Not bad, actually, partly because the cast is as good as it is. And what a cast! James Darren, whose performance is exceptional in being less than particularly good, is Nick Romano. Well -- the kid is a genius at the piano, see. But he's being raised in this crummy Chicago apartment house and everybody around him is a loser in one way or another. There is the failed, drunken ex-judge (Burl Ives), the heroin-addicted saloon singer (Ella Fitzgerald, in another below-professional performance), Darren's distraught mother (Shelley Winters), the helpful guy who runs the news stand (I thought it was Richard Taber but he's not in the credits) and the helpful cab drive (Rudolf Acosta). They'd all like to help Nick when he runs into trouble with the law, injuring his precious hands, his tools out of the slums, and so on. And Nick is immediately sympathetic because his father died in the electric chair. But what can they do? They all have their own weaknesses and can barely keep themselves together.
And there are bad guys too, exemplified by Ricardo Montalban's smooth, expensively dressed and immaculately groomed dope dealer, who shoots Shelley Winters up and then takes advantage of her, as they say, in her flat. The scene is kind of edgy for 1960 and only gets more so when Nick barges in on them unexpectedly while they are in flagrante delicto.
Burl Ives pulls himself together sufficiently, with the aid of the good-natured others, to introduce Nick to someone (Philip Ober, an actor whose magnetism has always eluded me) in a position to get Nick into the Music Conservatory after high school. Pretty good, eh? It's not just how good you are, but who you know. Or, more precisely, it's who somebody you know knows. And then, to top it off with a cherry, Ober the Impresario has a drop-dead gorgeous daughter who comes in the shape of the young Jean Seberg, the perfect, if entirely conventional, incarnation of Nordic beauty.
Actually, Seberg doesn't act well either. Let's see. It LOOKS like a good cast -- but Darren, Fitzgerald, Ober, and Seberg don't really deliver. You know when I said "the cast is as good as it is"? Can I take that back? I don't think I'll give away the ending except to mention that the very last shot in the film has Darren and Seberg walking hand in hand in front of the Chicago Art Institute. You'll have to guess the rest.
I don't know who chose the title or why. It's from a speech by Robert Emmett, an 18th-century Irish nationalist I think, just before his execution. Emmett's message was along the lines of, "Don't judge me now, you cretins. The historians of the future will give me a fair shake." Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose. (My keyboard doesn't have the accents for that cliché.)
And there are bad guys too, exemplified by Ricardo Montalban's smooth, expensively dressed and immaculately groomed dope dealer, who shoots Shelley Winters up and then takes advantage of her, as they say, in her flat. The scene is kind of edgy for 1960 and only gets more so when Nick barges in on them unexpectedly while they are in flagrante delicto.
Burl Ives pulls himself together sufficiently, with the aid of the good-natured others, to introduce Nick to someone (Philip Ober, an actor whose magnetism has always eluded me) in a position to get Nick into the Music Conservatory after high school. Pretty good, eh? It's not just how good you are, but who you know. Or, more precisely, it's who somebody you know knows. And then, to top it off with a cherry, Ober the Impresario has a drop-dead gorgeous daughter who comes in the shape of the young Jean Seberg, the perfect, if entirely conventional, incarnation of Nordic beauty.
Actually, Seberg doesn't act well either. Let's see. It LOOKS like a good cast -- but Darren, Fitzgerald, Ober, and Seberg don't really deliver. You know when I said "the cast is as good as it is"? Can I take that back? I don't think I'll give away the ending except to mention that the very last shot in the film has Darren and Seberg walking hand in hand in front of the Chicago Art Institute. You'll have to guess the rest.
I don't know who chose the title or why. It's from a speech by Robert Emmett, an 18th-century Irish nationalist I think, just before his execution. Emmett's message was along the lines of, "Don't judge me now, you cretins. The historians of the future will give me a fair shake." Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose. (My keyboard doesn't have the accents for that cliché.)