What a beautiful movie!
... View MoreTruly Dreadful Film
... View MoreThat was an excellent one.
... View MoreI like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.
... View More"Dear Heart" was intended to be a romance. Yet, inexplicably, the film has a lot of unromantic material--and the leads, who you are supposed to like, are rather awful people. After reading through the other reviews, I can see that some could look past this and there were a few who could not.Geraldine Page stars as Evie, a rather pathetic and annoying woman in New York for a postmasters convention. Exactly who she is and what she is doing at the convention is a bit vague--for a while I thought she was a prostitute--albeit a very unappealing one. Regardless, she talks almost incessantly, has the hotel page her loudly and repeatedly for bogus calls and seems VERY willing to hitch up with just about any man. Her desperation was very sad and would have made for an interesting character study had the part been played with SOME subtlety. Instead, she was just grating and I could see no reason why the male lead fell for her.Glenn Ford plays Harry Mork (yes, MORK)--a complicated and difficult to like guy. He is about to get married and tells everyone he's married. He even calls the 18 year-old son of his fiancé 'son'--even though they never met. Yet, despite seeming to try so hard at domesticity, he is a bit of a player and sleeps around during the course of the film.I know I am a bit old fashioned, but a woman who is willing to sleep with who she thinks is a married man and an engaged guy who sleeps about just before the wedding are hard to like. And, given the film is a romance, this all seems VERY unromantic. So, even though parts of the film are quite nice (such as the music and Ford's acting), I just couldn't get past the sleazy and very adult nature of the 'romance'.
... View MoreComedy is hard. Ask any professional comedian. In the movies, romantic comedies are hard to do, so that good ones are rare, and really good ones even more so. Great romantic comedies are like rare gems; the avid movie fan sees a lot of junk looking for these sparkling creations. I give you Delbert Mann's exquisite 1964 jewel DEAR HEART, perhaps the sweetest little film of the decade, and a showcase for the late, great Geraldine Page.Page plays Evie Jackson, a postmaster from Avalon, Ohio who arrives in New York at the beginning of the film for a convention. Evie is a sweet, slightly daffy, and almost too-friendly woman on the brink of middle-age who redecorates her hotel room to make it feel more like home and who knows every member of the hotel staff by their first names before her first day in New York is over.Also checking in is Harry Mork, played by the always-dependable Glenn Ford. Ford was never a great actor but he is wonderful here. Harry is the epitome of the stereotypical traveling salesman (greeting cards), with a woman waiting for him in nearly every city he visits. Soon after his arrival, he goes to visit one of his many mistresses, a commercial artist he calls by her last name, Mitchell, played to a fare-thee-well by the great and underrated Patricia Barry. It is to Mitchell that he breaks the news that he has met a woman named Phyllis, and has somehow gotten himself engaged to marry her, almost on a bet. Mitchell, the consummate New York sophisticate, takes the news in stride, and as Harry leaves, you can almost hear her thinking, "You'll be back, buster!"Back at the hotel, Harry finds himself being shadowed by a young man who takes it upon himself to carry his luggage upstairs. The young man is the son of Harry's as-yet unseen fiancée. Harry is a bit befuddled; he has a picture in his wallet of Phyllis and her son, taken when Patrick was thirteen. He is now twenty, and has come to seek out "Dad's" advice and support because Mom appears to him to be unaware of the fact that he is nearly grown. With him is his silent girlfriend, whose main function is to be caught taking baths in other people's bathrooms.Finally, Harry enters the hotel coffee shop in search of lunch, and the only available seat is at a table across from none other than Evie Jackson. Page and Ford are simply sublime together; the script is very knowing, and quite sophisticated for its time. Harry's exploits are already well-established, and in a later, rather poignant scene, we realize that at a previous convention Evie was intimate with a married man, an intimacy she now regrets because it was only a shadow of what she really wants. For himself, Harry is so taken with Evie that almost immediately after lunch, he propositions the girl at the magazine counter almost on a reflex. The resulting "date" is one of the film's comic high points.I don't want to give away too much of the romance; it is too good to be spoiled that way, so I'll simply urge anyone who reads this to see it for him/herself.But what about Phyllis?Oh yes, Phyllis. So