DELBERT MANN
Bil’s rating (out of 5): BB.
USA, 1958. Don Hartman Productions. Screenplay by Irwin Shaw, based on the play by Eugene O’Neill. Cinematography by Daniel L. Fapp. Produced by Don Hartman. Music by Elmer Bernstein. Production Design by J. McMillan Johnson, Hal Pereira. Costume Design by Dorothy Jeakins. Film Editing by George Boemler. Academy Awards 1958. Cannes Film Festival 1958.
Boring adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s play features an early English-speaking performance by Sophia Loren. Anthony Perkins plays a farmboy whose widowed father (Burl Ives) brings home a foreign woman (Loren) as his new wife. Perkins is angry about the situation, then finds himself at a moral crossroads when he develops true feelings for her and she returns them. Not nearly passionate enough, and certainly too stagy a film treatment, the tedium of this film is further compounded by Loren’s still-poor English preventing her giving the good performance she was capable of.
