Greenes Please don't spend money on this.

SeeQuant Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

Hattie I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Jerrie It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

MissSimonetta Though I like what this film is trying to do, I feel the execution was wanting. Outside of Yul Brynner's Major Surov, the other characters were too flat to be interesting. The film is overlong and could have been cut by fifteen minutes at the very least.One of the strong points was the chemistry between Kerr and Brynner. You can certainly feel the sexual attraction there, and the kiss they share at the end of the film is hotter than any sex scene ever could be. But Kerr's character is not fleshed out enough for the romantic aspect to really work. Unlike Ilsa in Casablanca (1942), the character's struggle between two men is not compelling nor do you really feel sorry for her.Overall, the only thing the film has going for it is Brynner's character. Everything else is not worth the time.

isoreno This movie was a fine drama and had a pretty good love story. The acting was mostly first-rate. I don't understand the popularity of Jason Robards and this premier performance for him in the movies is no better than a bunch of other roles I've seen him in, he's okay, but not a standout. Robert Morely was very entertaining, somewhere between the amoral crook in Beat the Devil and the spoof on Mr. Goldfinger he did in The Road to Hong Kong. Ann Jackson gave a surprise performance; I think the audience dislikes her selfish character so much they don't realize how good a job she was doing and her concern was for her unborn child - - not enough of THAT in today's world. Of course, the best work in acting was done by Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner. They were attracted to one another even though Lady Ashford was dedicated to helping her former lover, who is just a pain in the neck, even though he was a hero and a freedom fighter. I guess Deborah Kerr signifies The West and Brynner The East in the days of the Cold War. Brynner's Soviet Major can't understand why the Hungarians hate the Russians meddling in their internal affairs, since the Soviets were the ones who freed them from the Fascist yoke only 11 years before, and he gives vent to his hurt feelings under the influence of lots of vodka. You almost feel sorry for the Major - he's so tied up in defending the USSR that he's begun to believe it's twisted propaganda. Another reviewer here asks why, after defeating Nazism together, relations between The West and The East broke down so quickly and we had the Cold War...there was just no natural affinity there, that's the most-likely reason. Americans saw oppression - taxation without representation - and just refused to live that way, and fought an 8- year war to rid themselves of their unwanted Mother Country. But, with Marxists, they see most everyone as victims. Victims of bosses, victims of landlords, etc., and tell all their little people that they can't overcome their perpetual victim-hood without a strong and oppressive state to "protect" them.

writers_reign I've only just caught up with this one so any 'cutting edge' element it may have had at the time - it was made three years after those Russian tanks cut a swathe through Hungary - is long diluted and there is more interest in the cast - from Ron Howard in only his second film, to Gerard Oury who would direct the first of many fine movies the following year, to Ann Jackson, a fine stage actress who was sparing with he film work, to E.G. Marshall, another stage actor, one of the 12 Angry Men and starring on TV in The Defenders at the time this was shot, to Anouk Aimee, a fine French actress yet to go supernova with Un Homme et une femme to Jason Robards who'd made a film in 1946 and waited 13 years to do another, filling the years between with standout Broadway performances in The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey Into Night. As has been noted George Tabori's screenplay owes more than a little to Maupassant's Boule de suif, which also formed the basis of Stagecoach and viewed today it's a pleasant enough diversion but little more.

Howard Schumann Yul Brynner is Major Surov, a singing, dancing, vodka-drinking Russian Officer stationed near the Austrian -Hungarian border during the Hungarian uprising of 1956 in Anatole Litvak's The Journey. Though the film has yet to be released on video or DVD, it remains one of Brynner's most compelling performances. Because of the political unrest, a group of travelers cannot fly out of Budapest but are put on a bus to Vienna. Before they can reach the border, however, their passports are taken and they are detained for questioning by the Russians led by Major Surov.The Major has reason to suspect that there is a Hungarian freedom fighter among the group being smuggled out of the country. Indeed Lady Ashmore is hiding a mysterious passenger, Paul Fleming (Jason Robards, Jr.) who pretends to be an American but fools no one. She is helping Fleming mainly to repay a debt she owed because of the trouble her past association caused him. Among the other passengers are a British journalist played by Robert Morley, an American family played by E.G. Marshall, his wife Anne Jackson and their two children, one of which is the screen debut of little Ron Howard.Major Surov takes a romantic interest in Lady Diana Ashmore (Deborah Kerr), and a romance of sorts develops between them. She offers him nothing but disdain and a stiff upper lip, however, though we suspect that underneath her heart still beats. The Cold War intrigue and the powerful acting carry the story but the romance is never quite convincing. It remains, however, one of my favorite Yul Brynner films and deserves to be seen if only for his passionate performance.