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Simply A Masterpiece

Overrated

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

Having watched Kirk Douglas in 'Spartacus', I wanted to learn more about his track record leading up to 1960 by watching this film. Don't waste your time on this poorly made effort. It doesn't even come close to the quality of 'A Detective Story' because it fails to provide engaging characters or a compelling plot. Kirk can be quite intense in his roles and almost neurotic at times. The close-ups in this film allows you to see the sickness in his eyes that we also see in 'The Juggler'. Both of these films are dud efforts and can't really be called movies. Fortunately, Kirk made enough popular movies to cancel out the dud efforts such as this one and 'The Juggler'.

Fresh from the acclaim he got in A Story Of Three Loves as a romantic, Kirk Douglas got a film to do the entire feature length of in Act Of Love with French Actress Dany Robin. In all our wars on foreign shores there is usually a story of American soldiers falling in love with some woman of the native population. Kirk Douglas plays your average American soldier, no heroic type by any means who falls in love with a woman who is about two steps away from selling herself just to live.It was that all over Europe after Hitler's War. This same story could and probably has been done in all the occupied countries of Europe, East and West, in Italy, in Austria, in Holland, and even in Mr. Hitler's Germany. Our army had a no fraternization policy, but boys and girls will be boys and girls. And if the real thing did come along you had an incredible amount of bureaucracy to deal with.The whole subject was dealt with a few years later in Sayonara with a racial component attached to it and a much bigger budget. I don't think Kirk Douglas has ever been more romantic on the screen than in Act Of Love. It's an unusual part for him, but he carries it off. Anatole Litvak gets good performances out of his cast and the on site location cinematography is a plus.

Although a co-production ,although it has a French title and features plenty of French luminaries,the film fell into oblivion in France.It's barely mentioned in the dictionaries of movies .It was Anatole Litvak's return to France,where he had made some of his thirties movies ("L'Equipage" ,definitely a movie to rediscover, "Mayerling" the remake of which was filmed by Terence Young in 1968 or "Coeur de Lilas").But although I expected much of this film,I must admit I was disappointed.Particularly after watching his absorbing "decision before dawn" ,the movie he made just before "Un Acte d'Amour" The main problem is language:it's not very smart to make the French speak English between them.It's not a problem for a foreign audience,but for the French one it is one: Dany Robin and Serge Reggiani speaking English together is downright embarrassing.Not that their English is bad,but it is impossible to believe in THAT Paris,where almost everybody ,from a humble waitress to the hookers,speaks fluent English .And why didn't Litvak use Douglas' linguistic abilities?I once saw an interview during the Festival de Cannes and his French was quite good.The French outnumber their American co-stars:Fernand Ledoux,Gabrielle Dorziat (whom Litvak had already directed in 'Mayerling" where she was miscast as Elizabeth "Sissi" from Austria),Dany Robin (who would be part of Hitchcock's "Topaz") ,the highly superior Reggiani (whose English delivery is much faster than when he speaks French: one should note he never says a single word in his first language,which is unlikely),and Brigitte Bardot (wearing braids) who appears in two short sequences as a waitress .The best of this mushy story (the scene in the prison with a ridiculous voice over takes the biscuit when the young pure heroine winds up in the lions den (that is to say a cell with prostitutes)takes place in the prologue and in the epilogue :Douglas comes back to a place his love was happy when she was sixteen on the Cote d'Azur and he remembers her words .The meeting with his former superior and his wife,the room where the soldier feels nostalgic for a time that never was ,all this has Sirk accents and makes me feel the movie could have easily been boiled down into a good short.

More than any other movie I've seen, this one draws a dark picture of what the statistical enormity and bureaucratic obscenity of WWII did to individuals during (and after) the Second World War. This is a love story set against the new way of dealing with the logistics of millions of people on the move in wartime Europe -- on either side. The big point is that it's difficult to draw a line between the sides in the brutal impersonality of the events that crush people like the characters in this story.Kirk Douglas is great, of course, and the direction in the film is always intersting. Hard to believe this was made as late as 53. See this if you can -- I saw it on TCM recently in a Kirk Douglas festival. For that matter, watch all the Kirk Douglas flicks you can -- the guy had either great taste or great luck.