Why so much hype?

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

This is the sort of movie the critics love, but it's not one that particularly appeals to me. My guess is that the original novel, "A Jest of God", was probably a lot more ironical and bitter than this soft, misty-eyed all-the-way with Joanne Woodward version, indulgently directed with more close-ups than a TV soapy, by husband, Paul Newman. Still, within its limits, the direction is occasionally rather stylish. And the film is attractively photographed on some occasionally effective locations. But somewhat disappointingly, the music score by Jerome Moross is both uncharacteristic and unobtrusive. The Geraldine Fitzgerald sequence seems to have nothing to do with the rest of the movie and is an embarrassment that should have been left on the cutting room floor. Otherwise, the movie is reasonably effective within its limits.

It's amazing to me how far and how fast we've fallen in the realm of cinema. I caught this movie midway and was gripped by the intense emotion Joanne Woodward conveys with her distraught portrayal of an emotionally inexperienced "middle-aged" woman (35 years old and middle-aged!). Naturally, the acting was so compelling that I found the film and watched it through. The direction is wonderfully simplistic and the portrayals deep and rich with emotion and confusion. There's not a film that's been made in the past 25 years, perhaps with the exception of The Apostle, that captures the emotion of a common person with such depth.

This is one of those so called ground breaking 60's dramas which uses the familiar device of a hopeless, frustrated spinster, (such as Jane Wyman would have played 10 or 15 years earlier, think "Miracle in the Rain") in an attempt to propagandize the audience into thinking the solution to her dilemma is sexual liberation.Thus we have plain jane school-teacher Woodward finding carnal knowledge with a former classmate who's on a brief return visit to her home town.Woodward sees sky rockets, marriage and children, and of course suffers the inevitable disillusionment of desertion.Exceedingly well acted by all concerned, with many precise observations of small town life, (including a brilliant evocation of an old ladies bridge club) , the film uses these strengths to cloak, (make respectable?) distasteful scenes of Woodward's ruination in the hay, along with a highly improbable Lesbianic interlude with Estelle Parsons.How interesting it would have been to have seen this theme treated the way Francois Mauriac would have realized it--and yet nowhere is the moral, much less, supernatural dimension even fleetingly evoked much less alluded to.Indeed the films' only reference to religion is a depiction of a revival meeting featuring a wild eyed snake handler.And so, in the end, (like so many other late sixties pretensions), all that we are left with here is mere, dreary, sociological naturalism, a melo but with the same basic ends as a Norman Lear comedy (all you squares need to unshackle all of your old wives tale repressions)--and not the lyrical star dust of Tennesse Williams who explored the same themes in "Summer and Smoke".Not the sort of role Loretta Young would have played!

In pretty much every movie where I've seen Joanne Woodward, she does a great role, and "Rachel, Rachel" (directed by her husband Paul Newman) is no exception. Woodward plays Rachel Cameron, a schoolteacher in a conservative, repressive small town. Various incidents from her childhood have long haunted her, and she still lives with - and has to take care of - her needy mother. Without a doubt she's unfulfilled in life, but she basically has no way to escape this existence. But things just might change when childhood friend Nick (James Olson) returns to town after spending many years in the big city.By barely moving her face, Woodward conveys many emotions in this movie: anguish, cynicism, hope, and more. I would suspect that "Rachel, Rachel" probably played into the burgeoning feminist movement, but moreover it showed the complete break from "traditional" American mores (after all, what characterized the '60s more than that?). Nineteen sixty-eight was certainly a great year for movies: along with this one, there was "Planet of the Apes", "Romeo & Juliet", "2001", "The Odd Couple", "Bullitt", "Charly" and "Yellow Submarine". Definitely one that I recommend.Also starring Geraldine Fitzgerald.