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The online film magazine Combustible Celluloid offers new movie reviews, DVD reviews, film reviews, actor interviews, actress interviews, director interviews, film books and all things cinema related for the thoughtful and passionate. Online for ten years! Over 3000 reviews!

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Carrie (1952)

Rating: 2 1/2 Stars (out of 4)

Poor Baby

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Buy Carrie on DVD.

Based on the novel "Sister Carrie" by Theodore Dreiser, this film by William Wyler takes the usual highly artistic approach to adapting a classic. It has many beautifully decorated sequences but no fluidity and no real emotion. A small town woman (Jennifer Jones) arrives in Chicago and meets a respectable businessman (Eddie Albert) as well as a married restaurateur (Laurence Olivier). She is expected to marry the former, but falls illicitly in love with the latter. The film tracks her slow downfall as her life with the middle-aged man is bludgeoned by one hardship after another. One sequence that shows Olivier waking up in a flophouse was deleted from the film's original release. Wyler's crisp direction (in black-and-white) only makes the descent into squalor that much harder, and only Olivier's superb, deeply felt performance makes Carrie worthwhile. Not to be confused with Brian De Palma's 1976 horror film of the same title.

DVD Details: Paramount's DVD beautifully handles the film's rich photography, and the flophouse sequence is edited back into the film. The disc has no other extras.

Starring: Laurence Oliver, Jennifer Jones, Eddie Albert
Written by: Ruth Goetz, Augustus Goetz, based on the novel "Sister Carrie" by Theodore Dreiser
Directed by: William Wyler
MPAA Rating: NR
Running Time: 121 minutes
Date: February 15, 2005