Best movie ever!

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

I never read the book but can't imagine that Fitzgerald would write something so awful. There is no way Elizabeth Taylor would ever fall for Van Johnson either on screen or in real life. The director and writers never give us any reason they would fall for each other. There is absolutely no chemistry.Also, Johnson is in his late 30's and so he doesn't fit the role of the young GI here.Johnson struggles throughout to play the part in the way that Hayden Christensen labored to play Darth Vader in Revenge of the Sith. It is not completely their fault in either case as the material from the screenwriters hurt them, but they are still totally miscast.The positives are Elizabeth Taylor's brilliant and lovely performance. She is mesmerizing. Pidgeon is great as always and you get a look at a young Roger Moore. Overall, this would have been a 2 if it hadn't been for Taylor. The story makes little sense and the screenwriters did a poor job along with the director. It also drags on way too long.

Producer: Jack Cummings. Copyright 1954 by Loew's Inc. A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer picture. New York opening at the Capitol: 18 November 1954. U.S. release: 19 November 1954. U.K. release: February 1955. Australian release: 12 March 1955. Sydney opening at the Liberty. 10,423 feet. 116 minutes. COMMENT: Elizabeth Taylor is certainly gorgeously costumed; and likewise indulgently treated by her photographer, hairdresser and make-up man. These worthies take great care to ensure that neither Eva Gabor nor Donna Reed have a hope of out-shining Liz. True, Miss Gabor is still presented in an attractive light, but Donna Reed looks positively dowdy. Still she is cast as the heavy - and her role is comparatively small anyway - so I suppose I can't reasonably complain. But what I can complain about is the acting. Just about all the acting is totally mechanical. The only exceptions are oddly enough Elizabeth Taylor herself, who brings a bit of fire and vivacity to her characterization, and to a lesser extent, Miss Gabor. The rest of the players go through their appropriate, one-dimensional emotions like wind-up automatons whom the director has set in motion: Van Johnson worried, Walter Pidgeon blasé, Donna Reed heavily serious, Kurt Kasznar ostentatiously sympathetic, Roger Moore politely punctilious, and so on. It's also obvious that the movie is directed by a writer who is inordinately in love with his own words - no matter how mundane, trite or ordinary. He has all his players speak slowly, distinctly, calmly, carefully enunciating each syllable as if offering the audience a succession of priceless jewels. So as not to distract our attention from these verbal treasures, he persistently sets up his camera in the most pedestrian and unobtrusive positions. With dialogue as dull as this, a plot that is nothing more than a slow-moving cliché, and characters so resolutely banal and impossibly stilted, it would be hard to imagine a more complete disservice to the memory and talent of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Expansively produced, with Van Johnson actually on location in Paris for some scenes, the film manages an occasional bit of flavor, even once or twice a smidgen of heart. But we hear that same old Kern/Hammerstein tune six or seven times too often. OTHER VIEWS: This emotional melodrama is bad enough judged on its own merits, but seems even worse when one considers its source - F. Scott Fitzgerald's story, Babylon Revisited. Director Richard Brooks, in collaboration with writers Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein, took a finely written, persuasively disenchanted story and turned it into a cliché-ridden tub of the most superficial twaddle. - TV Times.

The DVD was in a 10-pack Drama special, so I watched to see the celebrated Elizabeth Taylor. But if I'd known that the film was based on a story by F Scott Fitzgerald, I probably wouldn't have bothered.Fitzgerald's writing reflects his own pointless, selfish, self-centred, shallow and decadent life-style, and the film follows that throughout. It's an autobiography about nothing.The film is saved from getting a 1 rating by the generally good acting, and especially that of Donna Reed and Walter Pidgeon.When Charles (Johnson) meets the two daughters of another useless wastrel, (Pidgeon) he obviously like Marion (Reed) but then falls for the flashy Helen (Taylor). Perhaps later, much later, he regrets that choice.The film is set over a time span of eight or more years, but Van Johnson looks exactly the same from the first to the last scenes. Not one hair out of place in spite of once spending the whole night on the town with a broad, and later getting soaking wet! That is poor directing/producing. At least Taylor gets a new hair-style later.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story "Babylon Revisted", reworked by three screenwriters (including director Richard Brooks), becomes a well-dressed but chilly, mopey star-vehicle. Americans in Paris find themselves wealthy after striking oil, but the writer-husband's inability to sell a story--coupled with a drinking problem and an attraction to a catty socialite--puts a strain on their marriage. Elizabeth Taylor does what she can with the masochistic wifey role, even getting what actresses like to call "a good hospital scene," but Van Johnson has more of an opportunity as a performer to show range and emotion (the writing is slanted that way). The scenario becomes episodic after the couple comes into money, while the final portion of the plot continues 15 minutes longer than necessary, presumably to 'teach' angry relative Donna Reed about forgiveness...and to show Johnson begging for love, something that apparently humbles every tortured writer's soul. **1/2 from ****