Sorry, but this is BAD

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Mom certainly smacked the living sh*t outta that kid - in front of everyone in town no less !! If this were to happen today, she would have been removed in hand cuffs !

Agree: campy, overwrought dreck, but a good cast & it gives insight into the US in the 1950s. Obviously, this is a backlash against McCarthyism. Ironically, McCarthy (a nasty drunk) was correct: there was a Communist infiltration, but McCarthy was about 20 yrs too late. By the 1950s, most of the 'fellow travelers' were out of the US Gov, see "Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America "
http://www.amazon.com/Venona-Decoding-Soviet-Espionage-America/dp/0300084625/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1320337267&sr=1-1

"Those who were convinced that the Soviets were spying on us during the 1930s and 1940s were right. Haynes and Klehr have provided the most extensive evidence to date that the KGB had operatives at all levels of American society and government. Where Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassilievs The Haunted Wood (LJ 11/15/98) provided a peek at Soviet spying, Haynes and Klehr throw open the door, revealing a level of espionage in this country that only the most paranoid had dreamed of. Building on the research for their earlier books, The Secret World of American Communism (LJ 6/1/95) and The Soviet World of American Communism (Yale Univ., 1998), Haynes and Klehr describe the astonishing dimensions of spying reflected in the cable traffic between the United States and Moscow. Venona is the name of the sophisticated National Security Agency project that in 1946 finally broke the Soviet code. This is better than anything John le Carr could produce, because in this case, truth is really stranger than fiction."

Politics aside, the film was so enjoyably campy: One dimensional characters used to portray principles & kids loving the local librarian.

I also like the juxtaposition of the portrayal of 1956 American vs. the 1967 "Summer of Love", which occurred eleven years later.

I agree that the picture was bad. The movie really has many problems, but one of the biggest is Bette Davis's phony performance. She had been fantastic in many roles prior to this, but her lack of real warmth does the film in. It's like she was phoning it in from the parking lot. It was all a bit too hoity-toity when it should have been human. Other than that, the film suffered from bad direction and cardboard characters. Sad, considering the subject matter of censorship, supression, and paranoia is still relevant.

Bad, but deliciously so. A madcap film of the sort I've only dreamed about until now.

From his first scene, I pegged that kid as an unbalanced, neurotic child. The crazier he went, the crazier I wanted him to go. I was hoping he'd have a meltdown at the groundbreaking...AND HE DID! When he was sitting alone in the bleachers, I was hoping that he'd go completely bonkers and torch the library...AND HE DID!

Now I'm imagining a film in which he meets up with Rhoda Penmark...

Just saw this for the first time.

Three stages:

Looked interesting at first.

Got boring.

Came back to life when it got funnier than Plan 9 From Outer Space.


I loved the overwrought music in part three And Bette's little slapfest reminded me of something from Airplane.



CAN YOU TRAIN A CAMEL TO WALK ALPHABETICALLY?

I thought it was pretty well-handled up until the last act, when it spun out of control and became a cheesy melodrama. Some of the scenes were unintentionally funny (the slapping scene, the scene when Fred falls and hits his head on the table in the library, etc). As for Bette, it wasn't one of her most challenging performances, but she did fine. But then again, I could watch her in anything. 

Dick'll make ya slap somebody -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baeiVOKgWMo