Act of Love

How truly odd it is that so little attention to this film is evident in these archives. Apart from some quibbles one might have with its casting, the occasionally stilted dialogue, or some melodramatic nonsense here and there, it really is an important addition to the Kirk Douglas oeuvre as well as a story about a character very much like those he played later in "Paths of Glory" and "Lonely Are the Brave."

Douglas must have had more than a passing hand in choosing roles for himself during his career. Unlike many of his contemporaries (Brando comes to mind), he has played characters that require a fine balance between kinetic displays of a true hero and moments of self-effacing and troubled doubt. It is not so much the quality of the writing at work here as it is his own deliberate and skillful willingness to interpret the role honestly, without regard to any supposed preconceptions of what his audience expects of him.

I write this with a degree of reservation, because I never much cared for his voice or his looks. The fact that I admire his acting skill is perhaps all the more enhanced by this admission, however. With a profile a little less vivid and a better vocal range and timbre, he might have played Shakespeare.

His French colleagues in the present effort are more stereotypical than one cares for. They are made to speak a kind of pidgin English that was generally thought acceptable in 1953 for American audiences. Subtitles accompanying actual French would be requisite for any remake.

Moreover, there is that recurrent tinge of sentimentality and bathos. But I still liked it on the whole, giving it a solid 7 out of 10.

More than any other movie I've seen, this one draws a dark picture of what the statistical enormity and bureaucratic obscenity of WWII did to individuals during (and after) the Second World War. This is a love story set against the new way of dealing with the logistics of millions of people on the move in wartime Europe -- on either side. The big point is that it's difficult to draw a line between the sides in the brutal impersonality of the events that crush people like the characters in this story.

Kirk Douglas is great, of course, and the direction in the film is always intersting. Hard to believe this was made as late as 53.

See this if you can -- I saw it on TCM recently in a Kirk Douglas festival. For that matter, watch all the Kirk Douglas flicks you can -- the guy had either great taste or great luck.

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.

Although a co-production ,although it has a French title and features plenty of French luminaries,the film fell into oblivion in France.It's barely mentioned in the dictionaries of movies .

It was Anatole Litvak's return to France,where he had made some of his thirties movies ("L'Equipage" ,definitely a movie to rediscover, "Mayerling" the remake of which was filmed by Terence Young in 1968 or "Coeur de Lilas").But although I expected much of this film,I must admit I was disappointed.Particularly after watching his absorbing "decision before dawn" ,the movie he made just before "Un Acte d'Amour" The main problem is language:it's not very smart to make the French speak English between them.It's not a problem for a foreign audience,but for the French one it is one: Dany Robin and Serge Reggiani speaking English together is downright embarrassing.Not that their English is bad,but it is impossible to believe in THAT Paris,where almost everybody ,from a humble waitress to the hookers,speaks fluent English .And why didn't Litvak use Douglas' linguistic abilities?I once saw an interview during the Festival de Cannes and his French was quite good.

The French outnumber their American co-stars:Fernand Ledoux,Gabrielle Dorziat (whom Litvak had already directed in 'Mayerling" where she was miscast as Elizabeth "Sissi" from Austria),Dany Robin (who would be part of Hitchcock's "Topaz") ,the highly superior Reggiani (whose English delivery is much faster than when he speaks French: one should note he never says a single word in his first language,which is unlikely),and Brigitte Bardot (wearing braids) who appears in two short sequences as a waitress .

The best of this mushy story (the scene in the prison with a ridiculous voice over takes the biscuit when the young pure heroine winds up in the lions den (that is to say a cell with prostitutes)takes place in the prologue and in the epilogue :Douglas comes back to a place his love was happy when she was sixteen on the Cote d'Azur and he remembers her words .The meeting with his former superior and his wife,the room where the soldier feels nostalgic for a time that never was ,all this has Sirk accents and makes me feel the movie could have easily been boiled down into a good short.

USA/French co-productions are a rarity. But this serves its subject matter superbly well - that time when American soldiers in their hundreds of thousands were first fighters then feted liberators on French soil. As does the script - nobody is a stereotype, everyone has their own, believable, character. Perhaps the sense of authenticity came also from the short time, just 8 years, between the events portrayed and when it was filmed. This was not one author's or one scriptwriter's imagination - it must have been a vivid memory in the minds of tens if not hundreds of thousands of American soldiers. Equally vivid for the French who had seen occupation or collaboration then liberation. There is a certain graciousness and humanity in the treatment of the characters. Later and lesser writers and directors would portray such situations as simply the meeting of drunken animalistic soldiers with faceless whores and thieving tricky locals. There is a dignity and respect to this film which has all but disappeared in subsequent "war movies".

Star that he is, was Kirk Douglas well-cast? I think not. Kirk Douglas portrayed even personified a particular type: given to action either outer or inner. Here he plays a far less certain character, not driven but drifting. Douglas was always Spartacus, even if the Romans couldn't spot him, viewers could every time. Perhaps this was a role for Mitchum - a mixture of integrity tempered by a degree of indolence.

This is not a film packed with stars, it is packed with people, American and French - a tribute to the director, writers and cast.

(British viewers might recognise a familiar face - Leslie Dwyer (here a quirky cameo Tommy with "just 5 teeth") later the grumpy child-hating children's entertainer in a '80's TV comedy series Hi De Hi!.)