Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

I saw this movie before reading any reviews, and I thought it was very funny. I was very surprised to see the overwhelmingly negative reviews this film received from critics.

There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Having watched Kirk Douglas in 'Spartacus', I wanted to learn more about his track record leading up to 1960 by watching this film. Don't waste your time on this poorly made effort. It doesn't even come close to the quality of 'A Detective Story' because it fails to provide engaging characters or a compelling plot. Kirk can be quite intense in his roles and almost neurotic at times. The close-ups in this film allows you to see the sickness in his eyes that we also see in 'The Juggler'. Both of these films are dud efforts and can't really be called movies. Fortunately, Kirk made enough popular movies to cancel out the dud efforts such as this one and 'The Juggler'.

Fresh from the acclaim he got in A Story Of Three Loves as a romantic, Kirk Douglas got a film to do the entire feature length of in Act Of Love with French Actress Dany Robin. In all our wars on foreign shores there is usually a story of American soldiers falling in love with some woman of the native population. Kirk Douglas plays your average American soldier, no heroic type by any means who falls in love with a woman who is about two steps away from selling herself just to live.It was that all over Europe after Hitler's War. This same story could and probably has been done in all the occupied countries of Europe, East and West, in Italy, in Austria, in Holland, and even in Mr. Hitler's Germany. Our army had a no fraternization policy, but boys and girls will be boys and girls. And if the real thing did come along you had an incredible amount of bureaucracy to deal with.The whole subject was dealt with a few years later in Sayonara with a racial component attached to it and a much bigger budget. I don't think Kirk Douglas has ever been more romantic on the screen than in Act Of Love. It's an unusual part for him, but he carries it off. Anatole Litvak gets good performances out of his cast and the on site location cinematography is a plus.

A movie director and producer can take a direction either toward realism or toward some type of fantasy or horror. Many times movie watchers want a fantasy, something to take you away from your life and entertain. This movie has elements of fantasy. Who wouldn't want a quickly developing romance with such a beautiful French girl? But then reality sets in. Maybe some viewers would be sorry that reality ruined the fantasy. However, we have all watched our variations of the classic Greek tragedy. Act of Love is like a 20th century Greek tragedy. Maybe they didn't all live happily after, but we still could relate to the characters and their story. Maybe this is another movie where "We'll always have Paris." Of course Kirk Douglas has probably never made a bad movie. His nuanced performance here might be under-appreciated by some. I thought it was just right for the part. We could feel what he was feeling. But then there is the French beauty Dany Robin. I don't care what the media voted her, I thought she was wonderful in this movie. Her eyes especially, so beautiful whether she was in extreme sadness or in a moment of sheer joy. So spunky yet so vulnerable. I only wish I could see her in more movies. Barbara Laage was also special in the early parts of the movie.The many other bit parts are all played well. I also get the impression that while it is not a war movie in the classic sense, that the story and its setting played true. Liberated Paris just before the end of WWII was probably just about like that.All in all, a movie well worth watching.

A low-key film with a fine cast. Unfortunately, it's so low-key as to seem nearly aimless for the first half. The pace and interest do pick up, however, toward the end.As World war II grinds slowly to a halt in Europe, an innocent French girl on the brink of prostitution and a cynical but lonely GI fall in love in the City of Lights - where, due to the war, the lights don't always work, A flaw, at least as the film plays on television, is that the French accents are sometimes hard to understand. And there are plenty of them.Though ten years too old for the role, not unusual for actors in war movies before the '70s, Douglas turns in a solid performance as Pfc. Teller, the wounded American soldier now stationed at an army headquarters in Paris. But it is the lovely Dany Robin, rarely seen in America, who deserves most of the acting credit for keeping the rather unfocused story interesting. Fernand Ledoux is adequately brooding and resentful. The eighteen-year-old Brigitte Bardot is already beautiful, but look sharp or you may miss her.The real scene-stealer here, though, is the slinky Barbara Laage, who shows herself to be a fine actress in very nearly her only American film. Too bad she breezes out of the picture a third of the way through.The on-location shots of Paris are also a plus in a film that sometimes flirts dangerously with soap opera. Not a classic or even a forgotten classic, but worth your time if bittersweet love is your cup of tea.