far, she's only been a name and a face in a picture; we haven't actually seen her. But as Harry and Evie return from a lovely stolen day in New York, the lady herself (Angela Lansbury) is at the magazine counter, swathed in furs and completely unconcerned that Harry has been out and about with another woman.Lansbury's role is a small one, but as usual, she is a revelation. Coming a mere two years after her absolutely chilling Mrs Iselin in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, her Phyllis is quite the wrong woman for a man looking to "settle down" by the standards of the day. She's also screamingly funny, because she never seems to actually hear a word her fiancé says to her. As for her son, even with a beard she still sees him as a little boy.Somebody once said that the best comedy comes from pain and sadness. I think there is some truth in this, because amid all the laughs, and there are a lot of them, the central theme of this film is loneliness. Evie and Harry, underneath their cheery façades, are both desperately lonely people.Geraldine Page, a self-described "stage actress who does movies occasionally," delivers another luminous performance here; she is so utterly appealing that by the end of the film we feel as if we know her, and wish we did in real life. As for Ford, working with talents like Page and Lansbury is good for him here; he delivers a much deeper performance than he is accustomed to, one that may be all the more difficult since he starts off as a bit of a heel and it is not until the end that his character finds redemption.In his excellent review of 1981's ON GOLDEN POND, the eminent critic Roger Ebert had this to say:"Fragile emotions are hard to portray in a movie, and the movies that reach for them are more daring, really, than movies that bludgeon us with things like anger and revenge, which are easy to portray."I give you DEAR HEART, a film which, like ON GOLDEN POND nearly twenty years later, deals in the frailty of the human heart, the pain of loneliness, and the ways in which lonely people deal with their pain, all while making the audience laugh. For a "little" film, this is a huge accomplishment.A definite must-see.
... View MoreDear Heart finds Glenn Ford and Geraldine Page as a pair of late thirty somethings who find true love at a New York convention. The convention is one Geraldine's attending, she's the postmaster of her small Ohio town and it's a Postmaster's convention. By the way at that time these were political positions in every postal area of the USA so in 1964 Geraldine would have to have been a good organization Democrat in her town.Glenn's a traveling salesman, greeting cards is his line and he's spent his young years just on the road and now wants to settle down. He thinks he's found what he wants in Angela Lansbury, a widow with a son from Altoona.Almost a third of the film goes by before Ford and Page even meet and we get a good background into their character. Makes what happens in the film almost inevitable. Although this is far from the exotic setting of The African Queen, Dear Heart is like that film showing that love can certainly come at any age. And in this case from unexpected quarters where you least expect it.The code was still in place or the postmistresses played by Ruth McDevitt, Alice Pearce, and Mary Wickes would be far more explicitly lesbian. The three of them eye Page as possibly a member of the fraternity. As for Page she gets an offer from Charles Drake with whom she had a fling before she found out he was married and a more crude offer from Ken Lynch in the hotel elevator.The very lovely title song of the film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song. A whole flock of people recorded it back in the day, Frank Sinatra, Andy Williams, and Jack Jones come immediately to mind. It lost to Chim Chim Cheree from Mary Poppins, but while that song is known it certainly can't be separated from the film it came from. I think Dear Heart has more staying power.And I think the film Dear Heart has a lot more staying power as well.
... View MoreBusy, theatrical sentiment with Geraldine Page memorably neurotic as a lonely spinster who sends herself messages and has her own name paged in hotels...just to feel thought of; Glenn Ford is the family man whom she falls in love with. Stagy piece from writer Tad Mosel has a central character not too far from one of Tennessee Williams' heroines, and Page brings the part to life with a vivid portrayal. Henry Mancini's score sparkles and the black-and-white cinematography is good, but Ford walks through his part (he fills the bill and nothing more) and Michael Anderson, Jr. is way over-the-top as Ford's beatnik son (an embarrassing role for any actor). Smart talk, a few strong scenes, and Page's touching, annoying, amusing performance nearly makes this sudser worth seeing. ** from ****
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