From the Terrace (1960)

Sorry, this movie sucks

One of my all time favorites.

Boring

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

This is one of those movies that I can't pass up when it shows up on cable. I grew up in the 50's and 60's, so movies like this are also a bit of time travel. This time it was TCM. Saw it coming up and had to use the DVR.It is not easy to make a novel into a movie. An average novel would require eight to ten hours of movie--so a mini series is the least. A childhood to maturity novel must be a real challenge. In this case, selecting just a portion of the novel and writing a screenplay around it, in my opinion, worked nicely. Here's what I like about it.Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman. They do good work separately and extraordinary work together. Woodward is believable, especially playing a southerner (which she is not here), but also playing a member of high society in New England. Paul Newman is just a good and versatile actor. The story moves slowly, but not too slowly, and the characters have enough interest to be savored in the quiet moments. Scenes with the early 1950's cars in the forest. Elmer Bernstein's score. The scene where the Eatons meet Natalie in New York. Mary Eaton is wearing a tiara (crown?). The king and queen meeting the king's courtesan. Mary, afterward: "She calls me Mrs. Eaton. You call her Natalie, but she doesn't call you anything."Don't like. Glaring hole in the story. What happened to Eaton Steel and Martha Eaton. Big family owned business and only an alcoholic widow left, and Alfred just goes off to make airplanes? Clearly Samuel Eaton was a hands on manager. Did a middle manager pop in on Mrs. Eaton and say, "I'll take care of the company for you. Don't you worry. Just get a board resolution appointing me as CEO." Or did Alfred shut down the plant in his father's honor and to spite the striking union, with his mother just living off accumulated wealth?And I wonder. Compare the last half of this movie with the AMC TV series "Mad Men", which starts out set at about the same time that this movie is set. Imagine MacHardie coming in to the Sterling Cooper conference room. Compare the morals and mores of Terrace with those of Mad Men. Considering that they were written in times 40 years apart, they fit surprisingly well, don't they?

A story about an ambitious married man who on the verge of his success has a change of heart.I really loved this movie. It's a masterpiece of a drama about what we want in our life doesn't always coincide with our happiness. Money changes everything, and in this story it's especially so. This might be one of the quintessential story that money doesn't get you happiness, and is done in a very realistic way.Beautifully made movie that features one of Paul Neumann's best performance. I really thought he was great in this movie. He has other good movies, but this is one of his gems.Good movie that's highly recommended.

I didn't see what others apparently saw in this film. I did not see the moral of the film so much concerning the price of success as it being that despite your best efforts, you are often doomed to become your parents.At the beginning of the film, Alfred (Paul Newman) returns home after the second World War to renounce his father because he has, in Alfred's opinion, ignored his mother while strictly attending to business to the point where his mother has become an adulterous lush. Ten or fifteen years later, Alfred has ignored his own wife Mary (played by Joanne Woodward) while climbing the corporate ladder until his own lonely wife has become an adulterous lush. The only crime of his father's he does not commit is to produce offspring that can be dragged into the mess his life has become. One person with a more warped moral code than either Alfred or Mary seems to be Alfred's boss. While eating lunch he casually informs Alfred of Mary's affair with an old flame. When Alfred reacts by saying that he intends to divorce Mary, his boss warns him against such an action. To Alfred's boss, Mary's behavior isn't a moral failing or a cry for attention - it is an unforgivable breach of etiquette, and this is the same way he feels about divorce.Overall, the main characters in this film lack redeeming characteristics to the point where the movie almost becomes a film noir soap opera. There are still solid performances by both Newman and Woodward, and it is still worth seeing 50 years after it was made. After all, the idle rich and the mistakes they keep making over and over have not changed that much after half a century.

Newman meets Woodward at a party and is summarily rebuffed. The very next scene shows them canoodling on a sailboat. I actually stopped the DVD, thinking it had been manufactured with a dropped or mis-ordered scene. But no...the editors apparently decided it was unimportant for us to know how the two eventually got together. (See the discussion board for similar comments on this flaw.) I was shocked, considering this is an adaptation by the talented Ernest Lehmann. I made a conscious decision to not even finish watching the film. If you're interested in experiencing some of that Woodward/Newman magic, may I suggest "The Long, Hot Summer." Or with Newman in a director's role, the under-appreciated "Rachel, Rachel" which features Woodward in an outstanding performance,