Knife in the Water (1963)

best movie i've ever seen.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The movie is a brilliant psychological thriller. It tells a story of limited space and intense circumstances. The story is simple cause there are only 3 people in the middle of the sea during the whole movie. But emotions and actions of characters are profound. Only three characters, confined on a boat together for most of the run time – come from is felt throughout, most notably in the concept of materially. Upper-class, middle-aged Andrzej clings tightly to his yacht, his pride and joy and central symbol of bourgeois decadence and power, while the hitchhiker, although assembly hailing from a 'lower' social class. The obsession over materially and pride is a major part of what brings the characters to blows later on, and is of course fundamental to their aggressive instincts. This movie was examining the relationship between men and women in the primitive level. When a young hitchhiker joins a couple on a weekend yacht trip, psychological warfare breaks out as the two men compete for the woman's attention. "If two men are on board, one is the skipper." The struggle between the men in the movie, it's based upon this sentence. Both men were trying to prove themselves. It was like woman has to choose one of them in the end. For the reasons knife which is a primitive weapon was turning the power object. The knife not merely as a sign of virility, but also as a metaphor for psychological force in the duel between the two men for the attentions of the woman. Polanski creates a disturbing study of fear, humiliation, sexuality, and aggression with only there people. On the first point, the sexual 'contest' between Andrzej and the Hitchhiker over Christine is clearly the most significant source of aggression in the film. It is also one of the ideas that, as much time as the film spends exploring and depicting it, is hardest to nail down or explain in a reasoned, ordered fashion. Why does Andrzej need to feel so threatened by the Hitchhiker as to become outright aggressive? Of course – the Hitchhiker's youth and virility, Andrzej's materialistic possessive behavior towards his wife, etc. – but none of them completely summarize the issue. There is something highly emotional, and highly animistic, about Andrzej's feeling of sexual threat, and it is something I cannot completely understand One of the things that makes the film thriller film outside of the characters that the whole movie is in the middle of the sea. There is nowhere to escape, disconnected from the world around them. The characters are entirely isolated. It is only in this geographical isolation that Andrzej and the Hitchhiker allow their aggression to come out in full, and it is telling that once Andrzej returns to land, and becomes 'un-isolated,' he comes to his senses and feels moral shame for his aggressive actions. The movie try to understand the sources and contexts of aggression in intellectual, ordered ways, they are ultimately studies of the mysterious emotional state that is aggression itself, of the universal human struggles, senseless forms violence takes when stemming from such dense and complicated emotional issues. Knife which is one of the most important figures in the and which is the symbol of manhood movie drowned in the waters of the sea. And everyone's pride is bruised. The movie ends in an interesting way. At this point the woman has a confession to Andrzej. But Andrzej doesn't believe in it. Whether or not he has lost in both cases. I think the only winner of the film is young man. He continues to survive without considering any result.

According to Chekhov, if you make people aware of a gun early on in a story, sooner or later someone in the story will have to shoot the gun. If the gun is not going to be fired, it should not be in the story. Now, knives are more common than guns, and are used for mundane purposes, such as cutting the meat on one's plate, so the rule that applies to guns cannot automatically be applied to knives. Unless, that is, it is a wicked-looking, gravity-propelled, telescoping knife with a four-inch, locking blade. When you put a knife like that in a story, then Chekhov's law applies to that weapon as well, and it is required that someone get cut with it.But no one does. Not only is this knife referred to in the title, but it is introduced early on and emphasized again and again. The tension is built up as the knife is used to play a dangerous game of stabbing between the fingers of a spread out hand. It is used again when it is several times thrown across the cabin and into the wall. And it is used to cut the halyard when the sailboat runs aground. This would be like having a gun in a movie, with people showing off their marksmanship or using it for some ordinary practical end. It would not satisfy our need to see the gun used for a more deadly purpose, just as these various employments of the knife do not satisfy our expectation that someone will be stabbed with it. But no one is.Finally, Andrzej takes the young man's knife and throws it in the water. The idea is that the young man was very fond of his knife, and Andrzej threw it in the water out of spite. But in that case, the object might just as well have been a harmonica that the young man was fond of. As it is, the fact that no one got stabbed after all the emphasis placed on the knife leaves us disappointed. Roman Polanski, who directed this movie, must have eventually figured this out, which is why Jack Nicholson got his nose sliced in "Chinatown."

It's a rather long movie for what it has to say, and I'm not sure what it has to say.A man and his wife (or girl friend) pick up a young hitch-hiker and for no discernible reason invite him to spend the day sailing on the driver's smallish schooner. The older man shows the younger how to handle a sail boat, acting a little pompous in the process. The young man becomes truculent. The two men punch each other and the hitch-hiker falls into the lake. He's claimed earlier than he can't swim although, in fact, he swims well. The older man dives overboard and searches. Unable to find the other guy, he becomes frazzled and swims to shore. The girl is left alone on the yacht.At this point the younger man swims up to the boat, climbs aboard while the girl watches him blankly from a distance. They make love. They finally take the boat in towards the marina and the young man leaps ashore and disappears before they reach it.The driver is waiting for her on the pier. He thinks that the young man has drowned and he feels responsible, talks about going to the police. Driving along in the car, she reveals that she and the younger man played doctor together. He doesn't believe her. He stops the car in front of a sign that read "Police, 5 Miles." The couple sit in silence. Fade Out.Now, this review must sound a little dull, I know, but it's an accurate image of the film itself which is full of irrelevant details, screwy scenes, and non sequiturs. The acting is passable, though the young man's and the girl's voices were dubbed later. The girl, Jolanta Umecka, is rather more than passable. At the opening, with her bound hair, harlequin glasses, and stiffly held neck, she looks like a nerd. When she sheds all those properties and dons a modest "bikini", she no longer looks like a nerd, and her sensuous features have a predatory cast. Wow.But this belongs to early Polanski, like "Cul de Sac." Beautiful babes in a will-of-the-wisp story. He went through a phase of near masterpieces later -- "Rosemary's Baby" and the superb "Chinatown." Lately he's been coming out with films of mixed quality, sometimes as puzzling as his first efforts.I'm leaving out "Two Men and a Wardrobe" because that's borrowed from theater of the absurd and doesn't fit the pattern. I haven't seen any of his earlier work other than those I've mentioned.Some have obviously gotten more out of this than I did. I thought it was okay, but not more than that. Too much pointless rambling.

Say what you will about Roman Polanski but boy, can he direct brilliant movies! This movie was not only Polanski's feature length directorial debut, it also was the first and only Polish movie he had ever done, that immediately earned an Oscar nomination as well.In all of its simplicity, this is a strangely haunting movie. There really is not all that much to its story, which actually only adds to the movie its atmosphere and constant tension. Because we know so very little about the 3 characters in this movie, we as the audience, also never fully know what we can expect from any of them. You could call this a slower movie but never a boring one. It's simply far too intriguing for that.But what also makes this movie great is its approach and visual style. It has some beautiful cinematography and some great compositions in it. Some of the scenes are build up extremely well, especially the ones that consists out of some very long shots. It's a movie made with lots of eye for detail and also with lots of love and passion for cinema. Normally these sort of movies tend to come across as incredibly pretentious but never a Polanski movie! He simply is an unique director, who doesn't need much story or dialog to tell a story, with multiple layers- and depth in it.I won't pretend like I love everything about this movie, it still has its flaws and weaknesses but overall this remains one real intriguing and exceptional movie!8/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/