CheerupSilver Very Cool!!!

SmugKitZine Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

Kirandeep Yoder The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Raymond Sierra The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

philip-davies31 John Barry's music and Maurice Binder's credits sequence belong in a far better film than this overripe and putrid melodrama. The less said about anyone else's contribution - which all must have been embarrassed to acknowledge was the lowest point in their respective careers - the better. "All those people are crazy" as the Sheriff says (the only meaningful line of dialogue in the entire farrago). And, really, who wants to spend over two hours in the lunatic asylum of this cheap and pointless Hollywood degradation? Nowhere in this sprawling mess is there the slightest whiff of real human pain - except probably burned into the memory of the original audience, who had to sit squirming in endless torment beneath this over-the-top torrent of technicolor naffness. This is no morality - this is a ludicrous caricature of humanity. Cheap and offensive sensationalism. Reductive voyeurism, posturing as cinematic exposure. And worst of all NO PERCEPTIBLE DRAMATIC TENSION OR MORAL CATHARSIS WHATSOEVER. If only there had been any actual alcohol vapours to light up the screen at the fiery end, in an auto-da-fé of the wild unreality of that shambling mass of bad actors who even lacked the taste to avoid being stone cold sober while making themselves ridiculous, as their hopelessly pretend drunks spewed out across the Panavision expanse - - -Then, this rubbish could at last have ended in the blaze of recognition that normally consigns such an awful screenplay to the consuming fire of embarrassed self-knowledge BEFORE wasting time and money in unwisely perpetrating the abomination on the exhibitionist scale of a Panavision epic!A lurid pavement-oyster of a film. Definitely a night-out NOT to remember.(I saw this on Netflix UK - increasingly the purveyors of the most boring catalogue of films and TV programmes available anywhere. Its the sort of cheap date they are picking up too often these days.)

Smerdyakoff This movie was a product of the times like "All in the Family". Yeah, it was a Texas small town full of greedy heartless racist amoral lustful horrible white people. Maybe the writer was projecting her Hollywood social milieu? But nothing about it was believable starting with the beautiful sweet escaped con Bubber (what a stupid name) played by Robert Redford. He only had a couple months to go on his sentence, for a crime that was never mentioned but he had to be a free man like Cool Hand Luke, a classic 60s rebel stereotype mode. But he had to get free. The first big drama was that the hardened con he broke prison with killed a man for his car and money, which of course implicated Blubber. Even though most people in Tarl, the town in question, who knew Bubber knew he was basically a nice guy, lots of people all got it into their heads Bubber was coming back to get them personally. The spiteful weak bank VP Edwin Stewart, played by Robert Duvall, was certain Bubber was going to get him because of what he did to him 20 years ago as teenagers. Meanwhile his cheating lustful wife Emily is flirting with other men at his work place. This is just one example of the cartoonish Peyton Place vibe of the film. The film is partially carried by Marlon Brando as the town sheriff, Calder. He is a good man along with his stolid wife Ruby, played by Angie Dickinson. They managed to work some small Southern town racism on the side to gin up our contempt for these "evil" Southern white people. This is what made the movie so appealing to leftist urbanites and foreigners whose inclination was to regard the whole South as evil racist troglodytes,The script had some intelligence in it, but that was subsumed by its cynical cleverness. But it all failed at the end with a ridiculous and fatal scene in a burning junkyard. Here the locals all gathered to get Bubber, torch the place and party at the same time. The final climactic scene made no sense with one of the locals imitating Jack Ruby and gunning down the hapless Bubber, as our noble sheriff brought him to jail. This of course made no sense since Bubber did not murder a president. At worst he was suspected of murdering a strange man from another part of Texas so the movie's "Jack Ruby" connection is tenuous at best.

yelofneb-63037 ***may contain accidental spoilers*** There are movies and there are great movies. This is one of the latter--a magnificently mixed up story about good and bad people and not so good and not so bad people working their way through a crazy hot night in a small Texas town where slowly but surely all hell breaks loose. Even though it sounds like a lead-up to your average and common teen horror flick, The Chase is filled with the best actors in US movie history--even the first ever screen appearance of Robert Redford. It has Marlon Brando, still back in the days before he turned into Marlon the Hutt, with then absolutely gorgeous Angie Dickinson as his wife. Jane Fonda is there but only recognizable for her acting skill.Given such a talented cast, the director, Arthur Penn (Little Big Man and quite a few other little big movies), delivers a tight and perfectly controlled story that builds slowly from languid frustrations through tense dialog, slowly building to a literal explosion. Definitely worth watching.

classicsoncall A frustrating element bookends this picture with the character of Mrs. Reeves (Miriam Hopkins), mother of Bubber Reeves (Robert Redford), escaped from prison and on the run from a murder he's sure to be blamed for but didn't commit following the breakout. Each time we see her she's blaming herself for the way her son turned out, and quite literally has a nervous breakdown trying to convince Sheriff Calder (Marlon Brando) to give her son a pass. Bubber himself looks at his mother with disdain when she appeals to him by insisting that he take the money from the sale of the Reeves home to pay for a good defense lawyer. I would have welcomed a fuller exposition of what was going on there with Bubber and his Mom.It always fascinates me how certain actors establish a certain mannerism and use it from picture to picture. I've never read anyone else comment on it. In this one, I'm thinking of the way Redford uses that eye squint thing of his, usually just one eye, a trait he also exhibited as the Sundance Kid and as Sonny Steele in "The Electric Horseman". Brando's got his own thing too, but I didn't see it here, that slight brush to the jaw from "The Godfather" and "The Freshman". Other actors that have repeated a technique in a similar manner include Bogart with the facial grimace and Cagney with the shoulder shrug. For me, those little nuances heighten my viewing pleasure when I'm out there trying to catch them.As far as the story goes, I'd be hard pressed to come up with another picture with so many dysfunctional characters, where husbands and wives cheat on each other right out in the open, and carouse their lives away in alcohol and debauchery. It's what gave rise to Sheriff Calder's comment about the citizens of Terrell to wife Ruby (Angie Dickinson), noted in my summary line above. I also thought it kind of odd that Calder and his wife lived in an apartment stepping through a door directly from the sheriff's office. Gee, how weird is that? But you know what, the movie has a way of grabbing the viewer with it's disparate characters leading their train wreck lives, and it makes you want to stick around to see how it all plays out. As a couple of other reviewers on this board have noted, I also made a mental comparison of Bubber's shooting at the end of the story with that of Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald. It was almost too blatant, and I'd like to know what went into the decision to film the scene that way.As for Brando, I think he earned his pay here. Not only was his role performed superbly, but he also managed to take some WWE style bumps without benefit of a stand-in. Back in the Sixties that would have been the WWWF, but you know what I mean. He particularly impressed me by falling off the desk in his office after getting trashed by Lem, Damon and Archie. But even at that, and for the life of me, I can't figure out where all that blood came from.