TeenzTen An action-packed slog

Gutsycurene Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Cody One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

bkoganbing Hollywood did not even wait for the Broadway run to end with The Voice Of The Turtle. It would not be until 1948 that the John Van Druten play finished its run of 1557 performances, one of the biggest runs of the decade. On Broadway the roles played by Ronald Reagan, Eleanor Parker, and Eve Arden were done by Elliott Nigent, Margaret Sullavan, and Audrey Christie.And it's only a three character play so Warner Brothers got Van Druten himself and others to pad out the film. It also takes place in the apartment that's shared by Parker and Arden.We haven't seen support for the troops like this since World War II and unlikely to see it again in the foreseeable future. Apparently it was perfectly all right to take soldiers on leave into your home, a country that was founded on no quartering of troops in civilian dwellings just didn't press the point.In fact Arden is having the time of her life boosting our Armed Forces morale. Reagan whom she's gone out with before rings her up as he's on leave. Arden has traded up from an army sergeant to a navy commander in Wayne Morris. What to do with Reagan? She palms him off on her friend Parker who is an aspiring actress to entertain Reagan.It was a great break for both as the bulk of the film is the getting to know you and then love you dialog between the two of them. Reagan and Parker pair well together and Arden is her sharp and witty self. Eve's best scene is taking delight at the bad reviews a fellow actress got in a part that Arden was up for.The Voice Of The Turtle is a product of its era. It's still entertaining, but it has more value today as a picture of an America long left behind.

tarmcgator This 1948 Warner Brothers release was based on a Broadway play that had opened in December 1943 and closed only weeks before the movie premiered. The central issues of the film are a mix of the up-to-date and the outdated -- fear of commitment, as well as the propriety of "intergender cohabitation."In an era when proper young ladies didn't discuss sex with proper young gentlemen -- at least, not in movies sanctioned by the Hayes Office -- THE VOICE OF THE TURTLE was a bit risqué, which helped account for its long run on Broadway. The fear of what other people might think about a nice girl offering a spare bed to an attractive young man in uniform, even during the housing shortages of World War II, was not foreign to a lot of Americans, especially women, as the war put a strain on the nation's sexual mores and values. Among those born since the 1940s, that kind of innocent gesture might be taken for granted as an act of kindness, with no sexual overture implied by the woman. The scene in which Sally and Bill frantically try to prevent Olive from finding out that he's come to her apartment that morning to have breakfast with her may seem silly (though it is funny), but Sally knows that if Olive finds Bill there at breakfast, Olive will immediately assume "the worst." (I also anticipated that, if Bill was discovered, Sally's subsequent "reputation" might cause her to become an even more tempting target for the aging stage lothario with whom she's been cast in a play, but that little tete-a-tete occurs off-stage/off-camera.) It was still the 1940s, and in those days, people WOULD talk. (Some people STILL do.)Fear of commitment is still with us. Unfortunately, here the film doesn't succeed very well, perhaps because, again, of Hollywood's self-censorship. We get a little information about Sally's disappointing relationship with a theatrical producer (which, the context implies, did become sexual), but the allusions to Bill's pain about lost love are weak. (At one point he encounters his old lover in a nightclub, but we never learn anything more about her, or them.) The delicate minuet that Sally and Bill dance around their immediate attraction to one another is what drives the story, but (not having the seen or read the play) I have a strong sense that Van Druten's original addressed their dilemma more directly than his Hayes Office-vetted screenplay.No doubt self-censorship also undercut the more brazenly promiscuous aspects of Olive, though Eve Arden does a fine job with what she is given to work with. In fact the cast is one of the things that makes this film still worth watching. Eleanor Parker does well in conveying Sally's uncertainty about love, and whatever you think of Ronald Reagan's later political activities, he effectively portrays the essential decency of Bill. Actors Wayne Morris, Kent Smith, and those who play a host of other supporting characters (none of them in the original stage version) also are effective.THE VOICE OF THE TURTLE is best approached as a period piece, a time capsule of how Americans viewed awakening love in a changing wartime culture. For all the restraints imposed by the Hayes Office, it remains worth an occasional viewing.

eecall I agree wholeheartedly with the many reviewers who found this a delightful romantic comedy,but must disagree strongly with the few who found the title inappropriate. It comes from Chapter 2 of The Song Of Songs, a highly erotic poem, and the particular passage celebrates the return of spring, the time of love. What could be more appropriate? As for the turtle, at the time of the King James translation of the Bible that meant turtle dove. The complete passage is: For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land.I think the passage is lovely, and an excellent source for the title, referring as it does to the return of spring to the heroine's heart.

bmacv With snow falling softly over a back-lot Manhattan, and a French boîte where a Benedictine bottle holds the shade for a table lamp, how can anybody resist The Voice of the Turtle (Irving Rapper's adaptation of the John Van Druten stage hit, reissued as One for the Book)? It's a bit of romantic fluff set on the home front during the Second World War that somehow survives into the new millennium with much of its artifice and most of its charm intact.Circumstances throw together struggling young actress Eleanor Parker, on the rebound, and furloughed serviceman Ronald Reagan, who has just been daintily dumped by Eve Arden. Since hotel rooms are hard to come by on rainy nights in wartime, Reagan ends up spending the night on a studio bed in Parker's apartment. And the inevitable happens – they fall in love.That's just about all there is to it, allowing for some excursions into the New York theater world. But the cast, none of whom was on Hollywood's A-list at the time, gives it their best. This was the sort of amiable, easy-going role that Reagan played best, from the movies to the White House. Parker (in a dreadful hairdo) seems a little tense in the ditzy part of an ingenue with a slight obsessive-compulsive disorder, but ultimately she wins us over. Best of all is Arden, for once not a vinegar virgin but a high-fashion woman-about-town who's possessive about the multiple men in her life only when she's about to lose them. All told, The Voice of the Turtle is a somewhat faded sachet that brings back nostalgic memories of a 1940s Manhattan that probably never existed – but makes it fun to daydream that maybe once it did.