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I found this one disappointing when I saw it first several years ago and now it's a freebie with a major newspaper I see no reason to revise my original opinion. All hands were above average and all made much better films before and after this one - Peck and King worked together six times and their first two At Bats produced two of the finest movies to come out of Hollywood (Twelve O'Clock High, The Gunfighter) whilst David and Bathsheba and The Bravados were strictly ho hum and Beloved Infidel woefully underrated. Similarly King made three films with Hayward, almost inevitable in the old Studio system with people as prolific as King and Hayward and yet for all the track records on the shoot this remains disappointing. I bow to no one in my admiration for Gregory Peck but like any major actor/star working consistently in Hollywood it was impossible not to become involved with the odd substandard product. In all Peck portrayed three writers in his career, one fictional journalist (Gentlemen's Agreement), one real novelist/short story writer (Scott Fitzgerald in Beloved Infidel) and one not-quite-so fictional novelist/short story writer in the Harry Street he plays here in an adaptation of a story Hemingway clearly based on himself - 'macho' writer not averse to big-game hunting, watching bullfights, heavy drinking and equally heavy womanizing (Hemingway married four times) - and this is by far the weakest of the three. Students of irony may note that 1) King directed Peck as both Fitzgerald AND Hemingway (albeit a 'fictionalized' Hem) and 2) Peck was far more effective as Fitzgerald whilst in real life Fitzgerald, though a finer writer, was overshadowed in his lifetime by Hemingway's PR. Peck does his best - as do the entire cast and crew - but somehow it all fails to gel; Susan Hayward for example is not one of nature's doormats, she is far too feisty and ballsy to play the downtrodden wife meekly mopping her husband's brow when her instinct is to cut his throat and of the three leads it is glamour girl Ava Gardner who is able to find the vulnerability beneath the feral woman. Not a great film, far from it but see it for what might have been.
score 7/10
writers_reign 8 October 2006
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1492312/ |
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28-2-2021 00:05:17