Tender Is the Night

20th Century Fox

Drama Romance
142 min     5.667     1962     USA

Overview

1920s, the French Riviera: wealthy expatriate Nicole Warren's mental illness strains her marriage to psychiatrist Dick. A young American actress named Rosemary Hoyt arrives and is drawn into their circle, becoming romantically involved with the older, married Dick and disrupting the fragile balance of the group. The thought of Dick possibly being attracted to another sends Nicole on an emotional downward spiral that threatens to consume them all.

Reviews

CinemaSerf wrote:
F. Scott Fitzgerald did run a bit to language with his writing and this all-too literal adaptation suffers a bit from a lack of pruning. Consequently, we have a great deal of dialogue and perhaps not enough passion from a cast who seem curiously disconnected from the story. That plot revolves around some gradually evolving marital dysfunction which peppered with some flashbacks introduces us to "Nicole" (Jennifer Jones) who is married to "Dick" (Jason Robards) who used to be the psychiatrist helping her with her dypsomania. The story now takes us on a roller-coaster ride of alcohol-fuelled neuroses and conflict that offer loads of opportunities for intensity and tension but that Robards seems a little uncomfortable with. His inability to punch to his weight leaves Jones to do too much of the heavy lifting and though Tom Ewell's "Abe" injects some humour and, of course, reprises the title song whenever he gets a chance there is something just a little too sanitised about this overlong enterprise. It does look good and the production design offers us quite an authentic glimpse of just how the other half lived - epitomised well by Joan Fontaine's "Baby" whose scenes with "Dick" might have been the only source of a spark throughout this film, but I reckon it needed much more of a re-write to focus more on the nuances of this myriad of flawed characters. Perhaps the casting of "Dick" could have been just a little more robust and for my money, the desperation of this story comes across better within the confines of a stage.

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