Marjorie Morningstar was one of the most beautiful, poignant, heart-wrenching novels I've ever read. Beautiful Marjorie, coming of age in New York City, surrounded by her old-fashioned, traditional Jewish family but enamored of glamor and Broadway. The novel explores her vulnerability and sweetness, as well as her thoughtlessness and selfishness as her family's spoiled, favorite child.
Noel Airman is the guy we all fell in love with when we were 20 -- a dreamer, without the ability (as he acknowledges himself in a rare moment of honesty) to finish anything he starts, unless it involves alcohol or seduction.
Spoiler alert -- if you haven't read the novel, it ends entirely differently from the movie, and it is the ending that makes it all strike home -- Marjorie has indeed become a "Shirley," a middle-class wife and mother, living a tedious, mundane life in New Rochelle, just as Noel had predicted. The horrible ending of the movie, with Wally Wronken "rescuing" Marjorie and being a total doormat, completely destroys the message and meaning of the novel -- that we all have dreams, and we all (as Marsha said), settle for what we can get and try to figure out how to be happy with it, rather than living with bitterness and regret for "what might have been."
And the casting....Yuck! I absolutely adore Gene Kelly, but was a terrible choice for Noel Airman. Natalie Wood is gorgeous, and was okay as Marjorie - she communicated the love-bordering-on-obsession that we feel at that age. The tragedies of the other characters - Wally, Uncle Samson, Marjorie's parents -- all go comparatively unaddressed in the movie.
It wasn't intended to be a happily-ever-after story, the way the movie ended. It was intended to be a heart-breaking coming of age story. I'll stick with the book -- and if you love Herman Wouk as I do, try "The Caine Mutiny" if you want to see one of his books translated to the screen as it should have been.
Noel Airman is the guy we all fell in love with when we were 20 -- a dreamer, without the ability (as he acknowledges himself in a rare moment of honesty) to finish anything he starts, unless it involves alcohol or seduction.
Spoiler alert -- if you haven't read the novel, it ends entirely differently from the movie, and it is the ending that makes it all strike home -- Marjorie has indeed become a "Shirley," a middle-class wife and mother, living a tedious, mundane life in New Rochelle, just as Noel had predicted. The horrible ending of the movie, with Wally Wronken "rescuing" Marjorie and being a total doormat, completely destroys the message and meaning of the novel -- that we all have dreams, and we all (as Marsha said), settle for what we can get and try to figure out how to be happy with it, rather than living with bitterness and regret for "what might have been."
And the casting....Yuck! I absolutely adore Gene Kelly, but was a terrible choice for Noel Airman. Natalie Wood is gorgeous, and was okay as Marjorie - she communicated the love-bordering-on-obsession that we feel at that age. The tragedies of the other characters - Wally, Uncle Samson, Marjorie's parents -- all go comparatively unaddressed in the movie.
It wasn't intended to be a happily-ever-after story, the way the movie ended. It was intended to be a heart-breaking coming of age story. I'll stick with the book -- and if you love Herman Wouk as I do, try "The Caine Mutiny" if you want to see one of his books translated to the screen as it should have been.