Steinesongo Too many fans seem to be blown away

Laikals The greatest movie ever made..!

Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

Micah Lloyd Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

neocanuckbd A muddled attempt to achieve a great movie that fails on nearly every level and an absolute waste of time to watch unless you are into unintentional camp failures.

Robert J. Maxwell This soap opera really sprawls over the years before and after the Civil War. Montgomery Clift is a quiet homegrown college graduate in mutual love with pretty young Eva Marie Saint. They seem fated for each other. They'll probably be married, raise a number of surviving children, and live in a white two-story house on the outskirts of Fairhaven in Raintree County, Indiana. But then, the luscious Southern belle, Elizabeth Taylor, visits Fairhaven. She and Clift fall in love forever after.But dark Elizabeth is Veronica to Saint's blond Betty. Or is it the other way around? No matter. Anyway they have contrasting personalities: the intensely passionate Taylor and the winsome and innocent Saint. Saint, for instance, would never dream of putting out for handsome, intelligent, and sensitive Monty, whereas Taylor does so on their second or third date and then LIES to him about having gotten pregnant. He doesn't mind one way or the other, besotted as he is.I don't know whether it's worthwhile trying to get through the plot. It's probably been done elsewhere, and I'm too tired to trace the trips, the outbursts of anger and guilt, Sherman's march through Georgia, and the finale, which no power on earth could force me to reveal. Much of it has to do with the fear of having a touch of the tar brush in one's blood.But I must say, New Orleans is given rather a bad rap as a representative Southern city. It wasn't like any of the others. It had an animated and rich multi-ethnic heritage at the time -- American, French, Spanish, Caribbean, and African. Edgar Degas visited French relatives there late in the '19th century. Slaves of course but not nearly as brutal a system as elsewhere. William Tecumseh Sherman taught at Louisiana State Seminary of Learning & Military Academy, later to become Louisiana State University.Others have claimed that it was easy to tell the difference between pre- and post-accident scenes of Montgomery Clift but I couldn't. As for the accident, Clift was doing booze and other substances to excess on a daily basis during the shooting. I mean, eating steaks he'd spilled on the floor and so on. After an evening at Liz Taylor's manse perched on a hill, he drove drunkenly down the winding road and didn't quite make it.Neither the accident nor the booze seemed to interfere with his acting, although the part of the pathetic loner in "A Place in the Sun" suited him better than the idealist he's forced to portray here. Elizabeth Taylor is blindingly beautiful. Many of her films cast her has a frustrated nut job. Eva Marie Saint has the more sympathetic role as the unspectacular girl from home who never manages to shrug off her love for Clift.It's long. It has an overture and even an entr'acte, evocative photography by Robert Surtees, and a lushly orchestrated but fulsome score by Johnny Green. It's no "Gone With the Wind," though, partly because it substitutes anguish for laughs.

kindtxgal This is a fantastic Civil War film divided before and after the War of the States. I recommend that prospective viewers catch it on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) as I note that the DVD version offered is only 1:23 in length. The actual length of the film is 2 hours and 53 minutes, so I would wonder why the DVD version is so much less in length, not even a full feature length of 1:30. Just a thought. So, having rewatched it again, this time on TCM, I find that it's truly a fantastic movie...great actors, particularly Montgomery Clift who was seriously injured during its filming in an off-set automobile accident -- the resulting injuries serving to affect his remaining life in a negative way. It's interesting to watch the camera work post-accident. That aside, all of the acting roles are precise and everyone gives their roles their all. Montgomery Clift clearly shone out in this films and warranted an Academy nomination at minimum, as well as Best Picture nomination, neither which occurred unfortunately. Thus, it sometimes is passed over. For Civil War enthusiasts, it's a must see. Just enough of the fighting and struggle is shown to make its point without going overboard. For me the film is about love, commitment, and the power of holding onto a dream, real or fictional.

mcbride500 I read the novel before I saw the film. The book was magical despite its odd pattern of flashbacks that were out of chronological order. At 1100 pages, the story suffers mightily when compressed to fit the length of the film. I believe that the film starts about 1859 and ends in about the year 1866 while the book covers 1839 thru 1892. The plot was significantly altered regarding the Susanna Drake character also.I enjoyed the film and think that it was wonderfully cast. The book dwells at length on the natural beauty and the eternal character of Raintree County. This is hard to capture on film without narration. I hope that a more robust version of the story will someday be developed.