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By Love Possessed

1961, Movie, NR, 115 mins

By Love Possessed: Review

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Amid the calm pleasantry of his elite suburban East Coast town, Zimbalist is plagued with a variety of emotional and social problems. After discovering that the head of his law firm, Mitchell, has been embezzling company money to pay back an old debt of honor, Zimbalist begins to feel stagnant in his marriage to Bel Geddes and in his relationship with son Hamilton. He then finds himself in an adulterous affair with Turner, the wife of his crippled law partner, Robards. With Robards unable or unwilling to accept her love/pity, the alcoholic Turner finds understanding and love in the arms of Zimbalist. Although engaged to socialite Kohner, the sad Hamilton begins to associate with the town tramp, who, starving for attention, accuses Hamilton of rape. Unable to cope with the hussy's accusations, Hamilton's fiancee kills herself. Coming to his son's aid, Zimbalist learns to appreciate the importance of family love and patches things up with the understanding Bel Geddes. Seeing how the inability to understand love can destroy life, Turner and Robards commit themselves to helping and loving each other. Based on a popular novel by James Gould Cozzens, which had the same "literary significance" as Valley of the Dolls did years later, the film is a hopelessly melodramatic soap-opera complete with psychologically inane television-bred dialog that manages to lump every "adult" situation into one big mess. Somewhat controversial at the time, both the book and the film fail to capture the essential human complexities that would be created in such extreme situations. Bel Geddes and Mitchell manage to overcome the ridiculous scripting and direction with a couple of finely crafted performances, and Turner is about as good as could be expected, but Zimbalist and Hamilton have the appeal of driftwood. Interestingly, the original screenwriter for the film was the Academy Award-winning Charles Schnee, who, after countless revisions by other writers, threatened to sue if he was not allowed to use a pseudonym in the film's credits. leave a comment
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