Enchantment (C or 2/4 stars)
'Enchantment' (directed by Irving Reis) is meant to be an 'enchanting', swoony romantic melodrama. Rather, it is an astonishingly dull soap involving old recluse, General Sir Roland Dane, or "Uncle Rollo" (David Niven, as a young man), who looks back on his life in his waning days - particularly his ill-fated doomed romance with the love of his life, Lark Ingoldsby (Teresa Wright) - while resentfully welcoming a distant relative, his great niece, into his humble abode. It is she who will get him to re-evaluate his life. The movie opens with narration from Roland's London house {yes, you read that correctly}, and it just gets worse & worse from there.
Though 'Enchantment' is technically well-crafted with Gregg Toland's black-&-white cinematography {sadly, he would die at age 44 of a coronary thrombosis after this film wrapped}, & some slick period designs, but director Reis couldn't spice things up with a better dialogue or a story that you can actually care about. David Niven is charming in the main role. Teresa Wright - never one of my faves - didn't do it for me here as the high-spirited, manipulative Lark, either. Farley Granger is fine as Lark's aviator nephew; he just had a knack for being in lackluster films, didn't he? I DID like Evelyn Keyes as Grizel, and Jayne Meadows as jealous-of-Lark Selina.
This movie is only 100 minutes long, and yet, it moves at such a glacial pace that I couldn't have been less enchanted with it. The very ending of the film is fairly romantic, I admit. But even though Uncle Rollo is able to convince Evelyn Keyes' love-weary niece, Grizel, to not make the same damning mistakes that he did in his youth ... nothing to save this film from the interminable mediocrity that came before this final sequence. This movie isn't terrible, it's just terribly Meh.
Though 'Enchantment' is technically well-crafted with Gregg Toland's black-&-white cinematography {sadly, he would die at age 44 of a coronary thrombosis after this film wrapped}, & some slick period designs, but director Reis couldn't spice things up with a better dialogue or a story that you can actually care about. David Niven is charming in the main role. Teresa Wright - never one of my faves - didn't do it for me here as the high-spirited, manipulative Lark, either. Farley Granger is fine as Lark's aviator nephew; he just had a knack for being in lackluster films, didn't he? I DID like Evelyn Keyes as Grizel, and Jayne Meadows as jealous-of-Lark Selina.
This movie is only 100 minutes long, and yet, it moves at such a glacial pace that I couldn't have been less enchanted with it. The very ending of the film is fairly romantic, I admit. But even though Uncle Rollo is able to convince Evelyn Keyes' love-weary niece, Grizel, to not make the same damning mistakes that he did in his youth ... nothing to save this film from the interminable mediocrity that came before this final sequence. This movie isn't terrible, it's just terribly Meh.