Robert J. Maxwell The last seven minutes were missing from the print I saw so I don't know what happens after the number of relationships gets bumped up from one to six. If someone dies, I don't know about it.I've always admired the best of Nicholas Roeg's work because, as with Peter Weir, there's always something odd going on, simmering just beneath the surface. Libidinal impulses just dying to be discharged.It's not usually clear what they are, but here it's not clear that they exist. It's possible to be compulsively hypervigilant, to look harder for pattern than the thing looked at will ever provide. Oliver Reed and Amanda Donahoe, two strangers, agree to marry in order to spend nine months on a tiny, uninhabited tropical island. They argue openly. Is that all there is? Reed gets to mutter about "secrets within secrets" but there's nothing much unusual or hidden about a man wanting sexual intercourse from an uncooperative wife, and the wife in turn constantly nagging the husband. "Secret", my insect-bitten foot! I still like Nicholas Roeg despite thinking that this is one of his lesser efforts. After all, he hired my little boy as an extra in the compelling and immediately forgettable "Track 29." "Castaway" is not a total failure. It's not marred by multiple flashbacks and flash forwards. There is a confusing dream sequence or two involving the moon and fellatio, I think. But the performers do a crack job with this nebulous material.Amanda Donahoe looks great -- in or out of clothes. She has thin lips but her features are clean and sleek. Her figure is peerless.The scruffy Oliver Reed is a delight. We first meet him at a swimming club in London, plump, flabby, and repulsive. But on the island, he's lost weight, acquires a sienna tan, and is full of mischief. He's supposed to be a writer but his reading is limited to self-help books (I think that's a joke) and his recitations are bawdy limericks with none of the naughty bits left out. At one point, desperately randy, he describes a series of dishes from London restaurants while Donahoe writhes with desire. Their toes wriggle spastically, and Reed says, "That was better than sex, wasn't it?" However, if there is a hidden message or even a shallow mystery, I didn't even catch a hint of it. The only message I was able to discern was, "You can take the boy and girl out of the city, but you can't take the city out of the boy and girl."

malexander54 Don't be misled by other comments posted here. The original uncensored version of this film shows Amanda Donohoe full frontal completely nude (yes, pubic hair and all). In fact she is fully nude in many, many scenes and with long lingering shots (almost voyeuristic).She is a very beautiful woman and her nudity made the film far more realistic for 2 reasons. One is that people do often go about nude when there is nobody around, her nudity helped to convincingly portray a sense of isolation. Secondly, as a man I can get a sense of the frustration that Reed has when he sees her walking about and he can't touch.I feel bad for the people who have seen this movie censored because there is very frequent high level nudity in this film, which means that the censored version would have been cut to ribbons. This may also explain the experience some people had with "short scenes" or "scenes that ended abruptly".A very good film worth while watching (uncensored).

mmunier If you imagine yourself on your own, switching on your TV to accompany a frugal lunch and there on that screen you'd see a gorgeous young woman wearing her birthday suit in the most natural pose, for you to see all; would you call this a spoiler? And this in some way was only the "hors d'oeuvre"! I nearly bit my finger as I did not want to miss one frame! Well being on a commercial station it was not as bad a this so I did not go hungry either and for once appreciated those otherwise very annoying ads. I was only aware of one "castaway", recently with Tom Hank. I can tell you I did enjoy this one much more, I might have to give a go to the early one too, although if I understood rightly it's again a very different story. Beyond that thrill I also enjoyed the development of the characters through the story. I have seen the late Oliver Reed in a couple of other movie. And I expected from him a strong performance, well that how I know Oliver Reed, Bill Sykes! I sent my dice rolling on the table and it produced a 7 for my rating how about that. MM

David_Frames A middle-aged misogynist letch harbours fantasies of groping a woman half his age who will double as a door mat and assume the role of a sexually submissive automaton on a desert Island and advertises for the same omitting everything except the woman part in this true-ish story based on Lucy Irving's account of year with this obnoxious, overweight behemoth. This is a gap year with a difference, in this case the gap between reality and the ignorant daydreams of a couple of selfish, moronic Londoners. If this introduction implies you should feel some sympathy for Irving then forget it. If Gerald Kingsland, as portrayed by Oliver Reed was as crass and obvious as one of those sex cards you find in phone boxes then Irving, as played by Amanda Donahoe is a priggish middle class suburbanite who tires of the grind of city living and facts of life like crime and Royal weddings and so imagines that she alone, despite having no idea how it might be done, will travel thousands of miles to be self-sufficient and uses Kingsland to make this a reality. Initially she's not going to let anything, even the facts, get in the way of this protracted venture to la-la land. She ignores the warning signs - Kingsland's obvious fear of female intelligence, the fact that he's had to advertise for a "wife" in the first place, his obvious interest in sex with a woman 20 years his junior and even, in a wonderful example of the will to ignorance, the way he contrives to spend all their money before they've left, forceing Irving to marry him in accordance with Australian immigration law. Some women might bale out at this stage and cut their losses but those sandy beaches are quite the lure and the two sad-sacks go anyway prompting 12 months of predictable implosion in which Kingsland angrily resents Irving's lack of sexual interest while she alone is astounded by his laziness, toe curling advances, crudity and total lack of survival instinct. In fact 9 months in and the two have virtually died from malnutrition. If Irving had hoped to spend a year bathing naked while Kingsland built the house and grew the food, she's as deluded as the old man who hoped to spend 12 months engaged in vigorous intercourse, pampered by his new wife in idyllic surroundings. This is a fascinating story but its impossible to feel anything but irritation at these two characters and Roeg does nothing to pull us toward either of them. He seems content to be a bit of letch himself, focusing on Donahoe's nakedness while mercifully sparing us shots of Reed's reed. Ultimately Irving's story confirms something we already knew, namely that Robinson Crusoe is a great story but it makes a lousy lifestyle choice for a mismatched couple from west London who would normally get no closer to the life of self-sufficiency than a visit to M and S. It wouldn't have taken us a year to figure it out either. Pity they had to come back.