Spare, tragic movie
Peck holds it in throughout most of the movie. We feel his dissatisfaction and his discomfort. He's so tightly wound it's frightening. The movie plays squarely on his shoulders and I thought his performance brave, at times even shocking. Frankenheimer directs with such a sure and simple hand. He visually focuses on characters moving though this terribly decayed environment. Everything is dead or dying. The only beauty we are entitled to here is the natural setting. But even that is sullied by poverty that seems frozen in time. Frankenheimer's film is really about the environment and how it distills hopelessness and despair. The way his camera lovingly glides across the colorless wooden porch jutting out from a long abandoned house where Peck takes Tuesday Weld you know that what's happening has no future. The spare, single minded storytelling here is probably why the film is such a lost gem. There's no hope; not even a glimmer of something good. Only decay. Peck's final moments are the most disturbing scenes he ever played. In some ways it's like watching Jimmy Stewart loose it at the end of VERTIGO, except in this film our main character never gets close to what he wants. This is not a happy movie, but it is a very good one.
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