A Fine Madness (1966)

Director
Irvin Kershner

Main cast
Sean Connery; Joanne Woodward; Jean Seberg; Colleen Dewhurst

Genres
Comedy, Drama, Romance

Description
Sean Connery attempted to make a clean break from his "James Bond" image in the boisterous comedy A Fine Madness. Connery plays Samson Shillitoe, a Brendan Behan-like poet with a mile-wide misogynistic streak. Try as he might to complete his latest masterpiece, Shillitoe is constantly interrupted by the women in his life. Driven to a nervous breakdown, he seeks help from the medical establishment -- and ends up a babbling shell of his former self. The film takes scattered potshots at a repressive society that forces the truly creative among us into near-madness; at times, it is sidesplittingly funny, though never quite as potent as the Elliot Baker novel upon which it is based. Sean Connery is brilliant, but the public wanted James Bond to behave himself, thus the film didn't do as well at the box office as it should have.


Similar movies

Love and injury in time of war. Attilio de Giovanni teaches poetry in Italy. He has a romantic soul, and women love him. But he is in love with Vittoria, and the love is unrequited. Every night he dreams of marrying her, in his boxer shorts and t-shirt, as Tom Waits sings. Vittoria travels to Iraq with her friend, Fuad, a poet; they are there with the second Gulf War breaks out. Vittoria is injured. Attilio must get to her side, and then, as war rages around him, he must find her the medical care she needs. In war, does love conquer all?
Simple Italian postman learns to love poetry while delivering mail to a famous poet; he uses this to woo local beauty Beatrice.
A divorced writer from the Midwest returns to her hometown to reconnect with an old flame, who's now married with a family.
Miguel, a young psychiatrist working in Madrid, learns that his wife has just dumped him for no one else than his own father while he's expecting his mother-in-law's visit, who's come to the city on a medical revision, and doesn't know anything about her daughter's affair; to make things worse, one of Miguel's deranged patients has just stolen his wallet. Going to his patient's home to retrieve his wallet he'll meet instead his spontaneous and outspoken hairdresser sister Jasmina, who's bound to change Miguel's ordered, upper-middle-class world for good.
Fortune hunter Holly Golightly finds herself captivated by aspiring writer Paul Varjak, who's moved into her building on a wealthy woman's dime. As romance blooms between Paul and Holly, Doc Golightly shows up on the scene, revealing Holly's past.
Embarrassed by his large nose, a romantic poet/soldier romances his cousin by proxy.
Martin works at the local radio station, which just hired a new scriptwriter with a reputation for great drama, Pedro Carmichael. Martin’s aunt Julia, not related by blood, returns home after many years away and Martin falls for her. Once Pedro finds out about this romance, he starts incorporating details of it into the script of his daily drama series. Soon, Martin and Julia are not only hearing about their fictional selves over the radio, but about what they are going to do next.
Gordon Comstock is a copywriter at an ad agency, and his girlfriend Rosemary is a designer. Gordon believes he is a genius, a marvelous poet and quits the ad agency, trying to live on his poems, but poverty soon comes to him.
Though a childhood bout with polio left him dependent on an iron lung, Mark O'Brien (John Hawkes) maintains a career as a journalist and poet. A writing assignment dealing with sex and the disabled piques Mark's curiosity, and he decides to investigate the possibility of experiencing sex himself. When his overtures toward a caregiver scare her away, he books an appointment with sex surrogate Cheryl Green (Helen Hunt) to lose his virginity.
Rachel is a food writer at a New York magazine who meets Washington columnist Mark at a wedding and ends up falling in love with him despite her reservations about marriage. They buy a house, have a daughter, and Rachel thinks they are living happily ever after until she discovers that Mark is having an affair while she is waddling around with a second pregnancy.
The life of a divorced television writer dating a teenage girl is further complicated when he falls in love with his best friend's mistress.
RP (Ayushmann Khurrana) is a theatre artist portraying the role of Raavan. One day he witnesses Mandar Lele (Kunal Roy Kapur) attempting suicide attempt. He saves him and the story is about the friendship and the bonding between RP and Mandar and how they face problems and solve them.
While visiting her sister in Paris, a young woman finds romance and learns her brother-in-law is a philanderer.
An aspiring young writer (Jackson) tracks a literary titan (Keitel) suffering from writers block to his refuge in rural Italy and learns about life and love from the irascible genius and his daughters.
Robin Williams stars as Lance Clayton, a man who has learned to settle. He dreamed of being a rich and famous writer, but has only managed to make it as a high school poetry teacher. His only son Kyle (Daryl Sabara) is an insufferable jackass who won’t give his father the time of day. He is dating Claire (Alexie Gilmore), the school’s adorable art teacher, but she doesn’t want to get serious --
Writer Alex Sheldon (Luke Wilson) must finish his novel within a month. If he doesn't, he won't get paid. And, if that happens, angry Mafia types to whom he owes money will come looking for him. In order to expedite things, Alex hires typist Emma Dinsmore (Kate Hudson) and begins dictating his novel. The book is about a doomed love affair between a character similar to Alex and a character named Polina Delacroix (Sophie Marceau). But, as Alex falls for Emma, his work takes a different turn.
