Exoticalot
People are voting emotionally.
CommentsXp
Best movie ever!
Huievest
Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.
Leofwine_draca
THE GOOD DIE YOUNG is a fine British crime film noir of the 1950s with an impressive British/American cast and an intriguing storyline. The narrative is carefully structured, beginning with an exciting interlude before telling four separate character stories in flashback. Eventually the viewer catches up with the present for a gripping climax.The first thing you notice about this film is the exemplary cast. Laurence Harvey is perfectly cast as the despicable cad who gathers together a team of desperate men to pull of a post office robbery. Richard Basehart is the imported American player struggling to wrest control of his youthful wife Joan Collins from his sinister mother-in-law (Freda Jackson, who with this and THE BRIDES OF Dracula had a fine role in domineering older women). John Ireland and Gloria Grahame have a convincingly volatile relationship.Best of the bunch is a thoroughly sympathetic Stanley Baker playing a down-on-his-luck boxer going through some very tough times. The underrated Baker is a delight in the part and steals his scenes, even from Harvey. The likes of Robert Morley and Lee Patterson provide solid support. The lengthy flashback scenes are engaging pieces of character work, true to life and authentic, and they serve as a good set-up for the electrifying climax where things don't go according to plan. The last twenty minutes of this film are impressively downbeat and nail-biting to boot. Great stuff.
James Hitchcock
Although some purists would insist that film noir was an exclusively American genre, I have always taken the view that there were a number of British examples (and possibly also continental European ones such as Clouzot's "Les Diaboliques"). Notable British noirs include Carol Reed's trilogy of "Odd Man Out", "The Third Man" and "The Man Between", and Robert Hamer's "It Always Rains on Sunday" and "The Long Memory". Lewis Gilbert's "The Good Die Young" is another to add to this list. Gilbert was a versatile director; besides crime films he could also turn his hand to war movies ("Sink the Bismarck!"), action-adventure (several James Bonds) and comedies ("Educating Rita", "Shirley Valentine").Although the film is set in Britain it features several American characters, doubtless to increase its marketability across the Atlantic. It opens with four men a car, about to commit an armed robbery. It then tells each man's story in a series of flashbacks, explaining how the four, none of whom has a previous criminal record, came to be in the position where they see crime as the only solution to their problems. The film then flashes forward again to show the robbery itself and its aftermath. Although there is a conventional "crime does not pay" ending, the treatment of the criminals is surprisingly sympathetic, perhaps more sympathetic than the American Production Code would have permitted at this date.The one member of the gang who is an out-and-out scoundrel is their leader, Miles 'Rave' Ravenscourt. Rave is the son of an aristocratic family who has been living beyond his means and has run up heavy gambling debts. Rave's main way of financing his lifestyle has been sponging off his independently wealthy wife Eve- his father, from whom he is estranged, has long since cut him off without a penny- but eventually even Eve's patience has run out, leaving him in need of an alternative source of income.Joe (one of the Americans) needs to find the fare to fly back to the United States with his young English wife Mary to get away from the malign influence of her selfish, manipulative mother. Mike is a former boxer who is unable find work following his retirement from the ring and an accident in which he lost a hand. Eddie is an American airman based in England trapped in a failing marriage to an unsuccessful actress. The script implies that his wife Denise is cheating on Eddie with a handsome young actor, but this is never made completely explicit, perhaps to keep the censors happy. All three men seem to believe that they have some sort of grievance against "the system", and this makes it easy for Rave to recruit them to his scheme.There are several good acting contributions- from Laurence Harvey as the outwardly suave but inwardly vicious Rave, from a strikingly lovely Joan Collins as Mary, from Gloria Grahame as the spiteful, catty Denise and from Richard Basehart as Joe and Stanley Baker as Mike, both essentially decent men lured into criminality by the unscrupulous Rave. The one weak link in the plot was Eddie's participation in the robbery, as his problems are not so much financial as emotional; Denise obviously despises him, and there is no suggestion that his having more money would persuade her to return to him, or that he would welcome her back if she did. There is also an effective