Watch 1984 For Free

Excellent but underrated film

A Disappointing Continuation

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

I read the book many years ago. I remember the main plot but forgot the ending. The only other thing I recall is that they raised the price of chocolate from 25 to 30 and Winston had to rewrite the history and state they're reducing the price from 50 to 30.I watched the 1984 version a few days ago, and now this the 1956 version yesterday. This version is better for a few reasons. Simple film making, like better actors, screenplay, sets, cinematography, music. You know, stuff that makes it interesting to sit through a movie. As mentioned previously, I have not read the book recently and will soon. And I cannot expect the movies to be like the book. They're a different medium. What I got from this version is it clearly explained the world we were entering into and the characters acted paranoid. With the 1984 version we are thrown right into the 2 minute hate. We have no idea what is going on.Edmond O'Brien was a much better actor than John Hurt. Hurt was fine in toward the end with the torture scene. But everything else that was a mostly boring film. Richard Burton was really the only shining star in the 1984 version and he was completely underused. All the acting in this version are great. It did slow down toward the end and the ending sucked.Rating is a B-, or 6 stars. Worth checking out.

It's been too long since I read the book, so I'm just concerned with the movie as a movie. And what a downer the 90-minutes is for the generally sunny 1950's. Hard to think of a grimmer storyline or more downbeat ending for that period. I take the film's anomalous presence as a useful Cold War commentary on the Soviet Union, the rivalry then at its peak. Anyhow, the sets are grim, even the one outdoor scene is drained of any natural beauty, while the photography remains dull gray, as it should be given the dystopian subject matter. Then too, the two leads, O'Brien and Sterling, are not exactly marquee names. However, they are excellent actors, as the storyline requires—you don't want "movie stars" competing with the plot-heavy symbolism. In short, the production, though clearly economical, is pretty uncompromising. Story-wise we're plunged into the middle of the dystopian society without much explanation of how it got that way or why. Instead, the narrative emphasizes the tools of thought control among Party members, who are subjected to all sorts of thought conditioning techniques, such as the histrionic hate sessions. Just how the non-party people live is not really portrayed. However, love may be forbidden among Party members, but I doubt that it was among the common people, otherwise how would re-population take place.Besides dwelling on Winston's (O'Brien) efforts at contacting the political underground, the script dwells on the forbidden love affair between Winston and Julia (Sterling). And I had to laugh when Julia sheds her shapeless Party uniform for a flowing white gown right out of the Loretta Young Show of the time. This may be the movie's one concession to 1950's norms. The film does manage a few twists, one of which I didn't see coming. But, if I have one complaint, it's that Redgrave's high Party official lacks subtlety, in pretty much a one-note performance. This can be seen as a defect if you think about his official's changing roles. Anyway, the film remains a visual oddity for then as well as now. However, its thought- control message, though crudely put, may be more relevant in our digitalized age than it was then. At the same time, this is one of the few subjects that I think needs a bigger budget remake to do it justice. I haven't seen the latest remake from 1984, so I can't comment on its worth. All in all, this version maintains a grimly narrow, but thought-provoking focus.(In passing—having seen the movie on first release, I seem to remember the "rat cage" sequence as being longer, more detailed with glowing eyes, and much scarier than my DVD version. But then that was well over 50-years ago.)