Married songwriters almost split up while putting on a big show.
A romantic comedy. Michael Keaton and Geena Davis are speechwriters for competing political campaigns. Witty and amusing for the political junkies amongst us.
A soap opera writer gets hit on the head and wakes up as a character in his own show.
Hollywood producer Alexander Meyerheimer has hired drunken writer Richard Benson to write his latest movie. Benson has been holed up in a Paris apartment supposedly working on the script for months, but instead has spent the time living it up. Benson now has just two days to the deadline and thus hires a temporary secretary, Gabrielle Simpson, to help him complete it in time.
Martin Blank is a freelance hitman who starts to develop a conscience, which causes him to muff a couple of routine assignments. On the advice of his secretary and his psychiatrist, he attends his 10th year High School reunion in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.
A romantic comedy about a family traveling to the French capital for business. The party includes a young engaged couple forced to confront the illusion that a life different from their own is better.
A writer of BAD detective novels is in full writers' block. He pretends to be the alibi of a beautiful woman who was arrested for murder at first thinking her innocent, but as she shows more and more interesting abilities (such as knife throwing) he begins to doubt his first assessment.
An artist has an opportunity to go to Paris and wants to bring his fiancee along. However, she's a psychiatrist who currently has three female patients who don't like men. So, he guises himself as three different men to gauge their trust and hopefully cure them so that his fiancee can go with him.
This black comedy opens with Louisa Foster donating a multimillion dollar check to the IRS. The tax department thinks she's crazy and sends her to a psychiatrist. She then discusses her four marriages, in which all of her husbands became incredibly rich and died prematurely because of their drive to be rich.
Jason Biggs stars as Jerry Falk, an aspiring writer in New York, who falls in love at first sight with a free-spirited young woman named Amanda (Christina Ricci). Jerry has heard the phrase that life is like "anything else," but he soon finds that life with the unpredictable Amanda isn't like anything else at all.
A Freudian comedy set in Barcelona, 1913, that playfully questions sexual taboos through a Sherlock Holmes-style investigation.
Fictional documentary about the life of human chameleon Leonard Zelig, a man who becomes a celebrity in the 1920s due to his ability to look and act like whoever is around him. Clever editing places Zelig in real newsreel footage of Woodrow Wilson, Babe Ruth, and others.
A psychiatrist's patient, a nutty heiress, travels west to find gold in her grandfather's abandoned mine. The psychiatrist, unable to talk her out of it, decides to follow her out there.
A writer for a greeting card company learns the true meaning of loneliness when he comes home to find his girlfriend in bed with another man.
Meek, owlish Felix (George Segal) and strident, catty Doris (Barbra Streisand) live in the same apartment building. His incessant typing bothers her; her gentlemen callers bother him. Felix informs the landlord of her activities, so Doris moves in on Felix. When they both get thrown out, they move in with Barney (Robert Klein) . . . until they drive him out! That's when Felix and Doris finally decide to put theory into practice. But do opposites attract?
A hack screenwriter writes a screenplay for a former silent-film star who has faded into Hollywood obscurity.
In this film, we see the world through the eyes of main character Justice, a young African-American poet. A mail carrier invites a few friends along for a long overnight delivery run.
Story of the relationship between the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.
When New York psychiatrist Bill Capa visits Los Angeles to take over his murdered colleague's therapy group, he finds himself embroiled in the thick of a mystery when he bumps into Rose and begins a torrid affair.
A troubled man talks to his suicidal sister's psychiatrist about their family history and falls in love with her in the process.
In 1818, high-spirited young Fanny Brawne finds herself increasingly intrigued by the handsome but aloof poet John Keats, who lives next door to her family friends the Dilkes. After reading a book of his poetry, she finds herself even more drawn to the taciturn Keats. Although he agrees to teach her about poetry, Keats cannot act on his reciprocated feelings for Fanny, since as a struggling poet he has no money to support a wife.
Two feisty, free-spirited women are connected by the brilliant, charismatic poet who loves them both.
Elizabeth Barrett's tyrannical father has forbidden any of his family to marry. Nevertheless, Elizabeth falls in love with the poet Robert Browning.
Renowned 70-year-old poet Lee Jeok-yo falls for a 17-year-old girl named Eun-gyo. Upon realizing his love for the teenager, the poet goes through emotional turmoil and self-destruction, while willing to give up his fame as one of the nation’s most respected literary figures. Involved in the love triangle is Lee's student Seo Ji-woo, a novelist in his 30s who also becomes obsessed with the girl.
