I think Lisas love is so stupidly.she fell in love with a disgusting man withou see him!without speaking to him , without knowing him.sometimes while watchin this movie , i nearly to laugh!Movie tried to make amotional watchers with something that make somebody (like me) to laugh.
shareI understand your view of Lisa, it was naive of her to fall head over heels in love with Stefan who Lisa never formally met till years later. But we are not meant to view Lisa as a "stupid woman", rather a tragic figure who for the remainder of her life was consumed by her love for a man who did not love her equally in return.
"I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not".
Have you ever been a teenage girl?
shareShe really did annoy me. It was one thing when she was a teenager - you could forgive the blind infatuation. I had to take it that she got older but never really matured. She had plenty of evidence as to Stefan's character but chose to be charmed by and believe every line he fed her about her being the one who could save him despite the fact that he never remembered who she was.
shareTotally agree. And Lisa's total obsession with Stefan made the premise of the film hard to take. I was totally unable to feel any sympathy for either of them.
The flip side of fear is understanding.
This type of foolish characters seem to have been Fontaine´s stock in trade or something - I find her meek, breathlessly submissive temperament here as well as in Suspicion & Rebecca, rather annoying. In Suspicion, of course, she latches onto an even bigger as-hole than in this picture here.
"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan
Sooo agree! She uses the same dreamy, vacant stare in all of those roles where the moment anyone interrupts her little private reverie she looks all startled and embarrassed. LOL
shareIn fact, I saw this movie tonight on TCM on Joan Fontaine night and in Rebecca and Suspicion she always played the guilty, submissive, silent suffering wife/girlfriend. I don't know if this is typecasting or a coincidence in the roles offered or, and I think this, she just did so really well in those types of films. Deep concern, even self-sacrifice for a husband are admirable, but in all these films on tonight, she really comes off as stupid and devoid of character. I've always given her sister, Olivia, the upperhand in acting.
sharewmm,
Here's another smarmy poster putting his opinions about Joan Fontaine within the context of her sibling rivalry with Olivia. What nonsense to play that kind of role, taking sides in a sibling rivalry!
What does Joan Fontaine in this film have to do with Olivia de Havilland? Next to nothing. Certainly the quality of her performance had nothing to do with Olivia.
I bet you did not even realize what you were doing.
And how did Joan Fontaine ALWAYS play guilty???? Guilty of what? You don't know what you are talking about.
The character of the second Mrs. de Winter came across to you as stupid??? Devoid of character?
You clearly have no idea what you are talking about.
[deleted]
a1,
You do a much better job of getting at an understanding of the nature of Lisa's character. In short she was not supposed to be seen as merely an otherwise completely normal person who happened to get caught up in a bad case of unrequited love.
The interesting thing in his film is how her neurosis or perhaps more accurately pathology balanced the inauthenticity of Stefan's life. The posters on this thread complain about Lisa falling short of their idea of how she should have acted, but none of them complain about Stefan. Perhaps there is a form of sexism involved in such complaints. Probably is.
but that is not the main issue here.
What I found made for a compelling experience of sadness is how there was the potential, but of course not realization (except briefly) that these two dysfunctional people just might have been able, in balancing each other out, to save the other.
The others here complain that Lisa did not understand how Stefan's faults should have in effect overcome what they saw as her infatuation with him. I understand that point on a simplistic, surface level. But there is much more to it than that.
What initially drew Lisa to Stefan was a combination of her own loneliness, his appearance, and of course his music. This in turn drew her into an examination of him and his life that we later understand is more profound than his own self knowledge. Yet he does come to have enough self knowledge to, again however briefly, be intrigued by her and more than that see in her what he is missing in his other encounters and paramours. The film uses a series of events to then separate them, of course. So there is no permanence.
this is where the tension of the film arises, obviously. It is how we can see that they well might have been a successful couple under certain circumstances, under with they could each have redeemed the other. But actual circumstances did not permit this, and this potentiality is dangled before us, and the lead characters, but not realized in the end.
But to see Lisa as the others on this thread did is ridiculous.
Exactly right. The film is a tragedy and tantalizes us with what might have been. I think people are also missing that Lisa is attracted to Stefan in part because he represents the freedom of a creative life to her imagination. And she's not as weak as some are making out either. She doesn't marry who she is told to marry, she runs away, she gets a job and she doesn't go through the night with Stefan late in the film when she realizes he doesn't remember her. She might not be be a modern feminist's ideal progressive but she is at least a step along the way because she is willing to suffer to live an unconventional life that offers her a chance at achieving her dreams rather than go along with how she is supposed by society and her family to live her life. She's not stupid but passionate and wants a life of passion despite the conditions she was born into which are against passion.
shareShe's like a teenage fangirl in love. She should crow up and find someone better than this creepy womanizer.
Don't get me wrong, I love the movie, very different from other romance movies from that era. Her love is stupid but interesting.
She should have gotten over that infatuation when she saw that he had gotten married. But she didn't. She was truly in love with this guy and he didn't deserve her love.
~~~~~
Jim Hutton (1934-79) and Ellery Queen =
i've seen better written female characters in porn
so many movies, so little time
It's interesting that Ophüls changed Stefan from a writer (in Zweig's story) to a musician, because while watching the film I was thinking how easily this could be re-made as the story of a groupie and a 'Superstar' (The Carpenters).
clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am...