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The Bridge of San Luis ReyRating:
Release Date: 06 April, 1999 Retail Price: $24.99 OUR Price: $22.99 You SAVE: $2.00! Cast: Complete Cast (5 total) |
The Bridge of San Luis Rey Reviews
Worth Watching Even In Truncated Form
Rowland V. Lee screwed up many motion pictures but this isn't one of them. How often do you see the screen legends Akim Tamiroff and Nazimova together in one film? At the very end of her long, illustrious career, Nazimova girded her loins and lent her indelible presence to a final bunch of films (after what amounted to a blacklist on account of her wayward sexuality). THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY is one of her better projects and its decadent sensibility is a good match for the cagaries of her screen image. As he did his later novel, THE EIGHTH DAY, Thornton Wilder used the apparently simple story of five people meeting by accident and dying together to ask some thought-provoking questions about fate and chance. Why do we do the things we do? Are we moved by some higher (or lower) purpose? Is destiny irreversible? If we all meet the same death, what is the sense in leading a good life? Do individual lives have any meaning? Wilder's themes spoke to a wartime audience as few other authors. (His play OUR TOWN was the most performed American play during World War II.)
Lynn Bari is just as lovely here as she was in HELLO, FRISCO, HELLO. I never could understand why she never became a bigger star! Now we remember her only vaguely as the woman who married Sid Luft before Judy Garland did. In THE BRIDGE ON SAN LUIS REY she has what amounts to the leading part, and she acquits herself admirably, her Spanish accent soft but convincing. Watch for Abner Biberman in a small part. Biberman's name doesn't mean much now as an actor, but after the actual, McCarthy inspired blacklist, he rose to the occasion and directed the notorious SALT OF THE EARTH, one of the few independent pictures of the early 1950s worth watching today.
This DVD edition is nothing to write home about; it has long been rumored that more of Wilder's novel was actually filmed, then cut to keep the movie under a trim 90 minutes. But lovers of the novel have never felt Lee's film version to be an adequate representation of the rich character development of the book.
A bland movie that loosely follows the book
In 1774 Peru, five people are crossing the hundred-year-old bridge of San Luis Rey when it suddenly collapses, plunging the five to their deaths. Witness to this startling event is Brother Juniper who decides to find out why God has chosen those particular five people to bring into His realm. He travels to Lima to meet with Uncle Pio, a local character who knows everyone and everything surrounding Lima. From Pio, Brother Juniper learns how the lives of the five were connected to one another.
Sort of. The movie focuses on only four of the characters, and three of them in a very secondary sort of way. The fifth character, an old man who was transporting grain, is mentioned only in passing. To me that was disappointing, after having read the book, because each of the characters has his or her own unique story which connects with the others. The acting is very wooden, with too many varying accents and some with no accents at all, so it's difficult to believe the film takes place in Peru. (The Spanish viceroy looks and talks decidedly British, whereas Micaela has an American accent, and Uncle Pio sounds Russian when he speaks.)
The one good aspect from this film is the score by Dimitri Tiomkin, which was nominated for an Academy Award. However, even that gets marred by the poor sound quality of this DVD transfer. It fades in and out too much, and at times, I could not hear what was being said.
See this movie if you must, but the book is better.
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