I love this movie so much

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Best movie ever!

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

An ambitious young executive (Paul Newman) chooses a loveless marriage and an unfulfilling personal life in exchange for a successful Wall Street career.What a strange yet apt story of generational rejection, and sons becoming their fathers. We have Paul Newman's character striking out on his own against the wishes of his father, and then he slowly begins to make the same choices -- good or bad -- that his parents did.What is the message? Is there a message? Maybe this just says something about the importance of love rather than a life filled strictly with business. I am not sure.

This is a very long melodrama starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, and a host of capable supporting players, based on a John O'Hara novel. Its running time of close to three hours went quite fast for me. The 'plight' of Alfred Eaton (Newman) is somewhat hard to discern for those of us who are not wealthy. That is because of several issues that muddle the plot rather beyond our understanding.First, Alfred has issues with his unloving father. OK, so what? The Eatons are wealthy. But we are told over and over that this is not enough. It is respectability that matters, not money.Second, one notices that everyone drinks constantly and too much.Third, almost all the women in the movie are what we would call sluts; slaves to their carnal urges and in dire need of physical satisfaction often and emphatically. Even the eventual heroine (a miscast Ina Balin) is unsuccessful in resisting her lascivious yearnings.Fourth, Alfred is doggedly in pursuit of wealth and position. It is not explained why, since after the death of his father, ably played by Leon Ames, he is after all the heir to a substantial fortune and business. Nor is his drunken and philandering mother (Myrna Loy, in a small role) ever again mentioned after Alfred leaves his unloving home to make his own fortune.Given these issues, it is hard to sympathize with the main characters or to fully grasp their motivations. None of this makes the picture any less watchable. Newman and Woodward are always first class, and they have great chemistry on screen. And the fact that a cozy Hollywood ending is reached, in which all get what they either deserve or aspire to is good for this kind of sprawling soap opera.An enjoyable diversion into a past era: Hollywood film making of the late 50s - early 60s.

I didn't see what others apparently saw in this film. I did not see the moral of the film so much concerning the price of success as it being that despite your best efforts, you are often doomed to become your parents.At the beginning of the film, Alfred (Paul Newman) returns home after the second World War to renounce his father because he has, in Alfred's opinion, ignored his mother while strictly attending to business to the point where his mother has become an adulterous lush. Ten or fifteen years later, Alfred has ignored his own wife Mary (played by Joanne Woodward) while climbing the corporate ladder until his own lonely wife has become an adulterous lush. The only crime of his father's he does not commit is to produce offspring that can be dragged into the mess his life has become. One person with a more warped moral code than either Alfred or Mary seems to be Alfred's boss. While eating lunch he casually informs Alfred of Mary's affair with an old flame. When Alfred reacts by saying that he intends to divorce Mary, his boss warns him against such an action. To Alfred's boss, Mary's behavior isn't a moral failing or a cry for attention - it is an unforgivable breach of etiquette, and this is the same way he feels about divorce.Overall, the main characters in this film lack redeeming characteristics to the point where the movie almost becomes a film noir soap opera. There are still solid performances by both Newman and Woodward, and it is still worth seeing 50 years after it was made. After all, the idle rich and the mistakes they keep making over and over have not changed that much after half a century.

The original novel ran several bazillion pages and told the tale of one David Alfred Eaton, who couldn't think of anything worse than being his father, a nasty steel-mill owner, and essentially becomes him. Along the way wives, children, mistresses, and the general populations of several east-coast and mid-western states and cities are dragged into his miserable wake, all of it ending with the realization that he's a worthless bastard who might as well have died after service in WWII, the last time he was of any use to the world at large.The film shoves events forward to the years after WWII, lops off a great deal of the book, and gives everything a happy ending. Along the way, screenwriter Ernest Lehman weaves in some bitchily-amusing dialog, Elmer Bernstein gets the Fox studio orchestra to sigh and weep appealingly, and Leo Tover's wide-screen color photography makes the whole thing look like an expensive luxury item, the sort of thing that our protagonist would buy one of the women he's ignoring, hoping that they'll shut up and leave him alone . . .It was rather gutsy of Newman to play the role of Eaton, and play it rather honestly. He makes Eaton into a cold, snarky, insufferable bastard, determined to make the whole world pay for the fact that Daddy (Leon Ames) loved his dead brother more the he ever loved the son that survived. (The scene where Dad 'fesses up to this fact is full of creepy, incestuous overtones.) As his wife Mary, Joanne Woodward also is rather gutsy, not to mention smart and sexy, particularly as dressed by the costume designer William Travilla, who never made Marilyn Monroe look this good. Her character marries Newman's in spite of the fact that she's really in love with someone else, but makes a serious good-faith effort at the wife thing, with Newman responding once every six months, and then running to the ends of the earth, not to mention the wastes of California, Colorado, and Pennsylvania to avoid spending any time with her. When she finally takes up with the old boyfriend, the movie primes you to hate the woman; I found myself wondering what took her so long. As the Sweet, Simple, Unspoiled girl that promises Eaton a New and Better Life, Ina Balin works something close to alchemy, turning a sappy cliché into a vivid and appealing woman. A woman far too good for the creep that Newman is playing . . .Still, the movie has one of the great tell-off scenes in Hollywood history, Newman throwing a promotion and all of the crappy business ethics that go with it back in the face of the pompous bore of a boss (Felix Aylmer) offering it to him. It's corny and hammy in a lot of ways, but Newman gives it wit and zest beyond anything it really deserves. There are few things as delightful to watch as a good actor letting rip.