From the Terrace
|
List Price: Our Price: $7.24 You Save: $7.74 (52%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $6.20 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Canada
Movie Reviews of From the Terrace
Movie Review: My View From The Sofa
Summary: 5 Stars
Paul Newman has many more famous roles...but for some reason, this is one of my all time favorite movies of his. It comes on the Love Stories, AMC, or TCM cable channels every here and now...or you could just buy it like I did.He's nice, determined, well-meaning Alfred Eaton, who starts off with lofty, wealthy ideas about what is important in life...the right woman, the right career, the right friends...and showing them all how important he can be when he has them. Ultimately, he learns that what is important is only what feels right to him alone.
I love his story of personal discovery as much as his love affair story with Natalie. Alfred and Natalie have this beautiful scene where they are saying goodbye, they're barely touching, but it's the most painfully romantic thing to see.
Paul Newman and his wife Joanne Woodward have some excellent scenes in this movie also with real good comeback dialogue. He's the hardworking, decent man and she's the desperate-to-impress and just plain desperate society wife. She self-righteously and hurtfully accuses him of adultery with a girl with no guts when she's been sleeping with her ex-fiancee all along. She actually calls her lover and arranges a tryst while her husband is in the room!!!! She has guts!!!! (if little else) Unbeknownst to her, Alfred has exhaustingly if unaffectedly (if you can look unaffected and disgusted at the same time, that is) done his best to makes her invisible in the room, but she probably just becomes invisible without any real effort on his part to make her so by that point. Their voices just have the most impactful tones...especially when they get to play off of each other. I can play their final scene over and over again where she says she won't give him a divorce and he says,"Any further communication between you and me will be through legal channels." He has the most genuine smile on that handsome face in that moment than through the entire movie!!!!!
This movie is actually pretty long, but not a moment is wasted. It all comes together in the end when Alfred finally chooses what he actually wants instead of what he's supposed to want.
Maybe it's because it's so subtle and not at all like a "movie" that it seems to be largely overlooked by everyone except me and 20 other people. Paul Newman is one fine, naturally classy actor, I say.
Movie Review: Excellent oldie.....
Summary: 5 Stars
A view FROM THE TERRACE is what Paul Newman's character David Alfred Eaton has of his future wife Mary (JoAnne Woodward). The screen play was based on a best-selling novel of the same name by John O'Hara. Given it was released in the 1950s when sex on the screen was verboten and not much more explicit in novels (ban a book in Boston), one must appreciate the work it took for Newman and Woodward to give these performances. Like many other teenagers of my generation, I was "in love" with Paul Newman. Newman could make female hearts flutter by simply looking at the camera with his big blue eyes. Many other teens preferred Marlon Brando, his peer and rival for female affection. I believe these two actors were the Leonardo de Caprio and Brad Pitt of their day, although in the long run, Newman (like de Caprio) has had more staying power and gracefully made the transition to mature roles.
In the 1950s, to see a film one had to attend a theater, where the screen was usually covered with a huge velvet curtain. FTT played at the Center theater in my small town, and I saw the film six times after it was released. I was able to get into the theater for a quarter, and as my allowance was $3, this was no small sacrifice. So, you might say this film was one of my all time favorites.
Watching it again almost 50 years later, I wondered how I would react, and of course the passage of time and arrival of many other actors and vast changes in filmmaking have affected the way I view the film and Newman, but I still like him enormously, and this film holds it's own, though the storyline may seem archaic.
This film is about infidelity and divorce and the price of success, a story line that may be lost on generations raised in an age of no-fault divorces and dual earner households. Once upon a time, divorce and infidelity were considered absolutely scandalous, and financially disastrous. In fact, if you divorced, your life was ruined. Many couples stayed together and suffered the ignominy of a cheating spouse. FTT was a ground-breaking film because it tackled these issues head-on.
The DVD version of the film is well done, and the price reasonable (technicolor and cinemascope production). Do your self a favorite, buy this DVD and add it to the shelf where you keep CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF and other 50's favorites.
Movie Review: Wonderful movie about life, love, marriage, and true happiness.
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought this movie on a whim. I'm a big Paul Newman fan (who isn't?) and when I read the synopsis, it really caught my interest.
Paul Newman play Alfred Eaton who comes home from the war to broken home of degrading father and drunk mother (Myrna Loy). Desperate to get out, he and his friend decide to go into business together. Alfred's soul purpose is to make money, he wants a life of luxury, far away from the coal mining town he grew up in.
Shortly into the film Alfred meets Mary St. John (Joanne Woodward), she comes from an extremely rich family and is engaged. Knowing this does not stop Alfred from pursuing Mary, and eventually she gives into him, convinces her father he's a good match, and they marry. The one thing the couple agrees upon is that they want Alfred to succeed and make something of himself. Money is important, and Mary wants a husband of substance.
When the plane building business that Alfred has dreamed up doesn't quite work out for him, he's invited into the corporate world. This job is rich and fully lucrative, however, it keeps Alfred away from home weeks and months at time. His marriage suffers from this, and Mary ends up having affairs.
Alfred stays true to his wife, though he knows that his marriage is falling apart. And it's only until late in the film that he meets Natalie, daughter of a Coal Mine owner, that he truly realizes he is unhappy in his life. Natalie is played my Ina Balin, she is fresh-faced and sweet to watch. Alfred and Natalie's love grows slowly, and I felt myself caring for both characters.
The music fits the movie perfectly and I swooned a lot while watching it. It's bit soap-opera like but if you're interested in a classic romance, it's a good way to go. The actors are refining and Paul Newman is enjoyable to look at, of course.
Movie Review: A great film in every way!
Summary: 5 Stars
From the Terrace was a huge release in 1960, with its cast, and the long long novel that it is loosely based on. John O'Hara wrote this book with great loathing for the cold war, Eisenhauer, capitalism, and relationships, which he says in his novel have "no potential at all."
The film version touches on these issues, but avoids the drugs, addictions to sex, etc. and shows us marriages that are very bad, and affairs that are taudry, and Paul Newman's character etching out a career with a hateful wife and a loving mistress.
The mistress will be his new spouse, but his wife of old will block him at every turn. Paul Newman's Mr Eaton( beautifully played, as is Ms. Woodward's character) shuns NYC for love; it won't play. Hence the underlying tension, the display of virtue by Paul that will never work. Just as it did not work for his promiscuous mother, played with seeringn intensity by Myrna Loy!
Wonderful score by the great Elmer Bernstein, and photography by the endlessly talented Leo Tover (watch the stampede sometime in tghen 1955 western, The Tall Men), and Mark Robson's smooth as silk direction. And I remember the curved CinemaScope screen, but no matter, buy this and feel the past come into the present.
Movie Review: Romantic Drama
Summary: 5 Stars
From the Terrace
Paul Newman is a the top of his career, and with his looks. Joanne Woodward, his real wife and his wife in the movie, is a nasty, possessive, run around, wife. Newman climbs to the top by saving a corporate CEO's grandson from drowning and as a reward, gets a corporate job. But Newman is caught between his corporate job and his unfaithful wife because its against corporate policy, no matter the reason, to get a divorce.
Newman, on one of his assignments, meets a daughter of a mining CEO in Pennslyvania who is nice, humble, and just perfect for Newman. They fall in love with each other, but, his scheming wife, does not want to give him a divorce because she has the best of both worlds; i.e., a lover and her husband who provides her all the luxuaries she wants.
Although this movie is a real soap opera type of flick, I recommend it as a great acting, ane enjoyable story line that anyone would enjoy.