Technically it sure is a film. Past that, hardly any redeeming factors. The dialogue is just nonsense. As other reviews have said, no one talks like this. No one emotes this little when defending their close held beliefs or romancing the love of their life.
Handily Gary Cooper's worst movie. He's far too old, but mostly is just doing an absolutely horrible job. At least you sorta believe the crazy stuff Raymond Massey says; he understood his role, and ate up the crazy but essentially the whole movie relies on Cooper and he is simply not up to this task.
Oh, the romance. If he's hard to believe as a creative professional in a fundamentally collaborative industry, he's impossible to believe as a romantic lead in... what is this? A love triangle, I guess? It's often hard to tell what is even happening. Per the descriptions some stuff happens because years pass but that's not obvious, and apparently Patricia Neal leaves Cooper then goes across the street and gets married.
The actual work is nonsense. Oh, also super obviously fake, really shocking FX work when they could have just gone to real locations with snazzy post-modernist buildings; many in communist countries, by the way!) But anyway, there's no engineers, no mechanicals, no general contractors, just superstar architects. There are newspapers with architecture beats? Come on.
Where is his staff? When Wright was early in his career, he employed around 10 staff, and that was designing mostly houses. Huge office towers and complexes of buildings by... himself? I mean, since he's such a radical defender of his vision, I guess he does all the thousands of drawings, the math for structures, is an expert in every field and very fast. Not clearly so as he just scribbles a bit and gazes out of windows a lot. Not a drafting table in sight much less a blueprint machine (or... maybe he should have switched to diazo if he's such a radical?)
The culminating events, the trial, is just shocking nonsense. He's on trial for being anti-collectivist, not for explosives violations, (as far as they know) attempted murder, destruction of property and so on, but just being a selfish jerk.
He puts up no defense except that individualism is all that matters, and anything but strident individualism is communism (that's what they mean), so you don't have to play nicely with others even when you work for them, have contracts to do things, etc.
In any court in any time, the judge would have had the jury explain themselves and set aside the not guilty verdict. It's nonsense.
Handily Gary Cooper's worst movie. He's far too old, but mostly is just doing an absolutely horrible job. At least you sorta believe the crazy stuff Raymond Massey says; he understood his role, and ate up the crazy but essentially the whole movie relies on Cooper and he is simply not up to this task.
Oh, the romance. If he's hard to believe as a creative professional in a fundamentally collaborative industry, he's impossible to believe as a romantic lead in... what is this? A love triangle, I guess? It's often hard to tell what is even happening. Per the descriptions some stuff happens because years pass but that's not obvious, and apparently Patricia Neal leaves Cooper then goes across the street and gets married.
The actual work is nonsense. Oh, also super obviously fake, really shocking FX work when they could have just gone to real locations with snazzy post-modernist buildings; many in communist countries, by the way!) But anyway, there's no engineers, no mechanicals, no general contractors, just superstar architects. There are newspapers with architecture beats? Come on.
Where is his staff? When Wright was early in his career, he employed around 10 staff, and that was designing mostly houses. Huge office towers and complexes of buildings by... himself? I mean, since he's such a radical defender of his vision, I guess he does all the thousands of drawings, the math for structures, is an expert in every field and very fast. Not clearly so as he just scribbles a bit and gazes out of windows a lot. Not a drafting table in sight much less a blueprint machine (or... maybe he should have switched to diazo if he's such a radical?)
The culminating events, the trial, is just shocking nonsense. He's on trial for being anti-collectivist, not for explosives violations, (as far as they know) attempted murder, destruction of property and so on, but just being a selfish jerk.
He puts up no defense except that individualism is all that matters, and anything but strident individualism is communism (that's what they mean), so you don't have to play nicely with others even when you work for them, have contracts to do things, etc.
In any court in any time, the judge would have had the jury explain themselves and set aside the not guilty verdict. It's nonsense.