What a waste of my time!!!

How sad is this?

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

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

Never cared very much for Rita Tushingham. I remember her being tagged for the role of the daughter of Lara & Yuri in Dr. Zhivago. Seriously? That face was not created by the DNA of the likes of Julie Christie and Omar Sharif. I find her acting mannerisms irritating and her face reminiscent of a ferret. I realize that not every movie actor needs to be a great beauty, but swear to god I don't see how she ever got a career in movies. It's just hard to see her for 2 hours in a film. Thankfully I didn't watch it on a huge screen.The movie seems dated. Lynn Redgrave was pretty good and Peter Finch played his usual cold & distant personality which reminded me of his Jake Armitage character in The Pumpkin Eater.

This is not a film where everything works out. It's sad and disagreeable in the way it does not satisfy us.Basically a young, very vulnerable, very unworldly girl who falls in love with a very worldly worn man who has the psychic energy of a rotten discarded orange. He was naturally drawn to her. She completely misunderstands his general makeup preferring to see him as suave and debonair. She has obviously never met anyone like him. Later on in the movie we see the kind of men in her life. Her father believes in all the simple relationships between men and women. The priest has a traditional view of her behavior and offers her very traditional advice, which she chooses not only to ignore, but chooses to run from.Near the end, we witness the breakup of the love affair between the central characters. One of the things we learn about her father's marriage is that her mother ran away all the time just so he (her father) would pursue her (her mother). She thought the same ploy would work on her lover. That's how little she understood the world of such men.She could not understand his reaction. He was in their relationship only as long as it was idyllic. It was a very pleasant diversion, an escape from the failures of his life. He did not want any of the problems of her love because it was too confining. He was capable of making love, but not of loving.So it ended. He with a fading memory and she with a bit of an education.I liked Tushingham. Anyone would. It was the Peter Finch character that made the film so barren and ugly. That doesn't mean it was a bad film. It only means it was hard to enjoy and watch and feel anything but …sad.

Desmond Davis, who had worked closely with Tony Richardson, decided to try his hand directing films. For his first effort he decided to use Edna O'Brien's novella "The Lonely Girl", which we read a long while ago, and frankly, we don't remember it well. The result was a movie that has that "English Look" of what came out of England during those years."Girl with Green Eyes" owes its success to Rita Tushingham, an actress that was the darling of English movie makers. She had a certain waif look that she used to her advantage in films such as this one, and in others of the same period. She holds the movie together as it's hard to take one's eyes from hers. Ms. Tushingham was not a spectacular beauty, yet she had a certain look that was appealing in her work.Peter Finch appears as Eugene Gaillard, a man who is divorced with a child, and whose estranged wife has moved overseas. His attraction for Kate Brennan is quite understandable, yet, Eugene can't get Kate to be more than a platonic admirer, never being able to consume the passion she feels for him, and vice versa.Also in the movie, a young and fresh Lynn Redgrave, who went to make bigger and better things on her own in the British cinema and on the stage and films in America, her adoptive country."Girl with Green Eyes" is worth a look for what Desmond Davis was able to accomplish in his first feature. The copy we watched recently was sadly in need of restoration.

Long into watching this studiously "small," slice-of-life portrait of a naive young woman, I was still wondering if the film would turn out, in the end, to have been worth watching. Earnest in its desire to be grittily true-to-life, in the neo-realist manner of the Angry Young Men, it is also clearly intoxicated with the quotidian lyricism and plain-spoken poetry of la nouvelle vague. It attempts to be charming and brutally frank at the same time, and manages, to some extent, to carry it off.But will we end up caring about Tushingham's somewhat obtuse small town escapee, or Finch's sophisticated cold fish? Or will we be left with the rather sodden sensation that we've wasted our time eavesdropping on bores? For my part, I was pleasantly surprised. The story ends with the palpable sense that Kate has grown up a bit, and Eugene has grown a little older and sadder. We've looked on as two people have lived their bittersweet lives, much as we live our own -- and we're a little sad to bid them adieu.To sum up: not as fresh and appealing today as it probably seemed in its time, but still rewarding and worthwhile.