Reviews

This film is a masterpiece with a great script, patiently building to a crescendo, delivered by skilled charming actors.

Once upon a time, more than hundred years ago, before Google, before computers, before television, before movies, before radio, intelligent people still quested for understanding. If you are curious about reincarnation you might go to a public lecture and be aware of other people in the audience. The mysteries of why pain comes into your life, what gives happiness, can a soul survive death is the same in any century, and a quiet persistent pursuit yields result.

The other reviewers do an excellent job of telling of Fisk Jr. Trying through weekly visits to thaw his curmudgeon distant father. was the father always abrasive and bitter? Will he always be so?

What unlocks the emotions is a shaggy dog story. Somehow the aroma of a rare wine enjoyed by Dean Spanley unlocks the acute sense of smell of a dead spaniel, who lives again to tell his adventure. This is the adventure of the three astonished men and you the audience. It is more emotionally rewarding than all the explosions and chases and violence that are not in this film.

We begin with three old business men on Christmas Eve. George Melton of Oklahoma, played by Harry Carey, is in "bah humbug" Scrooge mode absorbed with business planning. C.Aubrey Smith's "Chad" is from Britain, and is not yet particularly keen about the holiday. But in comes spunky Irishman Michael O'Brien played by Charles Winninger loaded with gifts and Christmas Spirit. This first scene gradually develops into complete joy. The gentlemen wager on a game that tests honesty which brings in the young couple destined to be lovers. The huge surprise is young Richard Carlson's voice! (I want to see/listen to the four other singing films Carlson made about this period.) He beautifully sings "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" to Actress Jean Parker who plays Jean Lawrence, before we hear Jingle Bells sung in a variety of languages. You will be totally into the Christmas Spirit when the first act ends. Then, rather slowly, with a lack of suspense but an overload of charm we enter the world of fantasy and Hollywood mystic theology. How are all the old guys going to die? We have to have a plot device that gets rid of them all at once. You won't have much trouble guessing what is going happen next when actress Maria Ouspenskaya pleads with them to take the train and not the plane. Mercifully you won't have long to wait to see if you guessed correctly.

"Beyond Tomorrow" switches gears as we move into the meaning of the title. There will be ghosts. The lad with the heart of gold and the golden voice will be tempted, lured toward purgatory. Mystic fantasy visuals will effectively dazzle, even though low budget. The mood the story needs is achieved perfectly and you'll be glad the film was made sixty-eight years ago and not today. Welcome to drama in an imagined dimension no-one who can read this has yet entered.

I founded this DVD at a dollar store!

The town of Spectre is located deep in the dark woods, off the road most people travel, at the end of the pathless path. Beyond the yearning and the fear is the place of your dreams. Its peopled with your fantasy. It is alive with joyous and fearful beings you know only in deep sleep, or perhaps the enchantment of television or movies or books or your own imaginings of heaven or hell or what might be.

What might be... is the town of Spectre.

You may not have been there, but Tim Burton will take you there in this story about the Bloom family. The son, disgusted by the fantastic tales told him by his father rejects all his father told as lies. Big Fish is about truth in tall tales. There is truth in tall tales that will shake you to your emotional core. Someday your child, your heir, will happen upon a Deed, the undisputed Title that once you tried to own the town of Spectre, or perhaps just a home for the mistress of Spectre. Your cabinets will be filled with mementos of Spectre: the ticket stubs to movies or sport events; the books on a shelf are evidence of lands you visited. The town of Spectre lives in the tissue of your brain. Spectre (apparition)is accessed from printed page, coiled VHS tape, silver DVD disk, or close your eyes and be still.

What are your stories of heaven, history, politics, religion or just love? How can you entice your child to you simply enjoy a field of daffodils --for just this one day-- with the people we love? and do the same tomorrow?

But how do you share your adventure to joy with a child who cannot, will not, chooses not to live in your world? Can you patiently tell your tales of adventure to your children--those persons who come through you--? Alas, they have faith in only their own dreams. Perhaps they will only seek to know your dream's truth for themselves when you die. Will they find a tale to entertain and inspire your grandchildren to their adventure?

Take this fantastic adventure rich with images, humor and ideas that I am eager to visit many more times.

If you want to see a movie with nudity, sex, drugs, alcohol, brutal beating of a woman and child rape, this movie will satisfy you. If you want to see a man creatively exact revenge on the treasure of a wife who left him, this movie has it. You've already heard the wonderful music that keeps the raw emotion going. The surprise is that in a story of violence, action and music a climax can come in a moment of silence, without a pedantic speech, which transforms the movie. Look for a final scene that is an unexpected evidence of a wounded person healing. Perhaps we who wonder why we wallow in the abundant profane will learn that love can be located above the loins in the heart. From the pumping pounding follow the rhythm to where where love is sacred.