Karry Best movie of this year hands down!

FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Justina The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Claudio Carvalho In 1936, the witty columnist Sheilah Graham (Deborah Kerr) leaves her noble British fiancé and travels in the Queen Mary from Southampton, England, to New York. She seeks out the editor of the North American Newspaper Alliance John Wheeler (Philip Ober) offering her services but he sends her to the Daily Mirror. Sheilah becomes successful and John offers a job position in Hollywood to write gossips about the stars. When Sheilah meets the decadent writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (Gregory Peck), they immediately fall in love for each other. Sheilah discovers that Scott is accepting any job to write screenplay to financially support his wife Zelda that is in asylum and his daughter that is in a boarding school. She opens her heart to him and tells the truth about her origins; but their relationship is affected by the drinking problem of Scott. "Beloved Infidel" is a melodramatic soap-opera based on the true romance of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham along the last four years of the life of the American writer. However, the screenplay is based on the book written by Sheilah Graham that is pictured as an angel that helps the decadent and cruel drunkard. I do not know the biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald but this version is shallow and not independent. Gregory Peck is weak in the dramatic parts and the lovely Deborah Kerr is too sweet even when insulted considering the profile of the controversial reporter Sheilah Graham, considered a bitch by the industry. My vote is six.Title (Brazil): "O Ídolo de Cristal" ("The Crystal Idol")

bkoganbing Beloved Infidel is based on the memoirs of Hollywood columnist Sheilah Graham, specifically her three year affair with F. Scott Fitzgerald, who is still a legend in American literature, and a genuine legend in his own time.That's the key to the film. Can you imagine in the previous century Charles Dickens whose works in the United Kingdom were also acclaimed in his time getting a contract and asked to turn out potboiler drama three or four times a year for the London stage? In the late 1930s F. Scott Fitzgerald was in Hollywood having to pay mounting bills for his wife Zelda's care and his daughter schooling and the way to quick cash was in Hollywood writing screenplays.But the studios don't want genius, they want entertainment churned out quickly on a mass scale. That isn't how Fitzgerald operates. So he's fired and returns to the alcoholism that was his lifestyle during his literary hey day in the Roaring Twenties. As Fitzgerald, Gregory Peck's one consolation in his final years is the love affair with Hollywood columnist Sheilah Graham. I have to disagree with the other reviewers who say this film is too rosy a portrayal. Remember this is Sheilah Graham's work this is based on and it's through her eyes we see Peck's disintegration. Deborah Kerr is once again a prim and proper Sheilah Graham whose slum background she's worked like a demon to overcome. Peck and Kerr work well together, but as this is a Henry King film from 20th Century Fox, I wouldn't be surprised if the film might have been intended for Tyrone Power at one point. If it had been Power would have been well cast in the part of Fitzgerald.This is also Henry King's next to last film and take a look at his film credits and the astonishing list of classic films that he did over 50 years in Hollywood. I guess as a followup to Beloved Infidel, King chose to do a film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. That one for some reason is never shown.Beloved is a classic old fashioned romantic drama the kind that sadly is not being made any more.

writers_reign This film seems to have been vilified above and beyond the call of critical duty at the time of its initial release and a couple of posters on this page have seen fit to heave the old harpoon at a very underrated film. Though far from an expert on Scott Fitzgerald I have a strong feeling that he was around forty when he died and Gregory peck was forty three when he portrayed him so realistically that's about right; Deborah Kerr was thirty eight so that's also more or less realistic. By all accounts Fitzgerald retained a certain youthful charm even in alcoholic middle age and if you're looking for an actor who can do charm with one hand behind his back without resorting to the gauche bashfulness of a Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper then Peck is definitely your man especially if, as here, he's also required to brush the charm away as if swatting a fly and reveal the cruel and brutal streak beneath the surface. I've always had a problem with Deborah Kerr as a sex object, even in From Here To Eternity she didn't really convince me, I always found her far more believable as the repressed spinster of the kind she played so well in Separate Tables. The upshot was that I came to this as a great admirer of both Peck and Fitzgerald and someone prepared to tolerate Kerr. Perhaps because I was familiar with many of the situations - not least the episode which Budd Schulberg has written about so memorably both in his roman a clef The Disenchanted and in his own recollections of the time he and Fitzgerald left Los Angeles by train bound for New Hampshire where they had been engaged as co-writers on Winter Carnival; completely unaware of Fitzgerald's status as on-the-wagon Schulberg broke open a parting gift of champagne and shared it with Scott with hilarious/disastrous results depending on your point of view - and enjoy nothing more than movies about movie-making I enjoyed virtually every frame of this and found the moment at the very end when Scott is working away on The Last Tycoon and Sheilah is reading in the background and suddenly, magically, they both look up and smile a tender, lovers-only smile, resume what they are doing and then, seconds later, Scott slumps forward and is dead before his head hits the desk one of the most moving moments I've ever experienced in a cinema. I'd certainly add this to my DVD collection.

StoryisKey Firstly I will agree that this isn't the most riveting film ever made, but I will disagree with the reviewer who says that Peck is too handsome to make a believable alcoholic. We know that Fitzgerald was handsome, intelligent and charming, three things which made Peck an excellent choice to play him on film. Furthermore there is a pretty amazing scene where violence erupts between Peck and Kerr, it's truly believable, which heartbreakingly portrayed the depths to which Fitzgerald had sunk. Obviously when the story is based on Sheilah Graham's recollections, it will be purely personal and she may have softened the truth or by the same account exaggerated it. The look of the picture is beautiful, especially the wardrobe for Kerr. I say simply to get a look at two stars in their prime it's worth it to muddle through. Kerr and Peck have a tangible chemistry.