Rating: 
Summary: MARILYN IS OUR CHERIE
Review: We've got to admit that this kind of material belongs to the theater.However the casting of DON MURRAY in a real far out character and MARILYN MONROE as a dancer works surprizingly well.The saloon scene with MARILYN singing the 1942 MERCER classic THAT OLD BLACK MAGIC is fun.The fighting match in the snow is a real audience rouser.Perhaps one can say that the character that MURRAY plays seems rather unappealing and rather unbelievable.To resume the story simply, it's a youngman from the country who becomes a man when he discovers sex the first time he sees CHERIE.
Rating: 
Summary: Man, this stinks.
Review: I love old movies and I love Marilyn. But this just stinks. There's none of Marilyn's glamour or gold-digging charm. She's shrill and whiny in a terrible hick accent. "Beau" is obnoxious and completely over-the-top.The premise of the movie is Beau, a young cowboy, going to a rodeo. He's an innocent, never off his ranch in Montana. He decides he's going to find himself an angel to take back home. So he meets "Cherie" in a saloon. He manhandles her, browbeats her, and eventually kidnaps her. His screaming and fighting make a person think that if he managed to force her to marry him (after abducting her with a lasso as she desperately tries to flee), he'd probably rape her on the wedding night. It's just that creepy. So they end up stuck at a bus station together due to bad weather. FINALLY someone steps in when they see Beau manhandling Cherie, and says he can't kidnap this woman. Beau objects and ends up getting his butt whipped. Which somehow makes Cherie love him and they ride off to Montana together. It's really objectionable. Offensive, really. I can't say one single good thing about the entire movie. It wasn't believable, enjoyable, amusing, or entertaining. I'm really sorry I watched it.
Rating: 
Summary: If you liked the play, you'll be disappointed
Review: Inge's play takes a bit of time to grow on you, but there's a lot of depth to it, and it does a good job of showing many facets of love and loneliness. The movie strips a lot of that out and ends up simplifying things to the point where it just seems hollow. Many of the same emotional peaks are in there, but without anything in the story to give them context, they end up feeling false and overdone.
I think that a film needs to be taken on its own merits, so I'll spend a little time talking just about the movie. But there's no review that says much about the play here, so I want to cover that as well.
I thought Monroe was pretty good in this. There are moments where she was brilliant (the "Old Black Magic" song is a great piece of character work); watching this gives you another chance to appreciate how smart Marilyn actually was.
I thought the actors that did Grace, Carl the bus driver, and Virgil were acceptable (Carl the most so), but Bo was far too one-note a performance. He had some great physicality for the role, which was nice, but the vocal work was grating.
Overall, the pacing of the film seemed poor, but that's somewhat normal with older movies, and I'll admit I probably was biased by knowing the play in this.
The restoration is excellent, I thought. No complaints in the quality of the image.
Basically, had I not just done the play, I probably wouldn't have watched. It was actually a bit stunning to sit through, seeing what a play that I really enjoyed had been morphed into...
The plot's the same, but the movie takes an hour to cover what a few expository sequences in the first act cover: the rodeo, why everyone's on the bus, and so on. This really strips some of the tension from the actual part of the show that takes place at the bus stop; there isn't enough time to build it up.
If you liked Will the sherrif and Dr. Lyman the professor from the play, too bad. They're completely gone. Lyman had to go for 1950s sensibilities I suppose, but taking him out makes Elma a cutout character, almost pointless. Virgil's changed; he's got a different focus, and that really dilutes his part at the end. I always felt he gave the play a "happy" ending by actually answering positively the question of whether there still was love, sacrificial love. You get echoes of that in the film, but just echoes. And you lose a lot of the humor and character of Grace and Carl with the cleaning up of their relationship. Grace becomes a skit character, channelling Mae West, and Carl ends up an amalgam of Carl and Will from the play.
In a nutshell, if you're going to be doing the play, do not watch this movie beforehand! Watch it afterwards with the cast, like I did last night. It'll be fun, but in an MST3K kind of way. Otherwise, unless you're a Marilyn Monroe fan, I'd probably skip it.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Movie
Review: I am a Marilyn Monroe fan and I always heard this movie had some of her best acting. I didn't think I would like this movie but it turned out to be great. Marilyn plays a diffrent character for once. Marilyn also did a great job acting as well! The main plot of this movie is about a cowboy named Bo who goes down to Phoenix for a rodeo. He meets a cafe singer named Cherie. Bo is in love with Cherie but she isn't in love with him. So she tries to escape to Los Angeles but he finds her and forces her to ride back with him to his home in Montana. On the way to Montana they stop at a diner and it turns out that the road ahead is blocked due to a snowstorm. I'm not going to tell the rest of the movie. This is a really good movie!
