The story itself was unbelievable, the dialog was ridiculous ("redic" ....give me a break, no one ever talked like that) and the score, annoying. Even Ray Milland's acting was over the top. How did this win a best picture when "Spellbound" and "Mildred Pierce" were both up against it? It reminded me of an alcoholic version of "Reefer Madnesss."
shareYou know what? Ray Milland married Susan Hayward and they had a son called Nicholas Cage who is by now Leaving Las Vegas. Oh, Hollywood!!!
"redic" ....give me a break...
I agree - it was one thing for people to say "natch" for a while, but to abbreviate the word ridiculous seemed pretty stupid.
Was Gloria a mentally-retarded hooker? That's all I could think about when she was on screen.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.
In 60 years they probably won't believe we used such gems as TMI, OMG, and LMAO...
shareIn 60 years they probably won't believe we used such gems as TMI, OMG, and LMAO...
my personal favorite.....[drum roll, please].....'PROLLY'.
Uh, "prolly" is an intentional misspelling, not part of the natural evolution of a language like probablie/probably. Do you really think that "probablie" became "probably" due to someone being a smartass?
sharethe story in spellbound is way more unbelievable than this movie
shareWith these old movies, you always have to bear in mind what things were like when they came out. Alcoholism as we know it today was still in early stages of being understood, hell, AA was only ten years old at the time. Having something like this that so much as tried to depict the true horrors of the disease in such a concise way was preitty groundbreaking, I imagine audiences were floored back at the time. It would have been akin to the way modern audiences reacted to Requiem for a dream.
Problemn is that times simply change and the older a movie gets the more hoeles are left open due to public changes in perception. I can admitt up front that there are a million things in the movie that I find cheesy and unrealistic and mellodramatically over the top, but then I watch any other drama from the era this came out in and truth is, cheesy melodrama just goes with the territory. As a recovering alcoholic, I still have great admiration for this film because at least it oppened the door on the science of the issue so to speak, and exposed so many intricacies of alcohol addiction to the general population.
On the subject of ridic: People did talk like that. There was a popular song in the 1920s called a Sunny Disposish with the line "It really doesn't pay to be a gloomy pill. It's absolutely most ridic and positively sil." Gloria's slang was a way of indicating she was low class.
shareYeah.....some people just can't understand that a lot of today's slang is no less "redic".
shareYeah.....some people just can't understand that a lot of today's slang is no less "redic".
There was a popular song in the 1920s called a Sunny Disposish with the line "It really doesn't pay to be a gloomy pill. It's absolutely most ridic and positively sil."
The lyrics for that song were written by Ira Gershwin, no less.
You're opinion was "redic" !
shareI agree with the OP. This is a tedious melodrama (with a theremin for added irony)that is about as true to life as space vampires.
Like the original test audiences, I burst out laughing at the unintentionally funny parts of this film, which goes to show that audiences, then and now, are sometimes less easily hoodwinked than critics.
Milland does make a decent fist of this baloney tho. He is better than the movie deserves.
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Raspberries!
"I will not go down in history as the greatest mass-murderer since Adolf Hitler!" - Merkin Muffley