Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

An American soldier finds an orphan in the rubble of post-war Berlin, befriends him and educates him. Both of them want to find the boy's mother, but where to look? The story is told matter-of-fact and lacks a great deal of feeling and heart, and has the feel of a modified documentary. It also has an improvisational feel, as though the dialogue was made up on the spot. Our host on TCM said that Montgomery Clift wanted much of the sentimental dialogue removed and felt it lacked spontaneity. I feel it should have been left to the discretion of the screenwriter and the director, because what's left is a bloodless story, told one foot in front of the other. It is harmless and passes time, but could have been so much better.My star rating is in the heading. The website no longer prints them.

Montgomery Clift got an Academy Award nomination for his role in this movie. I don't really know why. The role is poorly written, and not very sympathetic. Clift does a decent but unremarkable job with it.On the other hand, the young boy who plays the real lead in this movie is an astoundingly good actor, and holds your attention for every moment he is on screen. You truly believe that you are seeing the real thing, and not a fine young actor, when he is on. He is definitely the best thing in this movie.Not far behind him is Jarmila Novotna. Novotna had been a major opera singer first in Berlin and Vienna and then, in the 1940s, at the Metropolitan Opera. She isn't well remembered today because her heyday coincided with the period when few operatic records were made in this country. But she was a well-known and highly admired soprano of her day.And, as you can see in this movie, a very good actress. A very good one, who knew how to act with her face as well as her voice.The last scene of the movie, with the close call that I won't elaborate on so as not to spoil it for viewers, is too much like some Shirley Temple melodramas. Some of the scenes between Clift and the young boy are strange because Clift's character doesn't seem to know how to behave with children. But there are other scenes that are both beautifully shot and deeply moving.Definitely worth seeing.

If you like tearjerkers, this film is for you. Long before Meryl Streep had to make Sophie's choice, The Search centered on the tremendous love of a mother for her child--a love that can be a great blessing, but also a cause for tragic despair.The Search was filmed not long after the end of WWII. It is the story of a young boy who escapes the horrors of Auschwitz and finds himself alone in post-war Europe, as a continent tries to reorganize and assess its damages. The boy is taken in by an American GI (Montgomery Clift in his first role) and they struggle to overcome the barriers of language and the boy's emotional scars.Meanwhile, the boy's mother endlessly searches for him, frustrated by the sheer size of her task, because there are so many displaced or orphaned children.If this film does not bring a tear to your eye, nothing will. It's an excellent story well told.

In the years following World War 2, stories about reconstruction and readjustment were popular with filmmakers, although they were somewhat hit-and-miss with the public, who at the time would accept nothing less than full understanding and sincerity on so sensitive a subject. Even viewed today, they are a bit of a mixed bag, and many seem to have been made with the best intentions but with naiveté in their presentation. The Search is one of these.The bare plot of the Search is kind of poignant-postwar-story-by-numbers. That's not such a bad thing in itself - often the simplest ideas are the best. Even its basic structure is a good balance, beginning with an objective exposition of the plight of children in war-ravaged Europe, allowing the Ivan Jandl character to emerge from the group, then parallelling his mother's desperate search with his own psychological recovery. I don't think the Oscar for Best Original Story was deserved but I can certainly understand it.The trouble is in the screenplay as it is written. Much of the scripted dialogue is bland and trite, and the way characters react in certain situations seems false - for example, the British UNRRA officer prompting Mrs Malik to keep questioning the Jewish boy even after she has suffered the shock of his not being her son. The very worst thing is the twee voice-over narration, which elaborates every point, regardless of whether it is already obvious or even necessary to know, in the most patronising tone imaginable. Perhaps the intention was to make these early scenes less confusing and threatening to child viewers - but other than its protagonist being a child, there is nothing to suggest that this picture is especially aimed at kids. And really, without the narration we would have been left with a more genuinely childlike view of the story. This is especially true of the flashback scene of Karel Malik's family - a young child would remember this time not so much in the adult context of where the city was or what his father did for a living, but more as a series of images. Imagine how much more powerful this scene could have been if we were to experience it the same way.Almost predictably, the director is Fred Zinnemann. This man would later do some great things, but his job on the Search is rather amateurish. I think his biggest problem here is failing to show things from the point of view of the child. In those early scenes we only see the rescued youngsters from the perspective of the UNRRA officers. We see that these kids are confused and daunted by their new guardians, but I feel truly great directing would have allowed us to share this feeling. Even in those cramped and crowded trucks the camera remains aloof above the children, rather than among them. And this from a director who tended to overuse point-of-view shots in his early pictures. The only thing I like about Zinnemann's direction here is the stark realism he gives to the ruined city, and the way he keeps this sense of a desolate environment at the forefront.I am glad to say it is the cast who make the best effort at rescuing this picture. Montgomery Clift gives a wide-ranging and naturalistic performance, but probably his best contribution is that he apparently improvised much of his own dialogue, making his scenes stand out above the turgid mess of the rest of the picture. Young Ivan Jandl gives an excellent performance for a child player. You can see that there is a lot of himself in the role, but that he is also clever enough to think about what he is doing and really put effort into acting. However the real treat here for aficionados of classic Hollywood is Aline MacMahon, who was busiest as a comic supporting player at Warners in the early 1930s. In the Search she is supremely dignified, even without makeup.The way things are in the Search is the way things often were for smaller productions in the postwar era. The studio system was weakened and the majors often found themselves collaborating with independent producers. Hollywood was not the well-oiled machine it had been in the 1930s, and we got teams where not everyone was on the same wavelength. The Search is one of the unfortunate collisions of this period, between arty-farty pretensions and Hollywood gloss.