If you see this movie, you'll feel the urge to end every sentence for the next few hours with "etcetera". Anyone who's seen it knows what I mean; it's even worked into the theme song very quickly. This is one more of those stories that people probably have extreme opinions about. I can never help imagining people starting to watch it and very quickly thinking it's drivel, but still watching it 90 minutes later- not because they've necessarily changed their minds, but because there's something about it that gets you HOOKED. This is easy for me to say, since I've been very attached to it since it was just a few years old. Of course it has things going against it, some of them pretty small. The kidnappers are a mixture of comical hippies and comical, kind of late, beatniks- but that seems true of countless comedies made in around, say, 1966-67. And maybe some of the "jazzy" language didn't really fit; I don't know. It's really full of quotable lines, like the business partner (played by Milton Berle) calling a kidnapping ransom a "forced-sell situation". And one of the kidnappers glaring at the victim and saying "If it weren't for him, we wouldn't be in this mess." One thing that's easy to notice is that, quite some time before The Godfather, this film showed Mafia figures in a very down-to-earth light. In one of the great lines, Anthony Quinn is asking (though the story doesn't use this expression) his "godfather" to pay his ransom, and reminds him of the oath of loyalty they both took, an incredibly binding one, of course. The man says very pleasantly, "Life ain't like that." This would be a pretty amazing line to hear in The Godfather itself, or in a lot of later films that are thought of as "de-mystifying" that subject. It's a toss-up as to who had the best part in it, apart from Quinn himself (though Robert Walker Jr. had the closest thing to a thankless part, but he had a very good moment at the end). There was Faye Dunaway (this is evidently her first film), treating the accidental kidnapping as a way to fill up the dull day. As someone here said, she overacts and gets away with it - just look at her face in that scene where they're tearing up the living room - maybe there's no reason for such an exaggerated look, but it doesn't bother me a bit! And Michael Parks as about the most reasonable one in the group. But to me it would have to be George Maharis as "Taurus". He played the closest thing to a genuine villain in the story, but he played him as a character almost impossible not to like. Another thing is that it had a fairly downbeat ending (though more like a "back-to-the-beginning" one), without it being a dark one, let alone for the pure sake of it (which is what I don't like about, say, The Suicide Kings, a movie with a similar idea). My opinion of The Happening in general is a popular expression that says, "you have to hate it a lot not to like it a little." (But again, I'm prejudiced.)
Review of The Happening
