Tedfoldol everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

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.

Skyler Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

aramis-112-804880 Anyone who thinks Cary Grant is always worth watching should tune into this. Grant starts out fine (doing a bit of business in a coach) but he either was not allowed to continue in that vein or . . . well, whatever the reason, he quickly becomes as boring as all the flat Spanish scenery.Set during the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, "The Pride and the Passion" takes a story of Horatio Hornblower's creator C. S. Forester called "The Gun" and blows it up to an epic scale it doesn't deserve (I suppose calling the movie "The Gun" might have made moviegoers think it was a gangster flick--too bad, the film flopped at the box office when a gangster flick might have drawn them in).Sinking with Grant is the woefully miscast Frank Sinatra. Gossip had it Sinatra had, and gave, problems behind the scenes. Who cares? What ends up on the screen is all that matters, and sometimes movies enduring the worst tensions produce sprightly results (cf the "Pink Panther" films of Sellers and Edwards, who had a legendary hate affair). Here Sinatra, who can bring incredible energy to a part, is just awful with his dreadful Spanish accent and his even more dreadful toupee. It would be interesting to know how the film makers got stuck with him rather than, say, Anthony Quinn; or even Ricardo Montalban. And he says such clever things, like "I will only let him kill him a little." Ha ha ha.To break up the tensions between two miscast male actors is male eye-candy Sophia Loren. With a chestnut-red hair color Loren, a Spanish peasant by way of Italy who says lines like, "Nobody knows him better than I," is stuck in a totally thankless role where her two best parts are in her cleavage. Sorry to be frank but that's the size of it--so to speak. In a tight bodice always just about to slip off her shoulder, Loren provides wonderfully statuesque poses that show off figure, and little else. She's not as tiresome of Liz Taylor, in full histrionic mode in "Cleopatra." But she isn't on screen as long, either.As far as the actors go only the always reliable Jay Novello, in a blink-and-you'll-miss-him part, brings any life to the movie.Even exciting parts (we know they're exciting because the music cues us), such as when a Napoleonic camp is destroyed by fireballs, or when Grant gets involved in a knife fight, are yawn inducing. Grant's knife fight is so drab they have to shoot it through a windmill to give it any sort of interest at all (which isn't much).Spectacles can be made so that it's impossible to tear your eyes away from them (see the best of David Lean). But "The Pride and the Passion" is horribly written, incompetently structured; it's full of tiresome tropes (even by 1957 standards), performed by a cast of usually good but miscast actors, stodgily directed. Who needs it?

tbssic So,,, you have 1000 people and countless mules dragging a giant sized cannon,,, up hill, down hill, side hill,, literally all over the Spanish countryside,,, leaving a trail that Helen Keller could follow??? But 10 citizens a day will be executed until the cannon is found,,,, because the entire French army is unable to locate this thing??? A 1000 kilometer trek that must have taken months????? I don't mean to nit pick but this seems to be a "bit" of a flaw to me.Frank Sinatra as a Spanish patriot???? Maybe,, if not for the fact that every time he opened his mouth,, that phony Spanish accent made my stomach lurch.There is a song and dance number in the movie the features Sophia Loren's two big guns that is worth watching,,, if you love big guns. Her performance seemed to have the same effect on Cary Grant as it did on me,,,, major wood... Stiff and emotionless as I've ever seen him.. The only spark in the entire movie is when the cannon is fired..So,,, what you have here is a 132 minute movie with 2 minutes of dance,, 5 minutes of battle scenes,,, 10 minutes meaningless dialogue and 115 ponderous minutes of cannon dragging.... If you happen to be into cannon dragging,,, this is a must see.....

