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List Price: $19.98 | | Label: Warner Home Video
Salesrank: 89473
Released: June 20, 2006 |
| Our Price: $13.53 |
| Used Price: $9.63 |
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
Genius, poet and carpet cleaner Samson Shillitoe (Sean Connery) has writer's block - and he can't bluster, clobber or curse it away. But just watch him take Manhattan by storm trying in this whirlwind comedy! It's a certifiable case of A Fine Madness, as nonconformist Samson and his beleaguered wife (Joanne Woodward) plunge into a series of daffy disasters from which he still comes up smiling. That is, until he dallies with the lovely wife (Jean Seberg) of a scheming psychiatrist (Patrick O'Neal), who seeks revenge by prescribing "brain surgery." Shillitoe will need the might of Samson to face down his foes, but with Connery's full-tilt charisma and Irvin Kershner's buoyant direction, it's flinty, funny entertainment. Director: Irvin Kershner Starring: Sean Connery, Joanne Woodward, Jean Seberg
Description of A Fine Madness:
A Fine Madness would never pass muster by today's politically correct standards. The "hero" of this 1966 comedy, a pompous poet named Samson Shillitoe (Sean Connery, doing a Saturday Night Live version of himself), is a classic bad boy--"an exact cross between Dylan Thomas and Mike Tyson," as one reviewer put it, a sexist philanderer who reneges on alimony to his first wife and punches out his second (Joanne Woodward, shrill and tiresome), can't keep a job, and insults, alienates, and abuses anyone who comes within two feet of him. (All of which makes him a total chick magnet, because he's an artist who has no time for quotidian vicissitudes, and also because he's Sean Connery.) Even taking the cultural time warp into account, it's hard to say what Irvin Kershner, who directed Elliott Baker's script from Baker's own novel, had in mind here, other than showing that Connery could do something besides play James Bond (in fact, the film was both preceded and followed by Bond adventures). Samson is an unredeemable jerk, the other characters are mostly unlikable as well, and the story, which involves psychiatrist Patrick O'Neal ordering him to undergo a lobotomy after he seduces the good doc's wife (Jean Seberg), is unconvincingly resolved. The film does a decent job of skewering the psychiatric profession and its pretensions, and Samson is probably meant to embody the whole screw-the-establishment ethos of the '60s, but overall, A Fine Madness is dated and simply not funny enough. One footnote: Kershner went on to bigger and better things with Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back. Ironically, he also directed Never Say Never Again, a 1983 Bond film with none other than Sean Connery as 007. --Sam Graham
A Fine Madness Reviews:
Not what I expected 
2007-04-06 - Made in 1966. The film depicts several aspects of that eras norms. If one considers cheating husband, spousal abuse, unethical psychiatric practices, and labotomy not entertainment then then movie is not for you.
Highly Original Comedy 
2006-07-27 - At the very least you can say that the makers of "A Fine Madness" attempt something different. That's not to say they hit a bulls-eye,though. Their ambitions are higher than their success rate. They attempt to skewer the artistic mindset and the psychiatric profession but the humor in part is too manic to truly succeed. That said there are enough laughs here to give the film a qualified recommendation. Sean Connery is inspired as the poet disguised as a brawling, boozing, womanizing, blue-collar guy. Or is it vice versa? Joanne Woodward is Connery's match as his supportive long-suffering wife. There are any number of amusing setpieces here: Connery dressing down the ladies' auxiliary, Connery's confrontation's with the process server(John Fiedler, "Mr. Peterson" from the old "Bob Newhart" show), Connery playing the psychiatrist recordings of an unfaithful wife to her unsuspecting husband. A mixed bag, but give this film credit for aiming high and just missing the mark.
Great fantasy 
2006-07-06 - I loved Joanne Woodward and Sean Connery (and everybody else) and I loved this movie. It was the purest of fiction. But it was a delight. Joanne Woodward I had to say was the best of them all with Connery following close behind and everybody else excellent. I didn't like seeing Bibi Osterwald playing a shrew and I thought it was a low blow giving her penultimate billing in the final credits. Did you recognize Clive Revill (sp?), he was the brain surgeon in this and the original Fagan in the Bway production of Oliver. Also the narrator (I guess, I only heard the album) in the Bway production of Irma La Douce. Much more sympathetic characters both. I had a ball watching this flick. And it was full of familiar faces.
BOR - - - ING! 
2006-06-22 - An unemployed (and unemployable) poet supported by his waitress girlfriend. Need I say more?
Another Interesting Connery Choice
2005-06-24 - Connery was sort of the Johnny Depp of the Sixties/Seventies in that he was a handsome leading-man type who always was trying to break loose from the "Bond" straightjacket by choosing offbeat, interesting, "challenging" roles when he wasn't saving the world as 007. (The only place Connery wouldn't DARE go back then are the fey, semi-gay characters Depp will occasionally take on. Sean had/has WAY too much "Scottish Macho" flowing through his veins to "go gay"! It would be like John Wayne or Clint Eastwood playing gay!) Anyway, he tackled this against-type role of rollicking, blue-collar poet Sampson Shillitoe. (Albeit, Gawd knows, Shillitoe is a strutting, bristlingly macho, overloaded-with-testosterone, thoroughly HETEROSEXUAL poet---sort of what Norman Mailer would be if he was a poet & not a prose writer.) When the role was somewhat customized in this way to suit Connery's screen persona, he succeeded in pulling off a bravura comic performance. As previous posters have mentioned, highlights are his hilariously disastrous, drunken recital at some high-society Ladies' Social Club & his explosive display of feeling-the-touch-of-God creative joy on the (Brooklyn?) Bridge. The macho/near abusive attitudes toward women are now very dated (as they now are in the early "Bond" films), but the movie is definitely a keeper, a nearly-forgotten, flawed gem.
