Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

MoPoshy Absolutely brilliant

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Martin Bradley The tagline read 'Nobody's as good as Bette when she's bad' and the movie, reviled at the time of its release, became a camp classic when it was immortalised in the opening scene of Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woof". It's actually a lot better than Mr Albee gave it credit for and Bette is magnificently over-the-top as small-town tramp Rosa Moline who wants to ditch her hubbie, (modest little Joseph Cotten), so she can marry bigshot David Brian and run off to Chicago, (the song 'Chicago' plays continuously, in one form or another, on the soundtrack).Okay, it's not one of Bette's greatest performances and, to be honest, she spends the movie chewing the scenery while Lenore J Coffee's screenplay reeks of purple prose. King Vidor was the director so you knew exactly what you were letting yourself in for; remember he was the man who gave us "The Fountainhead" and "Duel in the Sun" and who seemed to take a perverse delight in making his leading ladies suffer. Hysteria was always the name of the game with Mr Vidor. Of course, he was also one of the great visual stylists and even a corn-fed chicken, (it's certainly no turkey), like this looks the part. Without Albee it may well have been forgotten so perhaps we owe him a debt of gratitude. Camp, yes; a classic of its kind, most certainly.

melvelvit-1 Is BEYOND THE FOREST an overripe and over-the-top potboiler or a potent, underrated film noir? Both, actually, with an emphasis on the latter. This is film noir's MADAME BOVARY wherein a provincial housewife's romantic fantasies and big city dreams bring tragedy to everyone in her orbit and it's the "twisted sister" of Vincente Minnelli's ode to Flaubert's driven, deluded anti-heroine, released the same year. Nineteen forty-nine was the year of the desperate housewife in Hollywood- in addition to Bette Davis & Jennifer Jones, there's also Audrey Totter in TENSION and Lizabeth Scott in TOO LATE FOR TEARS, postwar noir women who "expect and demand a better life and plan to achieve it by any means necessary". Forty year-old Bette Davis "with her low-cut peasant blouses, long black wig, and carmine lips" is unquestionably miscast but, like the film itself, that actually works in a perverted sort of way. If Virginia Mayo had been cast (Davis actually lobbied for her), it would have begged the question, "why doesn't this beautiful girl just hop a bus to New York or Hollywood or something?" but with a not-so-young-anymore Rosa -out of options and rapidly running out of time- there's a palpable sense of entrapment as the irrational resentments that have simmered for far too long are ready to erupt. Still, the movie also has its amusing aspects and you can't help but smile as Rosa sashays down the street and all the men stop and stare. How could a past-her-prime, dimestore siren like that keep Joseph Cotten and David Brian in such thrall? Why, sex of course. Rosa no doubt did things in bed they couldn't get enough of, much like the hold Wallis Simpson had over the Duke of Windsor. The crime of Rosa Moline was similar to that of Phyllis Hochen in THE UNHOLY WIFE (desperate for a way out, she ends up shooting her husband's best friend) and from the overblown opening prologue scroll to the mounting hysteria and rampant symbols of Hell that culminate in a "shocking conclusion", Vidor's "Bovary" casts a spell as well. Written off as a "camp classic" for years, BEYOND THE FOREST has been reassessed of late:Bette Davis tires of life married to a small-town doctor, so she takes off to Chicago for an affair, hopping the most monstrously phallic train in film history. Her frenzied performance is met on the other side of the camera by director King Vidor, who matches her excesses shot for shot. The "What a dump!" line quoted in WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? originates here, though it's actually one of the film's more naturalistic moments. Much of Vidor's late work flirts dangerously with camp; this 1949 effort, I'm afraid, frequently succumbs, though it has a weird kind of power and integrity. With Joseph Cotten and David Brian. -Dave Kehr BEYOND THE FOREST, with its main character's dissatisfaction with small- town middle-class morality, its big-city expressionistic mise-en-scène, and Davis, with the most extreme portrayal of a malignant bitch of the forties, we have a work that is firmly rooted in the tradition of film noir...this paean to amour fou is one of the most operatic of all films noirs -at once both moralistic and obdurate, grandly emotive, overbearing, and magnificent. -The American Film Noir A TV perennial back in the day, legal hassles prevent King VIdor's unsung noir from being shown today. As of this writing, it's not in the Warner Archives and TCM hasn't aired it in well over a decade. That's a shame.

Wael Katkhuda I have just finished this film and i was really amazed by Bette Davis performance, she was a superb, her technique was just amazing, I don't Think anyone else could play This Role except her. the only thing was bad that she was too old for this character, everyone should see her performance here especially her Death scene.but to be honest with u the film was in somehow weak, most of the scenes are unrealistic, which make u feel angry about it. Joseph Cotten character was so weak, it didn't convinced me i have seen a lot of his works maybe five or six but the only one i liked was the 1943 movie ( Shadow of a Doubt )

Neil Doyle Just about everyone in 'Beyond the Forest' seems to have graduated with honors from The School of Bad Acting. First and foremost, Bette Davis, in her most wildly overdone, overbaked role sporting a Dracula-like black wig and pounds of lipstick, quivering with impatience at being stuck in a coal-mining town as the wife of a dull doctor. She's Madame Bovary in a major key, spitting out her lines with gusto as everyone else cowers around her. Neither Joseph Cotten nor Ruth Roman nor David Brian can do much but stand and stare at her antics. Of course, she's so camp that it's hard to turn away--like being at the scene of an accident. The only other cast member who outdoes her is Dona Drake as her dim-witted maid...talk about bad acting! Amid all the mayhem, we at least have Max Steiner's score to remind us that this is a Warner Bros. melodrama, a steamy concotion giving Davis a tailor-made role in which to be the ultimate bitch. Poor Ruth Roman stands by, wasted in a small role--a pity, because she can be a strong actress when given the right material. Only ardent Bette Davis admirers can possibly like this one--relieved occasionally by some typical Davis remarks. "What a dump!" Yeah, right. And what a film!!