Best movie of this year hands down!

Am I Missing Something?

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

The idea that free-spirited creativity is a social disorder that must be cured by a well-meaning but thoroughly incompetent psychiatric establishment is the theme here, and one quite familiar to anybody who has seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Sean Connery was a great choice to play a blocked, womanizing writer at the core of the drama and he centers the film with his amiable exuberance. Comparisons to Cuckoo's Nest are inevitable, and this film lacks the other's stifling power and resonance, but it shares a common vision of the psychiatric profession acting as a microcosm of authoritarian abuses in society at large. Still, this is a funny and charming, much lighter satire on the same subject, energetically directed by Irvin Kirschner, and enjoyable for Connery fans in any case.

I saw this film when it was first released. It was a "fish out of water" comedy, a coarse brute running rampant among effete elitists. At that time, I had a lot of contact with numerous psychiatrist/psychoanalysts. This film brilliantly caught the self satisfied pomposity, the self promotional tendencies, and the double standards of this group. The psychoanalysts couldn't cope with this guy! I found this part of the film hilarious, although most of the humor would go unappreciated by those who didn't know any people in the psychoanalytic world.I have seen this film many times since then. Much of it now makes me wince. The field of psychoanalysis has imploded and almost disappeared. Making fun of the pretensions of a now forgotten group of elitists is no longer very funny. Thus, it is a clumsy, sexist mild comedy. Yet, see it as a document of its time, and it is worthwhile.

A largely underrated film. Released in 1966 (a year after Thunderball), Connery obviously wanted a departure from the static James Bond debonair and so took on the volatile character - Samson Shillitoe (erratic poet). The transition is not a complete alienation of the Bond character. He still gets the girls, though there is some poising and strutting. If you think of this movie as a precursor to Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" it is brilliant in sort of a "The Odd Couple" sitcom vein. Those looking to see "action hero" Sean Connery will probably be disappointed. "A Fine Madness" looks to be inspired by the antics of Charles Bukowski and the revival of the dialog between pyschotherpy, psychopharmacology and brain augmentation in the early-mid 60's.

Okay, to borrow a few things from the previous commenter's observations, sure, this is an adaptation from a novel, and apparently the main character is an obnoxious lout who happens to be a genius.Here's where this film fails in just about every department.Not for a second do we buy that Sean Connery's Samson is a "genius" in any sense of the word. He's a thick-headed brute who hollers anti-establishment rants that really aren't enlightened nor are they particularly radical. The fact is, though, that he hollers a lot. There is no modulation to Connery's performance. No sense of a human being in there. His character is drawn to just be the hunky societal interloper whose mere physicality and scowls suggest a counterpoint to everyday norm. Genius, he is not.Topping poor Connery in the shouting department is the screeching yowl of Joanne Woodward, whose hapless wife character of Samson, Rhoda, is given all the depth of a punching bag (literally). Connery takes swipes at her head, connecting with her skull in the end, along with throwing every dish in the apartment in her direction. He even shoves her down the staircase resulting in a broken leg, and perhaps, 1960's sentiments saw this as an uproarious moment of hilarity. You know, madcap abuse of the wife is always so mercilessly humorous. Anyway, you get the picture (reference the above reference to "thick-headed brute").Jean Seberg is absolutely wasted in this performance. She plays the stifled wife of a renowned psychiatrist, Patrick O'Neal, who for some reason, and quite illogically I can only add, winds up having sex with Connery in a whirlpool bath and then dumping him the next time she sees him. There is no logic in having her character even in this film other than to flesh out the above-the-line star wattage on the marquee.Only Clive Revill, playing a hare-brained psycho-therapist in every sense of the word, cuts loose with the material and lends a Peter-Sellers-like diversion for a total of 3 minutes screen time.I cannot conceive of any audience, whether in the '60s or today, eliciting anything more than ho-hum chuckle and a wan smile over this pale comedy with absolutely no focus and one of cinema's most ill-conceived one-note main characters.My rating: 1 out of 5 stars.