Just perfect...

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Frankly, it appears that mine is a minority opinion. My own favorite story of a lonely woman is SUMMERTIME with Katharine Hepburn which had a lot more flavor as well as a genuinely entertaining and moving story.However, RACHEL, RACHEL drags along at an interminably slow pace with many close-ups of star Joanne Woodward as she reflects on the emptiness of her dull, spinisterish life in a small town. And the script provides no scenes that give us any real hope that things have changed for her by the time we get to the fantasized ending. Most of the scenes are played too long to hold viewer interest.As a result, I found it tedious and somewhat boring at times because nothing of real interest seemed to happen, except in a few flashbacks showing the effect her disturbing childhood had on her upbringing.The acting is competent but I never found the story involving enough to care about the fate of the main character or the few supporting characters for that matter. It fails completely to be anything but a character study of a lonely teacher without the needed dramatic power to make us feel her suffering.

During the course of their 50-year marriage (1958-2008), Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward appeared in 10 films together, and in 1968, Newman directed the first film of his career, "Rachel, Rachel." Although he would go on to produce and/or direct 11 more, only five of those dozen featured his wife in front of the camera: "Rachel, Rachel," "They Might Be Giants," "The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds" (a film that, like "Rachel, Rachel," featured the Newmans' cute little daughter, Nell Potts), "The Shadow Box" (a TV movie) and "The Glass Menagerie." Their initial pairing as director/star shows what formidable talents the couple wielded both behind and in front of the camera. In "Rachel, Rachel," we meet a shy, 35-year-old schoolteacher, Rachel Cameron. Rachel is only really half alive when we first encounter her at the beginning of her latest summer break. Still a virgin, Rachel spends most of her time caring for her nagging, widowed mother. We are told that she only eats vanilla ice cream, and the fact of her semiexistence is driven home by the fact that she lives above a funeral parlor, of all places! The film allows us into her inner thought processes, and we realize that she has suicidal fantasies that she herself characterizes as "morbid." She feels that she is at the exact middle of her life, and that this is her last "ascending summer." During the course of the film, we see that a revival meeting at a church cannot get Rachel "reborn," and are happy when the lonely woman enters into her first sexual relationship, with an old acquaintance visiting from out of town. Predictably, though, long-term happiness is a tenuous proposition at best...."Rachel, Rachel" is a wonderfully realistic, mature and adult film. Newman's direction is sensitive and assured, especially for a beginner, and the supporting players (most particularly James Olson as Nick, the new man in Rachel's life, and Oscar-nominated Estelle Parsons as Rachel's lesbian gal pal, Calla) are all very fine. But it is Joanne Woodward who most certainly holds the film together. She is simply superb here, as the attractive but diffident Rachel. Hers is a wonderfully well-modulated performance, making for a completely well-rounded character. Rachel is depressed and lonely, yes, but also capable of a certain steeliness and very real humor. And those interior monologues and fantasies previously mentioned help us to really understand the poor woman, and what makes her tick. Woodward most certainly did deserve her Oscar nomination for her work in this film, but just could not prevail at the awards ceremony against Katharine Hepburn and the force of Nature known as Barbra Streisand. The actress makes us feel the heartbreak of Rachel's situation over and over. Among the most heartbreaking moments: Rachel walks into her bedroom, after assisting at her mother's weekly bridge game, and spontaneously starts to sob; Rachel compulsively admits her love to her new boyfriend, and her desire for a child, while Nick looks on in discomfort; Rachel gets the news about her "pregnancy" at the hospital; and, most especially, Rachel sits on a bus, at the film's end, en route to a new life in a new town, and ponders the fact that she might always be frightened and lonely. Rachel is a wonderful woman who would most likely make most guys happy, and the viewer is left with optimistic hopes for her. (Too bad a sequel for this film was never made!) In a picture filled with so much sadness, at least Newman & Co. leave us with an uplifting finale of sorts. Only...I would feel a lot more sanguine about Rachel's future if she'd just left her darn mother behind....

This is one of those so called ground breaking 60's dramas which uses the familiar device of a hopeless, frustrated spinster, (such as Jane Wyman would have played 10 or 15 years earlier, think "Miracle in the Rain") in an attempt to propagandize the audience into thinking the solution to her dilemma is sexual liberation.Thus we have plain jane school-teacher Woodward finding carnal knowledge with a former classmate who's on a brief return visit to her home town.Woodward sees sky rockets, marriage and children, and of course suffers the inevitable disillusionment of desertion.Exceedingly well acted by all concerned, with many precise observations of small town life, (including a brilliant evocation of an old ladies bridge club) , the film uses these strengths to cloak, (make respectable?) distasteful scenes of Woodward's ruination in the hay, along with a highly improbable Lesbianic interlude with Estelle Parsons.How interesting it would have been to have seen this theme treated the way Francois Mauriac would have realized it--and yet nowhere is the moral, much less, supernatural dimension even fleetingly evoked much less alluded to.Indeed the films' only reference to religion is a depiction of a revival meeting featuring a wild eyed snake handler.And so, in the end, (like so many other late sixties pretensions), all that we are left with here is mere, dreary, sociological naturalism, a melo but with the same basic ends as a Norman Lear comedy (all you squares need to unshackle all of your old wives tale repressions)--and not the lyrical star dust of Tennesse Williams who explored the same themes in "Summer and Smoke".Not the sort of role Loretta Young would have played!

In pretty much every movie where I've seen Joanne Woodward, she does a great role, and "Rachel, Rachel" (directed by her husband Paul Newman) is no exception. Woodward plays Rachel Cameron, a schoolteacher in a conservative, repressive small town. Various incidents from her childhood have long haunted her, and she still lives with - and has to take care of - her needy mother. Without a doubt she's unfulfilled in life, but she basically has no way to escape this existence. But things just might change when childhood friend Nick (James Olson) returns to town after spending many years in the big city.By barely moving her face, Woodward conveys many emotions in this movie: anguish, cynicism, hope, and more. I would suspect that "Rachel, Rachel" probably played into the burgeoning feminist movement, but moreover it showed the complete break from "traditional" American mores (after all, what characterized the '60s more than that?). Nineteen sixty-eight was certainly a great year for movies: along with this one, there was "Planet of the Apes", "Romeo & Juliet", "2001", "The Odd Couple", "Bullitt", "Charly" and "Yellow Submarine". Definitely one that I recommend.Also starring Geraldine Fitzgerald.