Simply A Masterpiece

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

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

Maybe people really don't want to deal with schizophrenia and mental illness in general. A girl who only talks in rhymes meets a boy who doesn't want to be touched. On paper, it all seems rather silly.But "David and Lisa" was fascinating the first time I saw it, and it remained compelling on my last viewing.The very young Kier Dullea and Janet Margolin turn in poignant performances. Margolin is exceptionally beautiful in her first role. (She was quite lovely years later in Woody Allen's 'Take the Money and Run'.)Each scene is handled well. Howard De Silva gives a wonderfully understated performance as Dullea's doctor.This sort of material can easily be mishandled, and the results may be hokey or even laugh-inducing. But I didn't find a wrong note. (If I were to nitpick, I could say that the script made David's mother a bit too mean-spirited, and his father too sympathetic. But it's a minor point.)The scene where the troubled youngsters start yelling at the family at the station recalls (maybe not so oddly enough), the Todd Browning film 'Freaks'. This scene perhaps captures the spirit of Browning's 'Freaks' better than Todd's heavy-handed horror film did.This may be Kier Dullea's best performance. His eyes betray the arrogance and terror that the young man feels.It certainly is not an upbeat movie; this is probably one reason moviegoers did not warm up to it, although at the time of its release, "David and Lisa" was critically acclaimed. The black and white photography is perfect for the documentary style of the film. This movie remains a fine piece of work. Apparently, it also helped to boost the appeal of independent films, which was a good thing, as Hollywood could not always be trusted to go anywhere near films like this.

"David and Lisa" (1962) directed by Frank Perry was an astonishingly new kind of approach about adolescents traumatized by the adult's world for any reason or fault to adaptation on a competitive society. Because their own lyricism, not facing a reality very different of the sick turmoil of thoughts in a disturbed mind, turned only for self artificial abyss of imagination. Indeed, it was by no means a winning game inside a psychological development, instead criticizing the model of cure by electroshocks or drug medication installed in the fifties, as though a sleeping world should be the channel for cure and only that one. But the foolish David and the nervous Lisa, as tale for everybody with a problematic tale from childhood at home - having at the time here the alternative for being understood little by little -, whose contagion by a fake world of aggressive adults it was actually enormous, they were risking too then losing their own minds in an empty reality, but both in helping each other it was nonetheless better than worst. There is in this movie, made as a documentary in a hospital, a kind of rare tenderness between them as young couple of characters, when they discovered each other as main stable twin soul condition for coming out of their own unreality, only for touching the walls and listening her dislocated voice-over. Now their fingers are applied in their own affair of learning love, like the other side of the separated foolish mind, by the help of a distant doctor in mental disease as place of transition for another state of healthily body art, without the spatial environment of a house of arrest for forcing cure. The way that director Perry and wife Eleanora constructed this movie at the time, out of the traditional melodrama concerning the house arrest for mental diseases for fools with a psychoanalytic expertise, it is the strength of the subject illustrated like a television direct to the souls. Searching of lyricism and authenticity more than legitimacy, the characters never acting as in a psychological plot - for the case without at short term any cure, than loving each other or deepen in prolonged schizophrenia of very young people - in the sense of fiction as we habitually had been told in the recent past fifties - with a score of barbiturates and suicides not understated nor sensationalistic to the public opinion from the time -, namely in a big town and its outskirts. Where at an old abandoned convent this theatrical experiment was rehearsal for the screen, famous till this date at the beginning of the independent production out of self destructiveness of the creators then. This tale was about love between a boy who never talks since he enters there and a girl who doesn't like being touched on her skin.

This beautiful movie has more humanity and intensity than any violent or sexual-filled film that Hollywood puts out today. The magic and conviction of this film will look in your eyes and reach deep into your heart. The acting is superb.You feel like a voyeur uninvited watching a drama unfold.The actress has a sweet demeanor which is very rare in actresses today.The actor just pulls on your heartstrings with his ability to convey to the viewer that he cant touch,yet wants to ...desparat.ely. The simple scene in which the lead actor shares a slice of chocolate cake with the psychiatrist,shows an enormous amount of two humans interacting on a level of the patient and the doctor,yet each learning and teaching from another.The vulnerability and rawness of the film reaches so many different levels and scenes throughout the movie.This film has much more raw emotion than Nicholson's film"One flew over the Cuckoo's Nest".And that is because the story gets right to the point.It is beautifully done simple,and not trying to hard.Dr.Petersen

Although I viewed this film over 40 years ago, it still comes back to my mind from time to time. It packs an emotional punch that is rarely seen in cinema today. The young Keir Dullea gives a very convincing performance as a highly intelligent, but mentally disturbed young man. The cinematography is excellent, burning images into the mind that are still there 40 years later. I recommend this film highly to anyone interested in the cinematic art, as well as those who enjoy a strong story. The fact that the film was shot in black and white is a definite plus. It tends to accentuate the starkness of David's world and subliminally takes the viewer into a world of absolutes, where shades of gray have no place.