Jeff (actionrating.com) See it - This big sweeping epic has gotten a bum rap over the years. Most people want to focus on the improper casting of Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra. But its time to look past that. This is a pretty good movie. I like it because it is one of the few major motion pictures that was made about the Napoleonic Wars. At the heart of this movie, it's a drama. But it's hard to find a drama with this much action. It's the story of Spanish soldiers who transport a huge cannon halfway across the country to lay siege to a castle held by the French. Along the way they attack a French camp, blow up a bridge, and we even get to watch a knife fight amongst windmills. All of this leads up to the final crescendo at the enemy castle. This film is old school, but its time we brought this larger than life war movie into a new light.

theowinthrop Anyone acquainted with many of my reviews notices my background as a history major. Frequently I lament the fact that in pursuit of movie making that will turn into box office gold the studios (especially American ones) will ignore historical events or places. This is true about Ancient Greek History (pace the two films about Themopylae, and the two films about Alexander the Great - where is a decent films about Pericles?). It is also true about 18th-19th Century Spanish history. In particular, Napoleon's first major military goof: his invasion of the Iberian Peninsular in 1808 (four years before his better remembered goof, his invasion of Russia). "War And Peace" is such a classic novel that it has been made and remade as film and television series several times, so we know what happened in Russia pretty well. But the events in what Napoleon's "chancre sore" in Spain and Portugal are barely noted. I recall the Jeannette MacDonald - Allan Jones operetta film "The Firefly". There is a degree of involvement in the plot of "Anthony Adverse"(toward the end). Later there was that film with Tony Franciosa about Goya at the royal court, which dealt a little bit with the inept Count Godoy. But the actual events of the rise and fall of French involvement in the Peninsula are never mentioned. Not even (as far as I know - please tell me if I'm wrong) a movie about Sir John Moore (Wellington's model as a commander) and his death in the retreat from Corunna (it would have been a great film for British morale after Dunkirk).I don't know how "The Pride And The Passion" got started as a project. It is based on a minor novel of C. S. Forester, and that can be the reason. Forester struck Hollywood gold twice, first with his short novel "The African Queen" (about events in British and German colonies in Africa in 1914), and then with "Captain Horatio Hornblower", the film with Gregory Peck about the adventures of Forester's fictional British Captain in the Napoleonic Wars. I suspect since Peck and his film did well in the movie houses, it was thought a land based Forester tale would do just as well. So they chose this idiocy.The plot deals with Anglo-Spanish cooperation in moving a heavy siege gun to a fortified town in order to breach the walls. The officer sent in command is played by Cary Grant. If his attempt to do American Revolutionary History, "The Howards Of Virginia", showed to be less than his fans expected, this film demonstrated he should not do British military history. His performance is dominated by his costume and the scenery. He is supposed to have a romance with the Spanish woman played by Sophia Loren (and an actual romance between them began in the course of the film) but the visual record does not excite viewers passions. Frank Sinatra played an ex-priest, also interested in Loren (she is supposed to have split feelings here). He resuscitates his hesitant and mediocre performance as a priest from "The Miracle Of The Bells". If the three leads are fumbling about in the film it is doomed. That, plus the boring details of how to bring that huge siege gun over mountains and through valleys is just not the stuff for this film (although the later movie, "Fitzcarraldo", demonstrated that a madman's attempts to push an ocean liner through the Amazon jungle to Manaosh shows a great film might be made from a similar story). Looking back, the only thing I liked was that the story showed the French as well as the Anglo-Spanish sides, so we watched as the French General (Theodore Bikel, in the one competent performance in the film) tries to keep tabs on the progress and make preparations to thwart its effects.I give it a "3"...and that's for a side issue which I liked. Marty Feldman had a funny television show in the 1970s that was briefly shown in the U.S. He did a take off on "The Pride And The Passion", about two inept soldiers ordered to deliver a cannon to a particular spot, who constantly get fired at by the French. In the end the cannon is delivered by the wounded pair (they have casts on their arms and legs) and they arm it, aim it, and pull the lanyard. Nothing happens. The idiots go in front of the cannon to check it, and it blows up killing them. A voice over (suitably basso in tone), states, "They died because they could not live....They live in the clouds forever, where stupid heroes die at the ends of movies like this!!" For allowing Feldman and his writers to come up with that, the movie did have a little redeeming feature to it...albeit one not planned by the production.