Moustroll Good movie but grossly overrated

Intcatinfo A Masterpiece!

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

guitartown Saw this on TCM.The movie looks cool,sounds cool and is way ahead of it's time. The female roles are all outstanding.Not a lot of love for this one out there but I don't know what more people want.

SnoopyStyle A man (James Garner) wakes up on a bench in NY Central Park with no memory. He has a phone number on a piece of paper. He calls the number and Gloria (Angela Lansbury) is woken up calling him Sam. He sees a Budweiser truck and a plane in the sky. So he calls himself Sam Buddwing. He goes to see Gloria but she doesn't recognize him. He thinks he knows a girl on the street calling out "Grace!" He follows her in a cab but her name is Janet (Katharine Ross). Although he recalls her as Grace during a long college romance. There is an escaped insane mental patients in the city. He notices his cracked ring is inscripted FROM G.V. He meets actress Fiddle Corwin (Suzanne Pleshette) who helps out the handsome man. Then he has a flashback with Fiddle as Grace and he's a musician as they struggle as a couple. A rich drunk socialite in a game picks up Sam. A memory is jogged and he recalls his life before he lost his memory.This could have been a great movie about paranoia. When the cop gets surrounded by a crowd and then they follow it up with a raving lunatic, I thought it was going somewhere interesting. I thought maybe Katharine Ross was actually Grace and she was hiding from him. That would have been a much better movie. This is rather bland. The end really has no tension. The flashback gets tiresome. The high hopes early on soon fades away.

jamdonahoo This film would have been OK if it had been played for laughs but someone wanted to make a "serious" movie and it ended up a pretentious piece of crap. What were they thinking? When I saw the cast I was excited, three delicious babes and Maverick himself. Poor Jim Garner, his emotions ran the gamut from A to B. In fairness to him, however, Laurence Olivier could not have done much with this part. The plot was confusing and the film so disjointed that it was impossible to follow. Did the movie have a message? The scene where Garner finds the razor and blood all over the sink must be symbolic of a person who has seen this movie. As Tallulah Bankhead once remarked about a play,"There is less to this than meets the eye."

Farnsbarns I saw this movie on TNT after being intrigued by the lackluster comments from reviewers. I typically like James Garner movies. After seeing the movie, I saw it as a religious allegory. James Garner plays Everyman who was searching to answer the question "Who am I?" During the movie, I realized that he asks that question rather than the question "What is my name?" He is asking an ontological question.Furthermore, there are two scenes where he refers to the deity. In the first scene, where he is youthfully impetuous, he refers to "all the gods of the earth and cosmos" or something. In the latter reference to deity, he soberly and humbly refers to "God." This reference occurs after an intervening scene of a flashback where he tells his young wife that he loves perfection that he finds in music. He then hears Bach's Requiem Mass; they enter a church and stand before an altar. This is an example of how knowledge of nature can lead to God. As the flashbacks bring back more of his life, Garner matures as finally realizes his current, wretched condition.The final scene is quite touching. He finds life through grace. Of course, Grace is his wife's name but the scene allegorically refers to the "saving grace." The movie is not a typical amnesia movie. It is disjointed and the dialog stilted, but, like a classical painting, many scenes have meaning when viewed from a religious viewpoint. Perhaps seeing this viewpoint requires knowledge of Christian doctrine. I would've ordered it on DVD, but it doesn't seem to be available.