cameo from Robert Morley as Rave's autocratic and overbearing father, Sir Francis Ravenscourt; with a parent like that Rave's turning to crime seems perhaps more understandable.British crime dramas in the fifties generally took a fairly simple "cops good, robbers bad" attitude towards their subject-matter; "The Good Die Young" was one of the few to take the line, more common in American noirs, that questions of right and wrong or good and evil are often more complicated than that.The film's climax takes place at Heathrow Airport, and involves a man named Joseph, a girl named Mary and their unborn child who are facing a long and possibly difficult journey. Was this, I wondered, a deliberate reference to certain events which took place in Bethlehem some 2,000 years ago? 8/10
Spikeopath
The Good Die Young is a cracking British Noir picture directed by Lewis Gilbert and featuring a strong cast of British and American actors. Laurence Harvey, Stanley Baker, Richard Basehart, John Ireland, Gloria Grahame, Margaret Leighton, Joan Collins and Rene Ray are the principals. While support comes from Robert Morley and Freda Jackson.Adapted from the novel written by Richard MacAuley, the story starts with four men pulling up in a car, guns are passed around them and it's soon evident they are about to commit a serious crime. We are then taken through the sequences for each man, how they came to be at that point in time, what brought them together and their common interest; that of women trouble and financial strife. It's excellently structured by Gilbert, four separate stories, yet all of them are on the same track and heading towards the grim and potently "noirish" final quarter. Such is the way that we as viewers have been fully informed about our characters, the impact when things get violent is doubly strong. It takes you by surprise at first because the makers have given us a smooth set-up, and then there is the shock factor because these were not criminal men at the outset. But then..A real pleasant surprise to this particular viewer was The Good Die Young, it's got fully formed characters within a tight and interesting story. The cast do fine work, yes one could probably complain a touch that the ladies are under written, but they each get in and flesh out the downward spiral of the male protagonists. Rene Ray is particularly impressive as the fraught wife of Stanley Baker's injured boxer, Mike, while Gloria Grahame (walking like a panther) is memorable as a bitch-a-like babe driving her husband Eddie (Ireland) to distraction. Basehart is his usual value for money self, but it's Baker and Harvey who own the picture. Baker does a great line in raw emotion, a big man, big heart and a big conscious; his journey is the films emotional axis, while Harvey is positively weasel like as playboy sponger Miles Ravenscourt; someone who is guaranteed to have you hissing at the screen with his stiffness perfectly befitting the character. Top stuff. 8/10
Chris Gaskin
Channel 4 recently screened The Good Die Young one afternoon so I set the video and was pleased I did.Four men, a boxer who has had one of his arms amputated, a rich man and two Americans are fed up of being short of money. The rich man suggests the four of them rob a post office which is having a delivery of £90,000 later that evening. After all agreeing, they head there but things start going wrong when a copper comes over to their car to tell them are illegally parked. He is shot dead and the gang the raid the van and take the money and escape into a nearby church yard. The rich man shoots the boxer first after he decides to give himself up, then as they are crossing the railway lines which are electrified, he pushes one of the Americans onto the live rails and is electrocuted. The two survivors manage to escape further from the police on an Underground train but the American decides he has had enough and goes back to his wife and they head to the airport to go catch a flight back to America. After making a last minute phone call to police telling them where the hidden money is, the rich man sees him in the phone booth but he is shot by the American. Thinking he is dead, he heads for the plane but is shot and then collapses into his wife's arms and dies. A sad ending.The movie has excellent location photography around London and one of the best parts is the railway sequence.This movie is worth having in a collection just for the cast: the gang leader is played by Laurence Harvey, the boxer is played by Stanley Baker (Zulu), the Americans are Richard Basehart (Voyage to the Bottom Of the Sea) and John Ireland. The rest of the cast includes a young Joan Collins (Empire of the Ants, Dynasty), Robert Morley (who only appears too briefly), Margaret Leighton, Freda Jackson (The Valley Of Gwangi), Rene Ray and Susan Shaw.Watching this is an ideal way of spending 100 minutes one afternoon. Excellent.Rating: 4 stars out of 5.
