Under the Volcano (1984)

Admirable film.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

I have just received and watched the newly released PAL version of the DVD. The DVD comes with no context, just the movie and the option to select a chapter, no subtitles, no documentation, which is a bit disappointing. However, watching the movie again was a wonderful experience. I had seen Under the Volcano in the mid eighties without having read the book. I was impressed and it has been one of these films that somehow always stayed with me. I was particularly impressed by Finney's performance, who superbly plays an alcoholic and disillusioned British ex-consul.I agree with some points made by posters here that if you have read and appreciate the novel, the film can be a disappointment from a literary point of view. Adapting a literary master piece is quite a challenge, and there are only very few films that can actually match the original book. But the acting is so well that the movie can be appreciated entirely on itself, without knowing the book.

I agree with others here who say the film is rather conventional in it's treatment of the novel. The consul's wife is very clearly a hallucination in the book but here this along with the consul's general mental state are presented too objectively and this makes a lot of the film ring false. A good start and of course excellent performances by Finney and Bisette but then the movie blacks out. I'm a great fan of John Huston I consider at least four of his films to be among the greatest ever (Moby Dick, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen, and Moulin Rouge ) but I believe he didn't make another good film after Night of the Iguana. Although I haven't seen Man Who Would be King. Under the Volcano is another late career disappointment.

This film is to Leaving Las Vegas as The Howling is to Little Red Riding Hood. Under The Volcano is the most grindingly real portrayal of the true devastation of alcoholism ever put on film (I've seen them all from Lost Weekend forward). This is no romantic movie where a guy decides he will go to Vegas and drink himself to death in 6 weeks then meets a devastatingly gorgeous chick who takes care of him the rest of the way. In this film the real horrors of alcohol are convincingly portrayed as the main character loses all track of reality and cannot tell whether his wife is really her or a hallucination. And because of that intermittent fading out and in, he loses the one chance he might have had at redemption. There is no romance here. There is no fabulous girl to have sex with while he's dying. This guy lives in a world so much more terrifying than Nic Cage's world in LLV as to be about two entirely different human experiences.Not everyone will be able to stand this. It's almost unremittingly awful. But for anyone who is an alcoholic, recovering or otherwise, or who has lived under its shadow as someone related to or in love with an alcoholic, this is textbook stuff. Malcolm Lowery was an alcoholic and died of the disease. He put all he had into this book. No punches are pulled. The benchmark of the genre.

Imagine Albert Finney, one of the great ham bones of the acting world. Imagine one of the great ham bones of the acting world playing a character who's drunk for the entire length of the movie. If you can imagine this, you can imagine why the audience applauded when Albert Finney's character finally died because it meant that the movie was apt to be over soon as well. Predictable and self-consciously "arty," the movie never seemed to be about anything, but rather seemed to be a vehicle for Albert Finney to overact (as usual). The plot was non-existent and the characters were stereotypical "strangers in a strange land."