Colibel Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

VeteranLight I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Casey Duggan It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Kaelan Mccaffrey Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

gavin6942 A fragile Kansas girl (Natalie Wood)'s love for a handsome young man (Warren Beatty) from the town's most powerful family drives her to heartbreak and madness.Natalie Wood was a great actress, especially in her younger days (she seemed to excel at being a love interest). And the film debut of Warren Beatty? Nice. It is hard to believe he has been acting since 1961 and is still around today (2016), albeit in a diminished capacity.This seems like the essential cliché story about the difference between girls that guys want to date and girls that guys want to marry. I don't know if this is still true (morality has shifted since 1961), but the cliché has not changed.

clanciai The amazing thing about each and every film directed by Elia Kazan is what he gets out of his actors to make them perform better than in almost any film by any other director. He must have been the most knowledgeable person instructor ever in films. Here it is worth while concentrating on watching the performance of Natalie Wood especially in the first crisis scenes. There is nothing like it in film history - the extreme sensitivity, the close-up following of her mind, how he lets the camera wander as she gropes her way through a reality that has become her enemy, her questioning looks, her invisible but extreme terror - he catches all this on film, and no wonder she was after this film given the role of Maria in "West Side Story". The film is all hers, he has given it to her almost like a personal offering, while Warren Beatty in his first major appearance is no more than what he is intended to be - almost a helpless dummy. When Natalie gets affected he is at a total loss and can't handle any emotionalism at all, while all he can do is to escape into the arms of another as an abject coward, which is what he does, leaving Natalie stranded in her emotional psychosis, like watching a drowning victim out there in the storm from the shore and doing nothing. His father, on the other hand, is another extremely remarkable performance, he overacts from the beginning and keeps overacting and even worsening it until the end, and he is the real tragedy of the story - like his son, he doesn't understand anything and least of all what is right. It's a simple story about the first love of youths and how it must burn you, it always does, but Elia Kazan's treatment of it turns it into a tremendous heart-breaker. And it's the same with every film by him - he turns his actors into more than just living, burning, and self-consuming people but toweringly passionate, and more alive, convincing and sympathetic persons than if they were real.

elzicsfarewell I think this might be one of the most overrated films I've ever seen. To begin with, thank goodness nobody hurt themselves trying to make 1961 look like 1929--I think all they did was borrow some old cars.This hypersexualized and ridiculous movie falls into the _Romeo and Juliet_ trap of confusing hormone- and boredom-driven teenaged lust with love. Bud and Deanie aren't loves-of-a-lifetime: They're first infatuations. Bud is handsome but there is nothing in Beatty's portrayal that suggests he actually loves Deanie instead of just being afraid that he might lose his adorable possession to some other dead-eyed high school boy. His adult love for Angelina, who took him in when he was depressed, displaced, and lonely, seems far more believable even though the movie makes it clear we're supposed to think he settled and gave up his true love for something practical.There is nothing emotionally gripping or even interesting in any of the acting, either. Warren Beatty is wooden and expressionless. Natalie wood swings from dim-witted, overwrought, childishness to overwrought hysterics, but after awhile you just want her to be quiet and go away. I suppose this had its place in 1961 but it hasn't aged very well.

Ligeia313-1 This film has at its heart the problem of young people desperately in need of medical knowledge that neither the family doctor nor the parents will provide. It was not considered appropriate. Deanie's mother says, after the stresses of the girl's situation has caused a nervous breakdown, "Deanie, I told you what my mother told me." Bud's family doctor refuses to help him. In Dreiser's An American Tragedy (which became the film A Place in the Sun) the hero, Clive,is similarly not helped by the doctor he consults. His girlfriend becomes pregnant and she then "dies" in a boating accident. The older generation sees the whole subject as Trouble, and doesn't see medical information as important to impart.