Alicia I love this movie so much

SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

Console best movie i've ever seen.

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Hot 888 Mama . . . would fall on deaf ears when Laurence Olivier said it to Ophelia a year later as HAMLET, but it does the trick in GREEN DOLPHIN STREET--even if it's not said in so many words. Winning an Oscar for best "special effects" is the aspect of this film that is the most laughable today. Though film makers had been pointing their cameras toward REAL earthquakes since at least 1906, when you watch the "New Zealand" quake scenes in GREEN DOLPHIN STREET you get the idea that the effects people here had NOTHING to go on in their depictions; that quakes were just a faint rumor from a distant planet. Toppling trees, yawning chasms every few feet, and MINUTES of continuous shaking--oh my! Everyone would be climbing rocky Jacob's Ladders like "Marguerite" to reach the safety of mountaintop monasteries and convents if GREEN DOLPHIN's effects were even half accurate. On the other hand, the lessons of love this movie teaches are as solid today as they were 67 years ago, or in the mid-1800s, when this story is set. Though it's sad that Timothy "Tyharuru" Haslam (Van Heflin) is the odd man out here, this is really a story more about the ladies, anyway.

moonspinner55 Lana Turner, playing 'bad sister' to Donna Reed's 'wholesome sister' in 19th century New Zealand, looks great in her period costumes but gives yet another of her plastic performances permeated with frantic unease. She and sibling Reed are both vying for the new man in town, with romantic complications sending the sisters on wildly divergent paths. Adapted from Elizabeth Goudge's novel "Green Dolphin Country", the film has some memorable set-pieces: a fabulous earthquake (undermined, unfortunately, with campy hysterics), a ferocious tidal wave, and a haunting, beautiful moment in which Reed scales a steep tunnel on the inside of a mountain and is taken in by the nuns. Relative balderdash is nonetheless an entertaining piece of work; pure Hollywood, though a first-rate example. Director Victor Saville shows a great deal of style, and the time and place of the story are vividly captured. **1/2 from ****

Maciste_Brother When I decided to watch GREEN DOLPHIN STREET on TCM recently I didn't expect much. A standard period drama starring Lana Turner, Donna Reed and Frank Morgan (the wizard in WIZARD OF OZ). It started nicely enough: beautiful cinematography, nice sets and location. But then things got more, eh, odd and then even more odd and yes, it morphed into something that was full-stop wacky. I mean seriously jaw-on-the-floor wacky. On one hand, the film didn't work at all but then the whole thing is so incredibly and spectacularly over-the-top that I was pleasantly surprised by this unexpected outcome. It wasn't the thoughtful period drama I expected but more an over-the-top ultra camp thingamajig that confounded me nonstop.The story is nearly impossible to describe because it goes here and there with no rhyme or reason, baffling the viewers with its overwrought drama that makes very little sense. If you saw TOP SECRET, the comedy from the 1980s starring Val Kilmer with all the incongruous elements (spy movie/beach movie/elvis movie/great escape etc) in it, well, GDS is like that but treated with a straight face. It's a combo of a Jane Austin period piece/swashbuckler/KING KONG/disaster epic/PEYTON PLACE all rolled into one. 3/4s into the movie, I thought nothing would top what had happened previously and the there's the scene when Donna Reed is caught in the rising tide and has to climb a well-like cave, that scene sent me over the edge. The well/cave is not something like 30 feet high but more like "Empire State Building" high. What happens to Reed's character after this scene is so priceless (certainly when you think of the story-line) that I was wondering "how come this film is not a camp classic?" That scene is so striking that it alone deserves to be remembered as one of the most brilliantly overwrought "symbolic" scenes of all time. It actually outdoes BLACK NARCISSUS (there's also a nunnery on top of a hill/cliff waiting at the end of the well) which was also released in 1947, several months before GDS! GREEN DOLPHIN STREET is like BLACK NARCISSUS' illegitimate child no one wants to talk about. In the film's many OTT scene, there's also an earthquake AND a roaring river tsunami (it won the Oscar for special effects over BLACK NARCISSUS which is something the other more famous film cannot claim), all of this over two sisters fighting for the love of one clueless man.Not a great film by any means but I give it 10 stars because it's pure ultra camp. It's a must see if you like camp and the unexpected. It's a totally hidden gem (what kind of gem it's hard to say).Who knew such a benign title (which is totally pointless vis a vis the story) could hide so much good stuff.

cooke_mark Although I've been a vintage film buff for years, I saw this film for the first time this week. Glady's Cooper's deathbed scene, played with Edmund Gwen and Donna Reed, has now become one of my favorite, most touching moments in film. Her dignity and courage, Gwen's simplicity and kindness, and Reed's ethereal beauty, along with the composition and lighting of the scene (including the candle-lit crucifix at the rear), riveted my attention and emotions from beginning to end. By the end of the scene I had tears streaming down my face, and believe me I'm a hard nut to crack.Otherwise, I thought there was a fine performance from Van Heflin (worthy of a look-alike Orson Welles), a rather startling and frightening depiction of a New Zealand earthquake and flood, very beautiful costumes and sets, and did I mention that Donna Reed is so beautiful you can barely stand to look at her? Her scene with Lana Turner below the crucifix at the convent, in which she describes her happiness at becoming a nun, is worthy of Ingrid Bergman in "The Bells of St. Mary's.