Two on a Bench (1971)

best movie i've ever seen.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The premise for this made for TV film is bizarre. Macy and Preston (Patty Duke and Ted Bessell) are brought in by government agents and they are sure ONE of them is a traitor...but have idea which. But their sitting at a particular bench frequented by an enemy agent somehow proves one of them is evil(???). So, they get them both to agree to share a room for 24 hours and undergo questioning to see what happens. Huh??????!!!!! Macy is an annoying free-spirited smart-mouth and Preston is a tightly strung stockbroker...both are merely one- dimensional caricatures of real people. To say none of this makes any sense and the two characters are incredibly annoying (especially Duke) is an understatement. This might just be one of the worst made for TV movies I've ever seen and a rare misfire for "The ABC Movie of the Week". It's awful.

'Two on a Bench' was a pleasant bit of froth: a made-for-TV movie directed by Jerry Paris in his usual workmanlike manner. The most notable fact about 'Two on a Bench' is that Patty Duke and John Astin met for the first time when they were cast in this movie; they married the following year.The male lead in this movie is Ted Bessell, who seems to have been associated with every bland and middle-level project in American television during the 1960s and 70s. I'd read somewhere once that Bessell was a child prodigy who performed at Carnegie Hall when he was ten years old; somehow, the intelligence he manifested in his childhood never guided his adult career as an actor.Here's the premise of this TV movie: American spymasters determine that a park bench in Boston is being used as a message drop by spies from behind the Iron Curtain. Because so many different people use the park bench, the spies who pick up and drop off the messages could be anyone. Eventually, the list is narrowed to two suspects: a free-spirited neurotic young woman (Duke) and a buttoned-down stockbroker (Bessell), both of whom (separately) eat lunch on the bench at regular intervals. The investigation causes them to 'meet cute', when government agent Brubaker gets the two of them into a room together ... announcing that one of them is a spy, and that the other one has a patriotic duty to help catch the guilty one. Naturally, Duke and Bessell glare at each other suspiciously.SPOILERS COMING RIGHT NOW. The real spy is none other than John Astin, who plays Patty Duke's psychiatrist. Quite without her knowledge, he's been using her as a 'pigeon' to carry the secret messages. Astin is an actor whose work I consistently enjoy, yet he's uninteresting and bland in this poorly-written TV movie. I'll rate 'Two on a Bench' 2 points out of 10.