The Big Sur (1965) User Reviews

Good, As Far As It Goes

[stevergy2000 · 7/10 · 19 April 2022]

A travelogue-type film of which James FitzPatrick might have been proud, this film about a celebrated region of California coastline is narrated by Richard Burton and was produced as a promotional piece to accompany the film of the same year, The Sandpiper.

While focusing on several different artists who have either come to work there temporarily or have made it their permanent home, the references are all too brief to be at all memorable.

But the real drawback is the lack of any helicopter garnered aerial shots: one senses that everyone there was deeply moved by their natural surroundings, but the film image never comes near to capturing the awe-inspiring majesty everyone was so undoubtedly feeling.

Still, pretty good, and WAY better than most promotional shorts, although it does show proper subservience by introducing the film's producer before its director or its stars.

Promotional Film

[boblipton · 5/10 · 23 January 2023]

Here's Richard Burton doing the voice over for this promotional film for THE SANDPIPER. He starts out by extensively quoting from Robinson Jeffers' poem, "The Place With No Story" and commenting on it while images of the natural beauty of the Big Sur, and a few people enjoying themselves in a hot tub, or working at their artistic tasks roll across the screen.

It's one of the efforts by MGM to get people to come to their latest big-name productions in the 1960s, after the collapse of the studio system. During the days when the major companies would turn out twenty or thirty movies a year, they had departments to produce "coming attractions" shorts of a minute or so. Now they had to go bigger to make people think a movie was an important event. Sometimes it was.