Something Wild

Audience Reviews

View All (13) audience reviews

delysid d a movie that makes you say WHAT?? Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 03/10/22 Full Review Audience Member A Stockholm Syndrome love story as odd as that seems. Sixty years has not aged this film well. It starts out as a sympathetic portrait of a young woman who suffers depression and alienation after a brutal rape. A young man rescued her from an attempt at suicide, then locks her up in his apartment - it's his "last chance" and the young lady suffers under the confinement (but is not raped). At last she is set free and her freedom leads her ... back to her captor whom she marries. I, for one, would like to see a feminist retrospective on this film. Johnny C sez check it out from a then and now perspective. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 02/17/23 Full Review Audience Member Amazingly raw film. Wonderful location filming. Stark and haunting. Carroll Baker and Ralph Meeker both give heartbreaking performances. Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 02/12/23 Full Review Audience Member At least Carroll looked great. Rated 1.5/5 Stars •  Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars 02/01/23 Full Review Audience Member Not to be confused with its namesake film of a quarter century later (the 1986 "Something Wild" directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Jeff Daniels, Melanie Griffith, and Ray Liotta), this offbeat indie is directed by Jack Garfein (who also co-wrote the screenplay) and stars his-then wife Carroll Baker as Mary Ann Robinson, a young Bronx-dwelling college student who is raped on her way home from the subway one night. She covers all traces of the crime committed against her from her neurotic mother (Mildred Dunnock) and stepfather (Charles Watts, not The Rolling Stones drummer) and attempts to get on with her life, but is soon overwhelmed by her trauma and drifts away from home and college, renting a room in a shoddy boarding house in Lower Manhattan and working in a five-and-dime store, until the chaos of her life again proves overwhelming and she tries suicide by throwing herself from the Manhattan Bridge; she is prevented from doing so by the enigmatic Mike (Ralph Meeker), an auto mechanic who takes her to live in his basement flat. From there the film becomes a two-person drama in a claustrophobic setting, with the protagonists alternately attracted to and repelled by one another based on their own histories of pain and trauma and suffering. The conclusion of Mary Ann and Mike's story is not conventional and has proved unsatisfying to many critics and viewers, but I find the movie- in which the cacophonous, crowded city itself, with its nonstop noise and off-center visuals is a featured player in the dramatis persona played out by Mike and Mary Ann. Superbly and aptly jarring score by none other than Aaron Copland, perhaps the most prominent American classical composer of the mid-20th century, and a characteristically stunning opening title sequence by the master of cinematic titles himself, Saul Bass. Look for Doris Roberts as one of Mary Ann's snarky co-workers and future-Edith-Bunker Jean Stapleton as a boozy, promiscuous co-boarder at Mary Ann's boarding house. This film is not to be missed. Rated 4.5/5 Stars •  Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 02/07/23 Full Review Audience Member An obscure blast from the past, Something Wild is a narrative precursor to Roman Polanski's Repulsion. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 01/25/23 Full Review Read all reviews

Something Wild

My Rating

Read More Read Less POST RATING WRITE A REVIEW EDIT REVIEW