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India Press Store - Green Mansions
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List Price: $19.98
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Manufacturer: MGM (Video & DVD)
Starring: Audrey Hepburn, Anthony Perkins, Lee J. Cobb, Sessue Hayakawa, Henry Silva
Directed By: Mel Ferrer
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: VHS Tape
EAN: 9786303120461
Format: Color
ISBN: 6303120466
Label: MGM (Video & DVD)
Manufacturer: MGM (Video & DVD)
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: MGM (Video & DVD)
Release Date: 1994-06-30
Running Time: 104
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
Theatrical Release Date: 1959
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Green Mansions Forever!!
Comment: Don't Believe any of the negative reviews about this film. I love this movie!!. I saw it on T.V. years ago, rented it on V.H.S. at some point,and have been waiting for it to come out on D.V.D.forever.(Along with other obscure favorites like "the Mad Woman of Chaillot"-starring Katherine Hepburn,"a Thousand Clowns"-starring Jason Robards, and, "the Slender thread"-Starring Sidney poitier; which it seems may finally be released on disk). I think these would make great criterion releases due to their off-beat but original natures.
Audrey Hepburn is Beautiful as always and exhibits an ethereal innocense appropriate to the character. I can't visualize any modern actress I know of being able to pull this off in this post-womans lib era.(can you imagine any of them playing a virgin??!). The music is wonderful. I remember a haunting leitmotive(a melody associated with her character) that reminded me of French composer Claude Debussy. Underated Anthony Perkins,(one of my favorite actors),sadly pigeonheld because of his leads in psycho and Pretty Poison(another good movie you should check out),had an ability to play subtle,complex,marginalized characters,that many of his overbearing peers could not. Also seek out Perkins in Eugene O'neill's "Desire Under the Elms".
Don't miss the book. It is a
Customer Rating:
Summary: Audrey's oddest film
Comment: Being an Audrey fan, I tried to watch this movie despite others' bad reviews about the film. Well, they were right. This is probably one of the strangest film that I've ever seen. Due to my impatience, I just fast-forwarded to the scenes where Audrey's in it. Her stunning beauty is not enough to save this movie though. And, was Anthony Perkins supposed to look that clean-shaven even if he's in the forest? Oh well. 2 stars for Audrey and the doe Ip.
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Summary: Cuckoo!
Comment: Many bright, talented artists (and Mel Ferrer) came a cropper with this inert misfire. Hudson's novel was probably unadaptable during the studio-bound 50's -- perhaps now, with the current emphasis on location and a suitably ethnic cast, a more satisfactory version could emerge, though in any period the mystic aspects of the narrative would be tricky to manage properly. But the MGM treatment, while a labor of love for the Ferrers, produced one of Hepburn's few flops, seemingly doomed from the start -- any film that prominently features Anthony Perkins, Audrey Hepburn, and a fawn is just too twee for most mere mortals. In fairness, Hepburn gives Rima the old college try, but (as in THE UNFORGIVEN) her refined diction does her in. Between her finishing school vowels and her innate chic, this child of the jungle would fit perfectly in Mayfair. Even Audrey's simple linen shift, on her, looks like the hautest couture. Dorothy Kingsley's dialogue doesn't help much -- this is the kind of movie where savages, noble or otherwise, don't seem to have yet discovered contractions. Throw in a wasted supporting cast (although Hayakawa and Henry Silva frequently lend their native hut the air of a particularly louche bar in Tijuana), futile attempts by Katherine Dunham and Villa Lobos to elevate the proceedings, a strong contender for Most Ludicrous Title Song Ever, warbled by Perkins, and you've got a real curate's egg. Too earnest for camp, perhaps GREEN MANSIONS' main point of interest for today's Hepburn fans is that, in many of the more successful moments of her work as Rima (her speeches to her late mother and her final love scene with Perkins, for instance), you can get a pretty fair idea of what her Tony-winning Broadway turn as Giradoux's Ondine must have been like. Audrey's ever enchanting, but this time, as part of the problem herself, she simply can't rescue a dud.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Hepburn in an Odd Though Watchable Curio as a Jungle Girl
Comment: This must surely be the strangest movie that Audrey Hepburn made, though it's not without its virtues. Directed by her-then husband, actor Mel Ferrer, the 1959 movie is a fanciful adventure story where Hepburn plays Rima, a nymph-like "bird girl" living in the remotest part of the Venezuelan jungle. She is being hunted by the local Indian tribesmen for being an evil spirit, but she is protected first by her grandfather Nuflo and then by Abel, a young political refugee whom she rescues after he is bitten by a deadly coral snake. The slowly-paced story initially focuses on Abel's hazardous journey into the jungle with Joseph Ruttenberg's cinematography nicely capturing the authentic Amazon locations.
Rima shows up as a shadowy figure about a half-hour into the film and doesn't speak until about ten minutes later. Leave it to Hepburn to exhibit any sort of conviction in such an implausible role. Looking ethereal if a little too styled and coiffed (even without Givenchy) and sounding entirely too Euro-cosmopolitan, she still exudes Rima's innocence while discovering the darker secrets of her past. The rest of the cast is not as lucky. Anthony Perkins, a year away from "Psycho", is irritatingly unctuous as Abel when he is not simply confounded by his heroic role. His low point has to be the ridiculous scene when he sings a love song to Rima as he strums his guitar. And where exactly did the guitar come from?
Familiar character actors show up in the oddest roles. Lee J. Cobb, heavily made up as a cross between Uncle Jesse Duke and Santa Claus, turns in yet another ham-fisted performance as Nuflo, and Henry Silva is cast as another exotic as the ultimately nefarious tribal leader. Nehemiah Persoff has a small bit at the beginning as a greedy trader, while Sessue Hayakawa, of all people, has a mostly silent role as the tribal leader. Adding to the artifice is the obvious use of soundstages and matte shots to replicate the jungle, and the ending is pure Hollywood sappiness. This is a curio for Hepburn fans.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Mel Ferrer directs this movie!
Comment: We are in presence of a film that at least, it dared to challenge the delicate issue; civilization against enrooted ancestral beliefs, whose fate has been previously decreed and the lead man, of renovated ideas.
The film had dated but still conserves the interpretative vigor of Anthony Perkins and the well known sweetness of Audrey Hepburn who looks like more an angel than a Bird Girl.
Original in its purpose.
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