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

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

An all-American young man, who is an excellent classical dancer, has risen to fame under the Russian-sounding name of Sanine. After the sudden death of his wife, Sanine sinks into a deep depression. Cared for by a kind-hearted and besotted ballerina, Sanine seems to recover both his mental health and his appetite for life. But what about the persistent rumours ? Did Sanine really kill his spouse ?"Specter" is an uneven and over-ambitious movie. At the same time it is an original and electrifying noir, notable mainly for its evocation of a certain kind of Russo-American ballet circa 1940-1950. Viewers interested in ballet, or in the history of ballet, are sure to enjoy both the music and the (excerpts from) performances. There is also a colourful depiction of the artistic bohème, with its age-old and universal problems : amorous rivalry, lack of money, nomadic employment, conflicts between real life and play-acting or between soaring vision and vulnerability. I'm sorry to say that the actor playing Sanine is both a beautiful man and a decent dancer, but not the most gifted of actors : watching him tackle a demanding, psychologically complex role is rather like watching a hamster drive a school bus. He redeems himself in his final scenes, which are genuinely chilling and unsettling. I do not think that anyone who saw Sanine's final exit, will ever watch "Le spectre de la rose" with the same eyes again...

Judith Anderson who was the nasty, evil Danvers in Rebecca and the miscast "big mama" with a British-Louisiana accent in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof plays a former ballerina who runs a ballet school (don't they all?). Lionel Sandler who became the gruff major domo in the TV series Hart to Hart, plays a gruff non-rhyming poet. Some other guy, plays an over the top effectual show biz promoter. This other guy decides to resurrect the career of a the brilliant ballet dancer Ivor Somebody,who may or may not have killed his wife a few months early and since then he has become a looney toon recluse;he hears music in his head and sees ghost dancers with his face. Anywho, he says he is OK now and begins a series of road shows and has a hot love and marriage to another dancer, I forget her name..she made two movies in her entire career...twice as many as Ivor. Well, as luck would have it, sometime after Kansas City, Ivor sort of starts going cuckoo again. Lots of drama and jumping and twirling which is suppose to resemble ballet ensues and instead of slitting his wife's throat he takes a flying leap out the plate glass window. Kerplunk. Some silly dialog for a couple of minutes. And then the movie ends. I streamed this on Netflix but the won't give me a pro-rated credit. The acting is dreadful. The dancing by Ivor is gymnastics, not ballet. The whole thing is awful.

Whatever unfulfilled ambitions drove Ben Hecht to write, produce and direct Spectre of the Rose, it's charitable to pretend they bore scant relation to the gruesome folly that eventuated. Did Hollywood's most prolific uncredited contributor to great screenplays crave the glory that would come with his very own Citizen Kane? If so, he made choices that can only be accounted as bizarre.First, he set his story in the world of `the dance.' Since of all the arts, ballet, for Americans at any rate, reeks of the rarefied – the elite, movies about it invariably lapse into gaseous talk about `aaht.' Spectre of the Rose dives right into this pitfall. The high-flown, portentous dialogue must have entranced Hecht but it plainly baffles his cast. They variously give it stilted readings, flat it out, and drop quotation marks around it, but except for Judith Anderson – as an old assoluta now training novices in a `dingy' studio – nobody can make it work. (But then, she made Lady Scarface work.)The plot concerns a deranged male superstar called Sanine (Ivan Kirov), who may have murdered his first wife and partner and now seems to be rehearsing to kill his second (Viola Essen). It's safe to presume Kirov was engaged only to fling his polished torso around because he can't even act embarrassed; it's no surprise that this is his solitary screen credit. But his murderous madness just sits there, with a take-it-or-leave-it shrug, while the movie pirouettes off on other tangents. There's a larcenous impresario (Michael Chekhov) who outdoes even Clifton Webb in trying to break down the celluloid closet's door. Most puzzlingly, there's Lionel Stander as a Runyonesque poet who seems intended as some sort of Greek chorus to the goings-on but serves instead as a major irritant, uninvited and out of place.Without knowing what compromises Hecht made and obstacles he faced in bringing his work to the screen, it's easy to be glib. But there's such a discordance of tones and jostling of moods that the movie elicits diverse responses; thus some viewers have found in Spectre of the Rose something special and unique. Movies, maybe more than any other art form, touch our idiosyncracies. But when we're left unsure whether The Spectre of the Rose is dead-earnest or a grandiose spoof – an election-bet of a movie -- something has gone radically awry.

I am surprised and even saddened that there are no other votes or comments for this extraordinary film about the ballet world, because that would seem to mean that no one using IMDB has seen it; you are missing one of the most unique films ever made.Ben Hecht wrote and Ben Hecht directed this surreal film about a dancer in the eccentric world of ballet who is obsessed with a ballerina; there are few if any obsessions that are not destructive, and I will not give away the ending, but it is spectacular and moving. You will not forget this film once you have seen it.