ChikPapa Very disappointed :(

Konterr Brilliant and touching

Infamousta brilliant actors, brilliant editing

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

lyganywern Enjoyable and welcome - just shows how few films were made about the end of the British Empire (India being an exception). Well cast and the excellent supports - Sydney Tafler, Michael Goodliffe and Maurice Denham bring added credibility. Nice to see Tafler in a role other than his usual line in club managers and assorted crooks. Likewise, Goodliffe shows a gravitas contrasting from his normal parts - the seedy (Jigsaw 1962) through to various officer types and police inspectors.

secondtake The 7th Dawn (1964)The best of this movie is an attempt to show the politics of Malaysia after WWII. There are lessons here that apply to our own time, with European powers facing rising anger in developing countries. Here it's the British who are facing horrors from the Malaysians because they own so much of the good land and maintain typical colonial class and monetary power (even though it was no longer an official colony). A little like half the world, I suppose, in mid-Twentieth Century, including South Africa and Vietnam.The movie is stiff and forced in other ways, and often feels like a movie that might have been made a decade earlier. It plays with clichés and uses convenient movie tricks that are false even to the uninitiated. The leading man hasn't that worn well over the years--William Holden. I generally like him, but here I can feel him acting too often. Some of the charming ticks in his face, or his dry delivery, now seems fake and even smarmy, like the letch in him can't hide beneath his acting, or the "leading man" in him is all he has. I have a feeling these quirks were attractive at the time, fifty years ago.It's not a total train wreck of a movie. Susannah York is stunning in a way that avoids the stereotyping she often reluctantly fit into, the Pop British flower-child. Unfortunately York isn't a terrific actress here, and at first is merely the serious woman to put against Holden's character. She does have an important role, but it's extremely limited (you'll see why) and she can be sculptural without pretense. But then next to York is the "other" woman to whom Holden (46 years old here) is attracted (which by itself is absurd, York playing the less desirable woman). This is played by the younger and unconvincing Capucine. (She went by one name, but was born with the usual allotment.) It's not that she's a bad actor really, but that she's a frivolous object with so little awareness of what surrounds here. I'm sure people like her were in Malaysia, but to make her a centerpiece of the movie brings everything down a couple notches.If we can absorb the stilted (at times) style and the improbable aspects in the subplots (Holden with the young tart slashing through the jungle with machetes) we are able to go back to the political facts. The details are fictional, for sure, but the broad outline, the fear of Westerners in a land where they are not at all welcome, is believable. And the film doesn't paint it completely as a bunch of innocent English richies being killed and tormented by the rabble, though there is a little of that. It's more about a the real conflict of histories and ways of life. And a sticking to principles. I think a more potent idea here, without York by this point, is whether personal friendship can hold up through huge differences of culture and loyalty. This might be the best part of the movie, and in those sections you'll at least feel depth to the idea and even the acting, even if the outcome is a bit beside the point. In one later scene the woman at this point (the tart) asks, "How can you believe him?" Exactly! The question of trust in the mind of the audience is obvious to the characters, too, and so it's the final large theme, taking us from the first scene to almost the last.Everything outside shot on location, which adds authenticity not only on the plantations (rubber) but later in the raw jungle. If you watch this you'll find things to like for sure. But it's not constructed very well, and the clunky parts will overwhelm you at times. You'll also find that people who should be freaking out (on death row, or a man seeing his daughter likely to die) calmly proceed instead. Or when someone takes a prisoner after a huge fight, they then let down their guard and trust him to walk away with his weapon.It's too bad. A lot was pointed in the right direction at first. There are more recent movies that take the realism of their periods seriously and to probably better results (blockbusters like "Gandhi" or "The Last Emperor" and more perceptive if imperfect films like "Lust Caution" and the weirdly chilling "Disgrace"). But the theme is really one of the largest in the history of movies, actually, if you start looking at everything from "The Rains Came" to "The Letter" both from the classic black and white Hollywood years. "The 7th Dawn" fits into this picture somewhere.

bkoganbing The Seventh Dawn seemed a natural for William Holden given the spectacular success he had in that part of the world with The Bridge On the River Kwai. Unfortunately Seventh Dawn doesn't quite live up to the David Lean classic.What The Seventh Dawn is, is a sincere attempt to look at the issues confronting Southeast Asia during the Fifties. Three people, American William Holden, and natives Capucine and Tetsuro Tamba have been involved in resistance to the Japanese. Holden like the country so much, he's going to settle down as a rubber planter. Capucine is going back to teaching school and agitating for eventual independence from Great Britain. Tamba is going to school himself, a scholarship awaits him at a university in Moscow.Fast forward seven years or so from V-J day and all of them have succeeded more or less in their chosen paths. Unfortunately their paths put them on a collision course with each other.Holden's a free-wheeling hedonist who just won't settle down and marry Capucine and he's got a new distraction in the form of Sussanah York the daughter of the new British administrator. Her role is the weakest here and the dumbest. Her offer of sacrifice to bring peace to Malaya just doesn't ring true at all.I do like what Tetsuro Tamba did with his part. His people as he's been taught in Moscow can't feed themselves, let alone govern themselves. They need Red style tutelage and he's going to see they get it.Measured against The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Seventh Dawn falls far short. Still it's nicely photographed in the Republic of Malaysia and the cast is earnest enough in their roles. William Holden fans will like it.

bbsilvers When the old KCOP Channel 13 in Los Angeles showed matinées (afterschool for me then), I saw this engrossing movie. Who could resist the lushness of the Malay jungle juxtaposed with the British Governor's pristine lawns? Not to mention the fascinating interweaving of the old love triangle amongst Ferris, Dhana, and Ng with an anti-colonial rebellion? I may have been a precocious child, but these things were clear to me amidst the Vietnam War. It's good to see others who recall this movie for what it remains--a trenchant comment on nationalist insurgents fighting their imperialist overlords. The irony is that, despite the purity of their intentions, the guerrillas destroy what they fight for: control of their own destiny. One might read the lovely Dhana as the fragile Malayan countryside laid waste in the ensuing skirmishes. True enough that the British colonial government executes Dhana. Yet both Ferris and Ng lose their dreams as well: Ferris leaves Malaya without Dhana (or even Candace), and Ng is dead.When I found the LP recording of the beautiful Riz Ortolani score about 20 years ago, I snatched it up. I won't expect a CD version, but Ortolani deserves to be lauded for music that supports the storyline. We may well remember "More" from Mondo Cane, but the haunting theme from The 7th Dawn can hold its own.Now, if only one could include this movie in a grouping of films with the broad theme of protesting war (Live for Life, Year of Living Dangerously, Torn Apart, Indochine)and show them to politicians....