In a recent review of Terry Gilliam's 'Brazil,' I confidently referred to the film as a "weird, twisted, fantastical tale of the sheer absurdity of an Orwellian society." In all honesty, at that time, I wasn't even certain of what constituted an "Orwellian" society, since I had never read the novel, and was only repeating fragments which I had extracted from other sources. Not more than three weeks ago, I decided to finally get my hands on George Orwell's famous dystopian story to see what it was all about, and was somewhat surprised to discover that it was one of the most engaging pieces of literature I had ever read. Eager to find out how the film adaptations treated Orwell's themes, I immediately tracked down copies of Michael Radford's timely version (released in 1984), as well as Michael Anderson's harder-to-find '1984,' released in 1956.Michael Anderson's '1984' was not, in fact, the first adaptation of George Orwell's novel, following a 1954 BBC television Sunday Night Theatre broadcast, which I've heard is phenomenal. I had expected that a 1950s adaptation would sugarcoat some of the novel's darker and more pessimistic themes, and yet I was pleasantly surprised to find that screenwriters Ralph Gilbert Bettison and William Templeton have followed Orwell's story quite closely. Edmond O'Brien plays Winston Smith, a lowly member of the Outer Party at the Ministry of Truth, where he works every day at "revising" history to correspond with Big Brother's most recent declarations. Winston secretly harbours a resentment towards Big Brother and his totalitarian government, a crime that is punishable by death should he be observed by the all-powerful Thought Police. However, Winston is not alone, and he soon discovers that the beautiful young Julia (Jan Sterling) also shares his reservations, and the two strike up a romantic relationship, meeting in locations without surveillance and always toying with the risk of capture.Inevitably, both are arrested by the dictatorial government, and Winston falls into the hands of Gen. O'Connor (changed from O'Brien in the novel, possibly to avoid the name clash with the film's main star), played by Michael Redgrave. Slowly but surely, O'Connor sets about destroying Winston's will, persisting with his torturous punishment, not only until Winston obeys Big Brother, but until he loves him. An alternative ending reportedly had Winston and Julia screaming "Down with Big Brother" as they fell before the firing squad, a conclusion that I suspect would have infuriated George Orwell. Fortunately, the version I saw stayed much truer to the spirit of the novel, ending with a "rehabilitated" Winston proclaiming his genuine love for the almighty leader. There is also a brief, ten-second epilogue in which the narrator practically spells out the film's moral – as if it wasn't clear enough already – but this minor slip-up is easily forgiven.The performances in the film are very well done. Edmond O'Brien does not look how I had originally pictured Winston Smith – perhaps a bit plumper than expected – but he did an excellent job, most impressive in the scenes of his torture. There is one brilliant long-take in which we see O'Connor pacing back and forth across the screen, periodically holding up four fingers and trying to convince Winston that there are five. Winston, pictured on a television monitor behind O'Connor, vigilantly maintains that "two and two equals four," before the latter's persistent torture finally breaks him. The acting here from both parties is sublime, and we can really feel the agony that poor Winston is enduring. Also notable is actor Donald Pleasence, who plays R. Parsons, an average workman who is hopelessly devoted to the Party and its leader, even after he is arrested for alleged thought-crimes.Perhaps one of the few complaints that I can make about the film is how Room 101 was dealt with. Though I was most impressed with O'Brien's acting during this sequence, it was all over much too quickly to be effective, and we don't even see a thing, treated only to the frantic squeaks of a mass of hungry rodents. Whilst it is often true that the less the audience sees the better, here didn't seem to be one of those moments, and the whole scene would have worked much better, in my view, had we been subjected to what Winston could see; to be face-to-face with "the worst thing in the world." Other than this, I can certainly recommend '1984' for its fine treatment of a challenging piece of dystopian literature. This one is well worth tracking down.

......is even better. One might be tempted to call this a remake, and I suppose it is, but it was the first theatrical rendition, enabling audiences to watch Big Brother (watching them) on a bigger screen than was possible via the BBC/Peter Cushing version (1954) of two years earlier. I agree with previous commentator "bux's" observance that, while Edmond O'Brien and Jan Sterling may not have been Orwell's first casting choices for Winston and Julia for the reason stated, the sterling performances generated by the leads and their supporting cast more than compensate. As a huge fan of the late, great Hammer Films luminary Michael Ripper, I was especially pleased to see him helping to take up the rear as an Outer Party Orator, exemplifying the tender loving care with which producer N. Peter Rathvon saw fit to cast even the smaller roles.