The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1976)

How sad is this?

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

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.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Story based on a classic Japanese novel but relocated to the UK for the movie. Widow Anne Osborne (Sarah Miles) lives in a beautiful ocean side town with teenage son Jonathan (Jonathan Kahn). One day a handsome young sailor (Kris Kristofferson) shows up and Anne falls in love. This causes issues with Jonathan and his band of sociopathic friends.It's well-directed with beautiful settings, a good script and good acting (especially by Miles) but it has issues. It's way too slowly-paced. It gets dull very quick and no amount of pretty scenery and good acting can liven it up. When you have nude love making and masturbation scenes and it's still dull something is seriously wrong. VERY morbid ending too. Worth a look but the slow pace makes it a chore to watch At times.

Sarah Miles deserved far, far better than this film. Her performance is head and shoulders above any others in the movie, and this becomes evident 15 minutes into it. Her performance is the only reason I can give this film a rating higher than one star. Kris Kristofferson plays her love interest, in a performance that redefines the words laconic and listless.Possible Spoilers: Miles plays a lonely widow whose husband who died after a long illness, with a troubled, sullen teen son (naturally). She meets Kris Kristofferson, playing a sailor with no sense that he is one, and instantly drops all of her British reserve to fall in lust with an American stranger who is completely passive and has absolutely no personality. Sarah Miles literally carries every scene between her and Kristofferson on her own shoulders; it's like watching a champion dancer dance with a mannequin, except that you can at least prop up and pose a mannequin. For some bizarre reason, Kristofferson, who underplays every role he has, decided to underplay this performance even more, as if that would give him some sort of quiet American strength. Instead, it gives him a quiet lethargy that puts the energy right through the floor. I have to wonder if Miles actually said to Kristofferson at some point during rehearsals: "Kris, you are going to give me more energy than that during the take, aren't you?" If the director actually said to Kristofferson "less energy, be more subtle", that was the Wrong direction for Kristofferson. It's like saying to Robin Williams "Robin! Be more manic, and much higher energy!" Naturally, the woman's son resents the hell out of Kristofferson, and like most movie children of single mothers, is under the influence of the worst element he can find, a hateful little psychopath that likes blowing seagulls' heads off with firecrackers, mutilating cats, etc, without adults around them ever noticing. Without a strong father figure around, the movie argues, male children will immediately fall into gangs or worse.The end of the movie is out of a Stephen King novel, and does not fit in with the rest of the story at all. There seems to be no moral or statement to the film that I could find. In fact, it seems to go out of its way to avoid one. If you had to find a "moral" in it, it would seem to be, stay in the Navy and never retire, or you will deserve to be cut into tiny pieces in short order, as your just punishment. Why? I have no idea. I guess the sea is a jealous mistress. Like, Fatal Attraction jealous.Which is especially odd, as there are No Sea Metaphors or allusions to the sea in this film! (This IS adapted from a Japanese story by a famous but rather disturbed author, who committed suicide as a protest against modern society, but even in terms of the Samuri tradition, the film makes no coherent statement; even one that we could disagree with.) The film left me with a feeling that I had been subjected to three levels of abuse: one, a slow-moving (and I mean, Slow-Moving) morality tale with no moral at the end, two, Kris Kristofferson's energy-sucking performance that seemed to suck the vitality out of me as I watched it, and lastly, the abuse of Sarah Miles, who gave an Oscar-worthy performance in a film that was not worthy of her, and gave her no energy to work with; which means her work was twice-heroic. If she was not in this film, no-one would remember it on any level; and out of respect for her, no-one should.

I will make my review very short and to the point.I enjoyed the story and small cast of characters. However, the movie was too predictable and completely void of character development. Two people meet, become lovers, deal with a troubled teen...end of story.Though the boy's mother was lonely after her husband passed way, I thought she was depicted as "too easy". After a single date, the sailor smiled at her ...cut to the sex scenes. This is not typical behavior for a woman who was presented as "fine English upper class", living in a mansion over looking the sea. If the movie had depicted her loneliness through a couple of masturbation/alone and crying scenes, it would have been more believable.However, the movie did a fine job focusing on how a third wheel can derail a relationships, how impressionable youth are, etc. It also did a good job of revealing what atrocities young boys are capable of, especially when trying to become a man in the eyes of his peers.Thirty more minutes of character development would have gone a long way. I'll give it a 2.5 out of 5.

The film can be faulted for at least appearing to give too much to the mother/sailor side of the conflict, an appealingly sexy but eventually unconvincing romantic fantasy. The boy Chief is the other distracting trap for the viewer - he's the embryo of a crypto-scientific nerd who has less in common with Nietzsche than with a certain type of sclerotic, egotistical academic you'll find slowly going berserk at a second rate college.Importantly, the Chief doesn't quite "get it" about his underrated disciple Jonathan and the Sailor. Jonathan is, or should be, the focus of the film because he is a more interestingly conflicted, assertive, and intellectually cogent character than any of the others - he is the Mishima surrogate, who tries to reconcile and meld the Chief's perfectionism with the sailor's fictional attraction. That requires canceling out the unacceptably artless "return" of the sailor, which is the "fall from grace." Restoring aesthetic grace to the Sailor is the shocking concluding project. Keep your mind's eye on Jonathan - even while heeding the siren calls of competing sex and death.The casting is very good. Miles has the dreamy look and self-deluding spunk of a romance novel heroine. Kristofferson always plays "himself" and in this film his noble antique head, wooden cowboy self-assurance, and gravel-voiced platitudes work perfectly to attract susceptible but discerning Jonathan in the first go around and disgust him in the second. The young actor Jonathan was a real find - able to play the submissive but also a live spark when called upon - his is the subtlest but most important role in the film.