The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea poster & wallpaper

Earl Rhodes, Gary Lock, Jennifer Tolman

Quite possibly better known for a notorious Playboy magazine spread than for its own cinematic merits, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea is one of the weirder artifacts of th...( read more  read more... )e wide-open American cinema of the 1970s. The Japanese setting of Yukio Mishima's novel is transplanted to the English seaside, where an adolescent boy has fallen in with a group of pint-sized fascists (they call each other by numbers, not names). The gang's idea of exploring "the center of reality" is vivisecting a cat, a ritual rendered in dreamlike, repellent detail. Meanwhile, the boy's mother (Sarah Miles) takes up with an ocean-wandering American seaman (Kris Kristofferson), their gauzy nude scenes providing voyeuristic titillation for the peeping son and audience alike (hence Playboy's interest). The combination of Lord of the Flies with the soft-core stuff makes a very awkward match, and the insistent touch of director Lewis John Carlino, who went on to make The Great Santini, does not help. Carlino's montage of shipboard pistons and pumps churning as the sailor arrives in town is a particularly unfortunate foreshadowing of the sexual gymnastics to come. Kristofferson, looking somewhat zonked as he often did in the '70s, is nevertheless effectively cast, and Miles, after Ryan's Daughter and Lady Caroline Lamb, practically had a patent on the sexed-up English (or Irish) rose in movies. Their efforts can't disguise the silliness of the execution. Still, those kids are truly scary. --Robert Horton

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47% liked it

684 ratings

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Directed by: Lewis John Carlino

Release Date: January 1, 1976

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DVD Release Date: January 27, 2004

Stats: 30 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (30)

  • exureimundo
    June 24, 2009
    exureimundo
    Remarkable adaptation of a great book by Yukio Mishima, considering it takes place in England instead of Japan.
  • vrtualme
    September 18, 2007
    vrtualme
    Many many years ago I saw an odd little film called The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1976) from writer Lewis John Carlino (...( read more).com/title/tt0076172/" target="_blank">I Never Promised You a Rose Garden 1977 and The Mechanic 1972) who was also making his directorial début. I never forgot it, and it took me close to 20 years to finally get another copy to view. On the surface it's a pleasant little story about a boy and his widowed mother who live in a nice big welsh seaside house. Life almost seems perfect when a sailor, played by Kris Kristofferson (The Jacket 2005), starts a relationship with the mother. But when that sailor decides to give-up the sea to marry the mother, it threatens the boy's romantic ideas about the perfect order of life leading to one of the most disturbing endings in cinematic history. This movie earned two Golden Globe nominations for best acting debut Jonathan Kahn (Though he only made one more film after this) and best actress Sarah Miles (Blowup 1966). The original British version is X-rated, but the American version is supposedly tamed down considerably. There is no official website or trailer available for this film; which kills me because I would love to give you a taste of how great this movie is.
  • sneakypetegb
    July 20, 2007
    sneakypetegb
    Miles & Kristofferson are so erotic the screen smokes. Awesome sexuality ala Sharon Stone in "Basic Instinct." Wow!
  • wetherman
    September 18, 2006
    wetherman
    Very Bizzaro, not quite sure where it was going ?

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