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That Douglas Sirk must have really loved watching soap operas. His movies always feature stories an average soap opera features in one whole season and would be jealous off. But yet his movies still often work out as great ones to watch, as does this one as well.

This movie can definitely be called melodramatic and overdone, since basically a whole lot is happening in it. Characters are all interconnected with each other, with all of the drama and emotions that go with it and there is really a lot of drama going on in this movie. Definitely too much to call this movie a really convincing one but yet I really can't say that the movie is bad or ever becomes an annoying one with all of its drama piling up on each other.

The movie is simply far too well made for that. Just imaging a soap opera episode being directed by Steven Spielberg. That episode would rock as well, as does this movie also, that got directed by genre expert Douglas Sirk. He gives the movie lots of class and gets great performances out of his actors.

Dorothy Malone even won an Oscar for her role, as a real femme fatale. Nevertheless I always keep seeing her as the old lesbian lover of Sharon Stone in "Basic Instinct", which also happened to be her last movie role by the way. She's still alive but simply enjoying her pension now, I would assume.

Rock Hudson and Douglas Sirk must had really loved working with each other, seeing that this is the 7th movie they did together and after this movie made even 2 more. It's no complaint of course, Rock Hudson was a great actor for these sort of roles and actually the worst movies they did together were their non-melodramatic ones.

I would actually assume that the story for this movie on paper looked extremely bland and average but Douglas Sirk simply managed to really spiced things up with his directing skills and made the movie a perfectly watchable one.

Can't say I was always too happy about its pacing. At times the story really makes some sudden leaps in time but this is something that often is the case with a movie that is filled with so much drama. The alternative would had been that this would movie would had been a 3 and an half hour long one, while the 100 minutes that it's now being short, ensures that this movie at all times remains an easy and always light watch, despite of all its heavy drama that is happening within its story.

One big soap opera, that just got done irresistibly well.

7/10

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About Frank Veenstra

Watches movies...writes about them...and that's it for now.
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