Customer Reviews

Beloved Infidel [VHS]

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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?

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.

As a movie, "Beloved Infidel" was a good one. Not great, but good. Because I'd researched Sheliah Graham beforehand, I found myself wondering how much of the story was fact and how much was fiction. Besides that though, the movie was beautifully done. The scenery, especially the beach scenes, were lovely to look at.

I actually found Gregory Peck believable as F. Scott Fitzgerald. I'm probably the only person over 40 who hasn't seen "To Kill a Mockingbird" (although I do own the video and hope to watch it someday), I didn't have to worry about the "Atticus Finch Effect" in watching this film. My favorite Gregory Peck film is "Duel in the Sun" where he plays the evil and sexually charged Lewt McCanles. His mean,selfish, jealous, drunk Scott was enough to make me want to smack him on the head.

As always, Deborah Kerr was absolutely gorgeous and I really did feel that she knew what she was doing when she sometimes played Sheliah as an insecure little girl in a woman's body. The scene on the beach when she told Scott to "be nice" just by the way it was said told me that a.) something big was coming and b.) the revelation was going to explain the tone of that request.

All in all, I enjoyed this film and wouldn't mind watching it again.

if you know the concept of "wabi-sabi", a japanese philosophical zen approach to beauty, life and art.....then you understand why i give this movie five stars. the sets are rather stiff, overall the acting is good, but at some moments it is resplendent and absolutely outstanding. wabi-sabi means perfection is in imperfection and that is apt description of this movie. it is not a slick movie, rather after the highest goals of romantic meaning. if you have an open heart to what artists go through, and what it means to truly love, then you should buy this movie.

i think it is a masterpiece of imperfection reaching perfection.

All i can say is we bought it for a friend and she is highly delighted with the purchase and as we are in the U K even more pleased it will work in our system as she thought she could
never get a copy.
I always check Amazon dot com for all i need and thanks for the fast delivery

YE GODS! NEITHER CONVINCING NOR EFFECTING-HOW SAD! A reasonably engrosing account of Hollywood columnist Sheilah Grahams romantic involvement with F.Scott Fitzgerald, novelist-scenarist, during his alcoholic years in the movie colony, emerges a routine, tedious and luridly-flapping drama of a washed-up man sponging off a determined woman. Gregory Peck as the doomed hero and Deborah Kerr as Sheilah are tackling hopless figures. This tempestuous and star-crossed romance between Fitzgerald and Graham just washed out with the tide . . . much inbetween, despair and drunkeness, the attempts of the newspaper woman to help him regain his former power as a great writer was just too much to hope for. Deborah Kerr and Mr. Peck are well-dressed and work well together, but . . . There is a saying in Hollywood to the effect that some stars survive anything during their film career--well, Mr. Peck and Miss Kerr are the perfect couple to have done just that. PRODUCER JERRY WALD

YE GODS! NEITHER CONVINCING NOR EFFECTING-HOW SAD! A reasonably engrosing account of Hollywood columnist Sheilah Grahams romantic involvement with F.Scott Fitzgerald, novelist-scenarist, during his alcoholic years in the movie colony, emerges a routine, tedious and luridly-flapping drama of a washed-up man sponging off a determined woman. Gregory Peck as the doomed hero and Deborah Kerr as Sheilah are tackling hopless figures. This tempestuous and star-crossed romance between Fitzgerald and Graham just washed out with the tide . . . much inbetween, despair and drunkeness, the attempts of the newspaper woman to help him regain his former power as a great writer was just too much to hope for. Deborah Kerr and Mr. Peck are well-dressed and work well together, but . . . There is a saying in Hollywood to the effect that some stars survive anything during their film career--well, Mr. Peck and Miss Kerr are the perfect couple to have done just that. PRODUCER JERRY WALD

PRODUCER JERRY WALD HAD SENT A SCRIPT TO DEBORAH KERR, WHO WAS ON HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND. SHE CABLED BACK: WHEN DO WE START? . . . PECK READ THE SCRIPT IN HOLLYWOOD; AFTER TURNING THE FINAL PAGES, HE ACCEPTED AN ONCE . . . PECK HAD NEVER BEATEN A FEMININE PARTNER BEFORE. BUT HE WAS FORCED TO BEAT DEBORAH DURING A FEW DAYS OF SHOOTING A DRUNKEN BINGE SEQUENCE. ALSO, DURING PRODUCTION DEBORAH MADE HEADLINE NEWS: SHE WAS DEVORCING THEN-HUSBAND ANTHONY BARTLEY. Wonder what ever became of him ? BELOVED INFIDEL-1959.

PRODUCER JERRY WALD HAD SENT A SCRIPT TO DEBORAH KERR, WHO WAS ON HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND. SHE CABLED BACK: WHEN DO WE START? . . . PECK READ THE SCRIPT IN HOLLYWOOD; AFTER TURNING THE FINAL PAGES< HE ACCEPTED AN ONCE . . . PECK HAD NEVER BEATEN A FEMININE PARTNER BEFORE> BUT HE WAS FORCED TO BEAT DEBORAH DURING A FEW DAYS OF SHOOTING A DRUNKEN BINGE SEQUENCE> ALSO, DURING PRODUCTION DEBORAH MADE HEADLINE NEWS: SHE WAS DEVORCING THEN-HUSBAND ANTHONY BARTLEY. Wonder what ever became of him ?