Contrived and Schematic

Rating: 5/10 (23 June 2001)

I'd been meaning to see this film for years, but sorry, I just laughed at the silly end.
The Master seems basically to be illustrating some more or less 'Freudian' idea about 're-enactment' (or 'acting and re-enacting', maybe), but cuts (sometimes expertly, of course) an awful lot of corners with the characterization and plot.
50-year-old Jimmy Stewart rather suddenly decides he's 'in love' with 25-year old Kim Novak (26 in the film, married for some unexplained reason to a 54-year-old husband - but she's supposed to be the rich one..). Even more suddenly the 25/6-year old risks a very long jail term (and in fact worse, but I'd better not give it away) by inexplicably 'falling in love' with the rather sketchy character of a stranger twice her age the first moment she meets him. When she indulges what can only be called Jimmy's necrophilia later on, I found myself just cringing for the actors (who didn't always seem completely convinced of characters and plots either) rather than succumbing to fear, suspense &c.
Maybe the world was very different in 1958, but I found what I'd expected to be a masterpiece more like an irritating didactic exercise: an unquestionably brilliant filmmaker subordinates the logic of a film to some half-digested idea borrowed from outside film, instead of finding his ideas in the logic of film itself.