Cheap Today We Live (Video) (Joan Crawford, Gary Cooper) (Richard Rosson, Howard Hawks) Price

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Customer Reviews of Today We Live

...TOMORROW WE DIE.
Diana Boyce-Smith, an aristocratic English girl, tries to do her part at home while her father fights at the front during the early years of the World War; she rents the family home to an American studying in England whose name is Bogard and there is an inevitable romance in the era of WWI. Joan Crawford seems awkward playing with a less than expert English accent; the part was actually a total figment of the scenarist's imagination: the original Faulkner story contained no women whatsoever! Gary Cooper is restrained, sympathetic and fairly believable in this; he and the great character actor Roscoe Karns seem to have the only genuine touches. Director Howard Hawks endowed the film with period detail; the air shots were esteemed in their day and the shots at sea are superb. This story was drawn by William Faulkner; this was his first literary effort transferred to the screen and it was done rather uneasily. Faulkner handled the dialogue (which sounds like short, urgent telegrams, instead of dialogue between people), himself.

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Faulkner's story on men at war becomes a romance
"Today We Live" is adapted from William Faulkner's story "Turnabout and stars Joan Crawford as Diana Boyce-Smith, an aristocratic English girl doing her bit on the home front during World War I. While her father is at the front, Diana rents the family home to Richard Bogard (Gary Cooper), a young American studying in England. Then, on the day she learns her father has been killed, her brother, Ronnie (Franchot Tone), and her childhood sweetheart, Claude Hope (Robert Young), are ordered to the front. Sooner Diana has joined an ambulance unit to be near Ronnie and Claude, who are operating a torpedo boat, while "Bogie" jons the American Flying Corp when the U.S. finally enters the war. Then the love triangle between Diana, Bogard and Claude become entangled in a suicide mission to blow up a ship.

This 1933 film was directed by Howard Hawks, who certainly lends his talents to the action sequences in the air and on the sea. Interesting enough, Faulkner's original story did not have a female character, which must have made doing the dialogue for this film a real treat for the author. Adding the romantic triangle basically turns Faulkner's story into a melodrama, and while Crawford and Cooper make a nice enough couple, the soap opera ending is just so absurd. The best parts of "Today We Live" are clearly at the front when Crawford is not around.

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visto dall"Italia
la storia non è gran che,ma Gary cooper è sempre all"altezza;un po" gigione nei momenti leggeri,ma capace di espressioni intense nel momento del dramma. Di più non posso dire perchè non so l" inglese e faccio fatica a capire i dialoghi.