Fluentiama Perfect cast and a good story

Salubfoto It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

SanEat A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

mark.waltz In one of the oddest casting choices in film history (and of a certain legend's career), the role usually played by Maria Montez is taken over by...Barbara Stanwyck??? She's the matriarch of a Burmese plantation who welcomes strangers into her house with open arms (and apparently an open bar), not even checking their references. The moment alleged killer Robert Ryan shows up, she's eying him up and down like a search light, offering him a second drink just as he's chugged down his first.She's just inspected the elephants and the men who use them to work in the jungles and fired one of them for repeatedly abusing the elder of the pack. This Elephant Queen of Burma treats the riders well, and immediately places a Sabu-like youngster on the back of the abused pachyderm, promising him great rewards if he does his job well. But the natives believe that evil spirited tiger has killed an elephant in the jungle, and Stanwyck heads out there with Ryan to prove that it was a real tiger, not some invisible spook with the power to kill beasts of burden three times the size of real tigers.On the search for Ryan is David Farrar, hired by the ruler of Burma to find the man they believe killed the prince. Ryan and Stanwyck encounter Farrar after their return from the jungle and this leads to another jaunt into the tropical forest where they encounter bandits and an oncoming monsoon. The three of them are forced to spend the night in an abandoned ancient ruins where chimps, orangutans and other assorted small monkeys reside. Before you can say, "Me Tarzan, You Jane", the king's men are on the march, having arrested one of the bandits who is in possession of one of the late princes' bracelet.Unbelievable adventure in the realm of Maria Montez/Yvonne de Carlo adventures of the 1940's (with a touch of "Elephant Walk" thrown in), this seems totally out of Stanwyck's element, and even her performance seems out of whack, sometimes so kindly you'd think she'd never played all those deadly film noir vixens. Visions of various jungle animals (including the deadly tiger as well as a black panther) add to the colorful vision of this jungle paradise, and the audacious set design is equally camp in its presentation. "You two men make me prefer the company of elephants!", she barks at one point to the fighting men, and certainly, her pachyderm pals are as loyal to her as her servants. Much of the acting of the mostly British cast playing the Burmese is amateurish and silly, but this isn't without its compensation. I've never had so much fun laughing at a Barbara Stanwyck movie in my life, and it wasn't one of her classic screwball comedies.

dbdumonteil Allan Dwan seems more interested in filming the elephants than he is in directing his actors.Most of the time,excellent actors such as Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Ryan are left to their own devices:it's obvious in their first meeting and in the intimate scenes.As for the story,if you have not guessed that Ryan is not guilty long before the extravagant "explanation" ,you are very naive.At times,it looks like an Asiatic western,the elephants replacing the horses.It's an interminable chase ,with a stubborn English cop,nasty natives, a meal in the jungle where the heroes eat elephant stuffed with tiger or the reverse and precious stones .

Alice Liddel It is one of the cliches of mainstream Hollywood cinema that the desire of the hero is limited to two options - a good girl (marriage, security, family, society), and a bad girl (lust, transgression). In this scenario, women are barely people at all, more embodiments of Law and Desire, the socially acceptable and unacceptable. Not the least of this brilliant film's achievements is the way it transfers this cliche to the heroine, making it new and strange. It is the two male characters who represent the two options open to the woman - Robert Ryan is the outlaw, suspected murderer and jewel thief, sexually direct; David Farrer is the policeman, punctiliously obeisant to the law, sexually repressed. Ryan hasn't stepped foot in Barbara Stanwyk's elephant ranch before he's made himself at home, made her frankly voracious and got her talking about 'marriage', which we suspect has little to do with religious ceremonies. Farrer no sooner arrives then he wants to take a man home with him. The film's most striking scene occurs near the climax, in the symbolic space of an abandoned, monkey infested Buddhist temple, the two men grappling like Lawrentian blood brothers, and Stanwyk gaping hungrily on, absolutely thrilled.This central twist is part of the film's wider iconoclasm. Like more renowned peers (Minnelli, Sirk etc.), Dwan takes reactionary material and dismantles it. Firstly, the film offers an odd mish-mash of genres. The film is supposedly set in Burma and its environs, but this is an Orient in the tradition of Powell and Pressburger, the hero of whose 'Black Narcissus' stars here (Farrer). Whereas 'Narcissus' was a work of complete, defiant artifice, 'Escape' offers a disturbing clash between real location footage and cramped studio sets, often within the one scene which, especially in action sequences, has a jarring, alienating effect. The most notable example occurs early on, when Ryan and Stanwyk hunt a marauding tiger - the effect takes us out of the 'realistic' adventure and alerts us to a more symbolic plane. Although the film is set in the east, the three genres it evokes originate much further away. Even though the film is an action adventure - and a very exciting one, full of chases, gun-fights and dangerous animals - it is also a melodrama, about a lonely woman stranded in the middle of nowhere, powerful but so starved of 'companionship' she'll attach herself to the first man who comes along. Some of the lighting effects and careful compositions recall the contemporary melodramas of Sirk. The film also belongs to the jungle sub-genre, full of thick forests and animals being cute. Most important, however, the film is a transposed Western, with Ryan as the outlaw hiding out in Stanwyk's ranch, and Farrer the sherriff sent to being him back. Except, like Ray's 'Johnny Guitar', the colour, the mise-en-scene, the extravagant sexual rituals tend to undermine macho Western self-importance; a female 'Eastern' reflecting back the male Western.As the scene I mentioned earlier suggests - the brawl in the temple - the idea of play figures throughout, with narrative action turned into ritual or theatre, with extras, ceremonial gestures, and, most importantly, an audience. The most alarming of these is Ryan's torture, but throughout there is an emphasis on people watching, usually obscurely, through gaps and grills, or being framed in proscenium arches within the narrative frame. Another motif alerting us to mistrust appearances is the mirror- so often a symbol of metamorphosis or revelation; actual mirrors co-exist with mirroring scenes, for example the symmetrical skulking of Stanwyk and the tiger watched by Ryan (doubly mirrored and reversed in the temple scene)

dinky-4 Homer Dickens in his book, "The Films of Barbara Stanwyck," suggests this is one of the low points in Stanwyck's film career but it's entertaining in a Saturday-matinée sort of way and has --considering its low budget -- colorful and exotic backgrounds. (True, these backgrounds have the look of studio sets but that only adds to an air of calculated escapism. The tiger hunt scenes, by the way, were filmed in Thousand Oaks, California, at the World Animal Jungle Compound.) The movie reaches a climax in the last reel when Robert Ryan, stripped to the waist and looking pretty good for a man in his 40s, is flogged across the back by a pair of enthusiastic whippers. Apparently he's been sentenced to death-by-flogging by the local potentate but this apprehension may not be quite correct. Some evidence suggests that the script's original plan was to have the potentate's men flog Ryan and then execute him by beheading but any mention of the "beheading" part of the potentate's sentence got left on the cutting-room floor. In any case, it's a memorable flogging scene and it ranks 20th in the book, "Lash! The Hundred Great Scenes of Men Being Whipped in the Movies."