Bells and banjos
The pairing of Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen was a great idea.Both are excellent and make a film which might seem trite and a bit obsolete to today's audience a winner .Natalie gets pregnant by Steve and this kind of thing was not a windfall in the sixties.Particularly if you are of Italian extraction,in a family who is not prepared to accept it and whose only way to get out of that "mess" is marriage.
Remarkable scenes: The tiny flat where Natalie's mama and papa and their family live and where the TV broadcasts a deafening western.
Steve meets his parents in the middle of an intense traffic.He also meets a former girlfriend who has become a colorless housewife."She is two years younger than me" he says to a baffled Natalie.
The abortionist scene:"You told me it was to be a doctor!" Wood's humiliation is very well directed and her fit of hysterics compares favorably with that famous one in Kazan's "splendor in the grass" (1961) The luncheon in the suitor's flat,with his mother and the two ugly sisters."It's a beautiful room" Natalie says as she tries to say something in this place where bad taste reigns .
The heroine was still dreaming of Prince Charming and she wanted a wedding with bells and banjos.She will have both of them ....but not in the way she expected.
I recommend this movie.
score 8/10
dbdumonteil 11 June 2006
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1390746/34895
Pages:
[1]