Rating:
Summary: What's the point of this movie?
Review: I have to agree with "Keialove". I can't figure out why everybody loves this thing. It's based on a play by William Inge, but in my opinion it never should have made it to the stage, much less screen. The story is about a woman (MM) who resists the advances of an obnoxious cowboy played by Don Murray, but in the end she realizes that she really loves him. Yeah, sure. She's so lonely, she'll go off with anybody. It's boring and overrated.
Rating:
Summary: Man, this stinks.
Review: I love old movies and I love Marilyn. But this just stinks. There's none of Marilyn's glamour or gold-digging charm. She's shrill and whiny in a terrible hick accent. "Beau" is obnoxious and completely over-the-top. The premise of the movie is Beau, a young cowboy, going to a rodeo. He's an innocent, never off his ranch in Montana. He decides he's going to find himself an angel to take back home. So he meets "Cherie" in a saloon. He manhandles her, browbeats her, and eventually kidnaps her. His screaming and fighting make a person think that if he managed to force her to marry him (after abducting her with a lasso as she desperately tries to flee), he'd probably rape her on the wedding night. It's just that creepy. So they end up stuck at a bus station together due to bad weather. FINALLY someone steps in when they see Beau manhandling Cherie, and says he can't kidnap this woman. Beau objects and ends up getting his butt whipped. Which somehow makes Cherie love him and they ride off to Montana together. It's really objectionable. Offensive, really. I can't say one single good thing about the entire movie. It wasn't believable, enjoyable, amusing, or entertaining. I'm really sorry I watched it.
Rating:
Summary: This trip's gonna be mighty educational
Review: So says the fatherly Virgil to his younger friend Bo Decker following a conversation where Virgil suggests its time Bo find himself a woman, "a plain looking, little old gal." Bo though wants to find himself an angel. However, the conversation takes a bit of a chauvinistic tone from the green and inexperienced Bo, who is headed to Phoenix to compete in the rodeo. Says Bo, "That steer this moment--he didn't wanna get throwed, did he? Well, I throwed him. Some wild horse you borke in, he don't wanna be broke, do he? But you don't let what he wants stop you. So what makes you think a gal's gonna be any different?" To paraphrase Virgil in a more contemporary way, "Houston, we've got a problem." Bo's other problem is that he tends to overdo everything. He does pushups in the bus, to the surprise and annoyance of the passengers and bus driver. But the worst flaw in his character is that he has no manners. As the bus driver asks him later, "Were you born in a barn?" Well, close, as he has been isolated on a ranch all his life. At the Blue Dragon inn, Bo finds his "angel," a much put-upon singer named Cheri. He falls so in love with her that he announces to a stunned Virgil, and more than stunned Cheri, that he has found his girl and is going to marry her tomorrow. Cheri herself has a long string of boyfriends and lovers, something that the naive Bo is unaware of. In her opening scene, when she's resting on the window sill, she is instantly harassed by rowdy cowboys pawing at her, and then by the manager. She's clearly not lived a happy life, but she does have a dream to go to Hollywood. What she's longing for is to be treated with respect, hence her identifying herself as a chanteuse and reminding Bo that her name is Cheri, not Cherry. Eventually, Bo's faults come to a head at the title place, where he gets a much deserved lesson. I'd find Don Murray likeable if his characterization of Bo wasn't so obnoxious. I detest rude people sans manners and loud, whooping cowboys, and unfortunately, Bo is both. While his meanings are noble, it's the way he does it that caused me to flare in exasperation. Arthur O'Connell is a relief in this picture as the wiser and more maturer Virgil. Virgil gives the fatherly patience and love to Bo, exasperated, angry, and hoping that his young friend grows up. In the scene where Bo gets his comeuppance, he generates a "this is gonna hurt me more than it's gonna hurt you" atmosphere. This is Hope Lange's debut film as Elma, the young girl on a trip to a concert. The woman to woman talk between her and MM in the bus is a standout. And Betty Field stands out as the diner owner Grace, a woman with an Eve Arden-ish sense of humour. Some trivia in this picture. Marilyn had issue with Don Murray, because of his relative inexperience, and she asked for Hope Lange's hair to be dyed a darker shade of blonde, because after all, MM was THE star. A bit of ego there. And the younger LIFE magazine reporter is Casey Adams, who also came out in Niagara as Ray Cutler. Also, this picture was the first with Marilyn's new acting coach, Paula Strasberg, utilizing Method acting. While this film is generally touted as the one where Marilyn finally could act, I take issue. Marilyn was "acting" way before then, from her B+ acting in Don't Bother To Knock to her compassionate blonde goofball in The Seven Year Itch. But if you take into account the strong backwoods accent of an Ozark hillbilly, then yes, her acting is definitely good, but nothing Oscar-worthy here.
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