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List Price: $19.98 | | Label: Warner Home Video
Salesrank: 17765
Released: January 8, 2008 |
| Our Price: $10.19 |
| Used Price: $8.44 |
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MPAA Rating: Unrated
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
When hearing-impaired John Singer moves to a Southern town to continue his friendship with a recently institutionalized fellow deaf mute, his compassion changes the lives of a small circle of struggling people--who discover The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
Description of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter:
This quiet, sentimental 1968 drama based on the Carson McCullers novel is considered a classic contemporary coming-of-age film about alienation and love. Alan Arkin (The In-Laws) stars as a kind, but lonely deaf-mute who befriends a lonely teenage girl in his boarding house. Set in the deep South, the film depicts a wistful small-town life with an undercurrent of turmoil and intolerance. It features a standout performance by Arkin and the debut of Sondra Locke (Bronco Billy, Sudden Impact) as two fundamentally lonely people who find solace in themselves as they reach out to each other. --Robert Lane
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter Reviews:
classic 
2009-10-22 - a classic tale of love - real love - and how simple it all really is. great view into the early sixties mindset. still powerful today.
A Modern Masterpiece of Tragedy
2009-06-20 - As so often happens, this movie does not, it seems, quite live up to the expectations of some reviewers who have first read Carson McCullers' acclaimed book of the same title. I have never read the book, but the movie, taken on its own merits, is a masterpiece that has been undeservedly neglected in the forty years since it first came out.
I saw "Lonely Hunter" back then as a young man, and it was instantly engraved on my heart and memory, especially the final graveyard scene where in just a very few words - even one letter of one word, the past tense "d" in "loved" - reveals and drives home the principal point of the movie powerfully and unforgettably. When I saw it again on DVD after forty years, the impact was just as great. I was left in reflective and tearful silence for a good half hour afterwards.
I regard this movie as a great modern tragedy, with a message worthy to rank with those of the great Greek and Shakespearian dramas.
The values are profound and deeply human. And through the artistry of Robert Ellis Miller's direction, that can only be fully appreciated on watching the film a second time when one now knows what every incident and gesture is leading up to, the viewer is invited by Alan Arkins's wordless but inspired performance to enter into the world of a handicapped but uncomplaining man whose life turns out to be one act of loving kindness after another toward the people around him. However, his inability to verbalize what is inside him inevitably means that he is pretty much just taken for granted by those same people - and indeed, by the viewer. That's part of the artistry.
This is a beautiful and timeless movie, worth watching again and again.
Rev. Brian W. Harrison
Bright and cheery film ... about devastating loneliness
2009-04-23 - The cinematography of James Wong Howe may be the real "star" of this film, creating a brightly-hued, sharply-focused view of small-town America in the 1960s that is almost like looking at kodachrome still photographs. That brightness, along with the almost cheery tone in much of the acting (Chuck McCann, Sondra Locke, etc.) seem at odds with the bleakness of the material ... until, on second thought, it seems like the perfect metaphor for how the world viewed Singer, all cheerful surface. The cinematography intentionally ignores the sadness and the darkness inside these superficially cheery lives, just as everyone ignored Singer's feelings. (Only Cicely Tyson's intense performance goes straight for the dark side in this material which, in fact, makes her seem the most out-of-place member of the cast.) On a different note: I really adored Sondra Locke here. She makes a debut with a charm similar to that of Reese Witherspoon's in Man in the Moon. Since I am also a big fan of Clint Eastwood's under-rated The Gauntlet (an homage to Don Siegel that is also the first hint of Eastwood's later mastery as a director), I have to say that Sondra Locke deserves to be more than a footnote in cinema history. She was an overlooked talent.
ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS!! 
2008-12-06 - The film is based on Carson MCuller's best-selling novel which is an Oprah Book Club selection. John Singer (Arkin) is a deaf-mute who works in a small town jewelry store doing engraving and repairs. He also apparently has responsibility for another deaf-mute, Spiros(Chuck McCann) who continually gets into trouble with the law and is sent away to a 'facility' in another small community. Singer moves there to be close and help his friend. He rents a room from a family struggling with finances due to the father's hip injury and inability to work. He enters into the life of the teenage daughter struggling with her identity and coming of age. His disability makes him very sensitive to the needs and hurts of those around him including an African-American doctor who refuses to treat whites. While selflessly reaching out to those around him, Singer harbors a secret known only to himself. A powerful story of love and relationships and redemption and the world of silence occupied by those who cannot physically hear or speak but in reality hear and say more than most who are not handicapped. [...]
Alan Arkin's finest performance
2008-12-01 - Wonderful story about the destructive power of loneliness. Alan Arkin (in a role of J. Singer) plays a deaf mute whose life revolves around his one and only friend who is also deaf mute. But his friend is simple and cannot stop himself from getting into a trouble. When situation becomes too difficult to handle his friend is moved to another town to an institution. To escape loneliness, Arkin's character moves to that city, finds another job, rents a room from impoverished southern family and hopes to start a new life. In spite of being generous with people around him, he is still considered outsider. Few people can understand him or relate to him. When his friend dies in the institution and a black doctor who our character became close with is diagnosed with cancer, set of circumstances make our protagonist even more isolated than ever before. Alone and unconsoled, he commits suicide in his small rented room. It is only after that act that people he truly cared about are there to acknowledge the enormous impact he had on their lives.
