31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating Look at a Tragic Story, January 1, 2002
This review is from: Beloved Infidel [VHS] (VHS Tape)
Beloved Infidel is a touching look at the relationship of Hollywood gossip columnist Sheila Graham & F. Scott Fitzgerald. After successful novels like The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night and This Side of Paradise, to name a few, Fitzgerald hit a career and personal slump. His wife Zelda was institutionalized and his writing career at a down turn, Fitgerald was struggling to earn money to cover Zelda's medical fees and his daughter's boarding school while trying to maintain his own sense of self-worth. Enter Sheila Graham who was a life preserver to Fitzgerald and helped him with his struggles, including alcholism. As a fan of F.Scott Fitzgerald, Beloved Infidel is a heartfelt and introspective look at his love affair with Sheila Graham. Gregory Peck does a fantastic job playing Fitzgerald in an honest and charismatic way. Deborah Kerr is equally marvelous, playing the caring and controversial Sheila Graham. On screen, Peck & Kerr are adorable. While the story is tragic, it is also touching and fantastically done.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Not good..., March 5, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Beloved Infidel [VHS] (VHS Tape)
Gregory Peck is hopelessly miscast as F. Scott Fitzgerald, first because of his looks and second because of his presence which kind of leads back to his looks. The story just skims little of what we know about Fitzgerald's life. What about Zelda, his wife?
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A very earnest film about very crazy people, July 5, 2007
This review is from: Beloved Infidel [VHS] (VHS Tape)
Deborah Kerr is the reason to see this film; she is Sheilah Graham, the gossip columnist from the 40s and 50s in Hollywood. She was featured on both radio and television, and she had an odd voice and her comments were deeply personal about movie stars, so much so you thought she lived with them all intimately.
Deborah Kerr plays her as a woman who has invented her past to impress everyone, including Gregory Peck, who plays F.Scott Fitzgerald. He exposes her fictions in a scene on a large beach, where noone else goes, and it is one of the most harrowing forced-confession scenes on screen. Further on into the film, we learn about Fitzgerald, and the fictions he wrote and the many fictions he told to Graham and others, and one sees why Sheilah Graham appealed to him..she, a very adept fabricator of fictions, as he was in and out of novels and short stories, and the very occasional screen play.
See this film for Deborah Kerr's incredible gestures and poses and false statements; her complete inability to relate to truth, and her self-righteous fights with Scott, and Gregory peck's violence toward her, as she rejects his drinking as cute, and his teaching her literature as opressive; and then at the end, a huge dramatic scene with Peck, and a great soundtrack, finds her on that unihabited beach again..a kind of return to the strangely bleak place of exposure ; but then Sheilah Graham writes the memoir, Beloved Infidel, with another writer, and it's fiction all over again especially as adapted for the screen. Their affair is awash with questions and speculations..all of which come out in this film. Any kind of story would do, and it works here, just as much as the fiction that Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald were really lovers.
Gregory Peck has, in this, as in many films in the late 50s, an Atticus Finch problem..this film is before To Kill A Mocking Bird, and it is as if Atticus himself were asked to play this alcoholic writer..he could never do it, nor could Gregory Peck. It's stogy and over- worked acting; he's not dissipated enough; but, it adds to the overall fiction of the life of these two people.
See this film, and admire the gloss of cinemascope and DeLuxe color, as it washes over one and all and gives us a disturbing look at lives only hinted at, because that is all they were really, hints of lives.
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