Director(s): Blake Edwards DVD Release Date: Released the 06 January 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Nominated for nine Academy Awards in 1957, Peyton Place has become synonymous with torrid soap opera. Though the novel by Grace Metalious is even more sensational, the movie provides plenty of tantalizing story turns--secrets, adultery, rape, bitter parents, frustrated teenagers, suicide, and murder. Multiple storylines deftly interweave: Allison MacKenzie (Diane Varsi), an ambitious young girl struggling with the neurotic fears of her mother (Lana Turner, in a career-reviving performance) and the neurotic fears of the boy she loves (Russ Tamblyn), while her best friend Selena Cross (Hope Lange) fights off the brutal advances of her drunken stepfather. The movie had to sanitize the novel's New England town in order to get some of the more unsavory plot turns past the... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Lana Turner - Lee Philips - Lloyd Nolan - Arthur Kennedy Director(s): Mark Robson DVD Release Date: Released the 02 March 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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The most famous and sublime treatment of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, John Ford's My Darling Clementine is by any measure one of the most classically perfect Westerns ever made. Henry Fonda plays a hard, serious Wyatt Earp leading a cattle drive west with his brothers when a stopover in the wild town of Tombstone ends in the murder of his youngest brother. Wyatt takes up the badge he had turned down earlier and tames the wide-open town with his brothers (Ward Bond and Tim Holt), all the while waiting for the wild Clantons (led by Walter Brennan's ruthless Old Man Clanton) to make a mistake. Victor Mature delivers perhaps his finest performance as the tubercular gambler Doc Holliday, an alcoholic Eastern doctor escaping civilization in the Wild West. Ford takes great liberties... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Henry Fonda - Linda Darnell Director(s): John Ford DVD Release Date: Released the 06 January 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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The up-and-down career of director John Milius had no finer moment than The Wind and the Lion, a dandy adventure tale. It's based on fact: An American (played by Candice Bergen) and her two children were kidnapped in 1904 Morocco by a Berber tribe, an international incident settled by President Theodore Roosevelt's "big stick" military muscle. The film's sweep and swagger are unabashedly old-fashioned, even as Milius occasionally pokes fun at the grand characters. Some of the peripheral material is sloppy, but as long as Milius keeps his sights locked on the two powerful protagonists, he's dead-on: Brian Keith makes a gutsy Roosevelt, and Sean Connery is in splendid form (with Scots accent in place--got a problem with that?) as the dashing Berber chieftain. Perhaps overshadowed... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Sean Connery - Candice Bergen Director(s): John Milius DVD Release Date: Released the 06 January 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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