Young, wild poet Arthur Rimbaud and his mentor Paul Verlaine engage in a fierce, forbidden romance while feeling the effects of a hellish artistic lifestyle.
She searched for a home, she searched for love. Confronted by Apartheid and a father who was Minister of censorship. With men like Jack Cope and Andre Brink she found much love, but no home. In his first speech to the South African Parliament Nelson Mandela read her poem "The Dead Child of Nyanga" and addresses her as one of the finest poets of South Africa.
Miranda Presley moves from New York to Nashville to become a song writer. At an unsuccessful audition she meets James Wright a promising newcomer. After only a few days they marry but start to quickly regret it. This is River Phoenix's last movie and you can see the end coming...
At the dawn of World War 2, a Rabbi's daughter and a disenchanted German soldier fall in love and are separated by the war. They struggle on a perilous journey to find one another.
Zhou Yu, a ceramic artisan in China's rural Northwest, has a deep rapport with Chen Qing, a shy sensitive poet. Taking a long train ride every weekend just to make mad passionate love with him, her longing seems insatiable. Until one day, she meets the hedonistic vet Zhang Qiang and begins a torrid affair, which takes her to another train station, and another level of lust. Driven by the locomotive of love and desire, she hustles through a dark tunnel of no return.
José Ferrer won the Oscar for Best Actor for his portayal of the swordsman-poet using his silver tongue to woo the woman he loves for another man. Cyrano de Bergerac is a play written in 1897 by Edmond Rostand. Although there was a real Cyrano de Bergerac, the play is a fictionalization of his life that follows the broad outlines of it. The entire play is written in verse, in rhyming couplets of twelve syllables per line, very close to the Alexandrine format, but the verses sometimes lack a caesura. It is also meticulously researched, down to the names of the members of the Académie française and the dames précieuses glimpsed before the performance in the first scene. The play has been translated and performed many times, and is responsible for introducing the word "panache" into the English language.
C.S. Lewis, a world-renowned writer and professor, leads a passionless life until he meets spirited poet Joy Gresham
A sailor prone to violent outbursts is sent to a naval psychiatrist for help. Refusing at first to open up, the young man eventually breaks down and reveals a horrific childhood. Through the guidance of his doctor, he confronts his painful past and begins a quest to find the family he never knew.
Writer Ernest Hemingway begins a romance with fellow scribe Martha Gellhorn.
The story of John Wilmot, a.k.a. the Earl of Rochester, a 17th century poet who famously drank and debauched his way to an early grave, only to earn posthumous critical acclaim for his life's work.
Cinta (Dian Sastrowardoyo), a teenager in suburban Jakarta, spends all of her time with her four girlfriends, Maura (Titi Kamal), Alya (Ladya Cheryll), Carmen (Adinia Wirasti) and Milly (Sissy Priscillia) -- that is, until she falls for Rangga (Nicholas Saputra), the unassuming winner of the school poetry contest. Rangga's presence triggers the jealousy of Cinta's best friends, and things get more challenging for the couple when the girls pressure Cinta to choose between them and Rangga. A sharply etched yet humorous love story of growing infatuation, ambivalence and near misunderstanding between two idealistic teenagers, Cinta and Rangga, at a high school in Jakarta. This sophisticated and charming film provides an engaging portrait of middle-class teenagers.
A woman becomes very curious about one of her psychiatrist husband's inmates, a man who was found guilty in the murder and disfigurement of his former wife.
Based on her acclaimed autobiographical book, THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD tells the story of Novalyne Price, an attractive feisty West Texas schoolteacher and her bittersweet, romantic and turbulent relationship with Robert E. Howard, the great pulp fiction writer of the 1930's.
Barr is a psychiatrist who falls in love with the sister of one of his clients. She's beautiful and married to a gangster. She hates her husband but is unable to escape from him.
A writer awakens one day to find a strange but beautiful woman in bed with him. He quickly falls in love with her, thinking he has found his muse, but as time passes she becomes more and more unattainable.
Set in 1951, a blacklisted Hollywood writer gets into a car accident, loses his memory and settles down in a small town where he is mistaken for a long-lost son.
Director Sidney Franklin's 1957 remake of his own 1934 film, about the romance of poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning.
Ben Stiller plays comedy writer Jerry Stahl, whose $6000-a-week heroin habit had him taking his infant daughter along on his drug runs and doing smack during TV script conferences. Departing detox, Stahl explores memories with survivor Kitty, who listens patiently to Stahl's flashback. Other women in Stahl's life are his British wife Sandra and his agent Vola.
A poetic road trip through Pulitzer prize-winning CK Williams' life over the course of 40 years.
An odd-but-gifted poet, Evan Merck (Wes Bentley, 'American Beauty') makes his living writing suicide notes for the soon-to-be departed. So when he meets Charlotte (Winona Ryder, 'Girl, Interrupted'), the free-spirited sister of his latest client, Evan has no choice but to lie about his relationship to her late, lamented brother.

© Valossa 2015–2024