John N.

As Fritz Lang says in the movie, "I liked 'M' better". What was this movie about anyway? These characters, while unpredictable and erratic, are also very two-dimensional. Yes, Jack Palance reads a few good lines from his black book, and yes Bridget Bardot is cruel and beautiful with the shifting wind, and yes maybe Penelope really did despise Homer.

So what?

This movie is filled with incessant whining and dirty looks. At least the audience gets to witness another trademark Godard death scene (and Bardot's ass). I have a suggestion to speed this movie up. How about this: Stay the hell home if you don't want to go to Capri! Damn!

A colossal headache! Odysseus would have steered clear of this torture.

If it weren't for several other strong works from Truffaut, this one would be my favorite. And it somes ways it is my favorite. The interaction between Victor and Dr. Itard was splendidly done. It was a joy simply to watch Truffaut on- screen directing the boy's progress, much like he must have done off-screen to get some very human reactions. At no point during this film did I think a scene was overdone or unnatural. It just seemed to flow from one small triumph to the next. My only complaint was that the whole experiment ended abrubtly, and so too did the movie. We are told by Dr. Itard that Victor is a extraordinary boy, but he has much training left to master. There were many points along the way where doubt lingered as to whether the wild child could be fully trained at all until the final scene. There we learn that Victor has a new home.

This movie was based on a true event which took place in the late 1700s. Unfortunately for the audience, the most pressing question of what became of Victor in his adult life is left unanswered. But fans of Francois Truffaut will find him even more engaging than in his role of Claude Lacombe in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". The roles are similar in many ways. If Lacombe could have taken home the child-like aliens to instruct, I'm sure he would have been much like Dr. Itard.

With all the recent Eyes Wide Shut hype, I went back to take a look at this early Kubrick work. Yes, you can see some touches of inspiration in this period piece, but I think it really fell short. For its day, the boxing sequence was pretty good, though I was more impressed by straight ahead camera angles in Requiem for a Heavyweight. Kubrick's gladiators didn't even seem like they were taking hard shots at each other -- not nearly as hard as the sound effects would have you believe.

Anyway, I thought Irene Cane did a fine job playing a wayward girl looking for some purpose in life. She latches onto whatever lifts her spirit for the moment and then can so easily turn it away with a casual look. So near the end of the film when she's pleading for her life with her offer to leave her new lover to marry the thug she had seemed to take pleasure in spurning, we just aren't sure whether she is simply acting desperate or if she really can recant her affection so easily. And the main character, Davy Gordon, openly considers this too as he dashes through the window to save his own neck.

If the film just ended right there, with those threds left unresolved, it would have been a much better movie. Davy could have boarded his train to the West never knowing what became of his two-day girlfriend or the thug she tried to appease. And wouldn't it have been ironic if she were forced to marry that man -- like her sister was forced to marry someone she didn't love? That would have been a cruel twist of fate indeed!

Yet what we got was neither cruel or unusual or even mysterious. No, we got the standard Hollywood ending to a film which had done a good job of breaking a standard Hollywood mold to that point. If it wasn't Kubrick making this film, making that woman run down the stairs into her lover's waiting arms as the big music came up to signal the Happy Ending(TM), I would have just clicked off the TV and forgot all about it. But this is Stanley Kubrick!!!!!! Boy was I disappointed! The only thing I can hope for was that the movie studio forced him to edit his true ending and Kubrick wasn't in a position to reject them at that early stage in his career.

Oh well. See this movie if you're a Kubrick fan, but don't say I didn't warn you that the ending is completely Hollywood.