2hotFeature one of my absolute favorites!

Infamousta brilliant actors, brilliant editing

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Freeman This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

slightlymad22 A Fine Madness (1966)Plot In A Paragraph: Samson Shillitoe (Connery) a genius poet, who is irresistible to women but is plagued by writer's block. I hate this movie. I bought a copy from France when I hadn't seen it, but wanted to complete my Connery collection. The collector in me is glad I did, but personally I wish I hadn't wasted my money. If you find Connery using his wife (Joanne Woodward) as a punching bag funny, you may enjoy it, but I don't find anything to laugh about here!! I will applaud Connery for trying something totally different in an attempt to move away from Bond, but I wish this wasn't the movie he chose to do so!! This is only the second time I watched it, and I have turned it off. A Fine Madness tanked at the box office.

SimonJack This 1966 comedy by Warner Brothers pretty much nailed the fad of "free love" from the sexual revolution. Sean Connery plays Samson Shillitoe, a divorcée who's remarried. But he accommodates other women as well – any and all, who come on to him. It's definitely not a family film, and not much of a comedy either. The only reason I could see Connery and Joanne Woodward (who plays Rhoda Shillitoe) doing this film is for their roles. They are very good at these diverse, different characters, and show their acting talent. But for their excellent acting, "A Fine Madness" wouldn't rate more than one star. The screenplay is downright terrible, and the story has more holes than a slice of Swiss cheese. Comedies are supposed to make one laugh, but this one fails on that score as well.

Dave from Ottawa The idea that free-spirited creativity is a social disorder that must be cured by a well-meaning but thoroughly incompetent psychiatric establishment is the theme here, and one quite familiar to anybody who has seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Sean Connery was a great choice to play a blocked, womanizing writer at the core of the drama and he centers the film with his amiable exuberance. Comparisons to Cuckoo's Nest are inevitable, and this film lacks the other's stifling power and resonance, but it shares a common vision of the psychiatric profession acting as a microcosm of authoritarian abuses in society at large. Still, this is a funny and charming, much lighter satire on the same subject, energetically directed by Irvin Kirschner, and enjoyable for Connery fans in any case.

Guy Grand Okay, to borrow a few things from the previous commenter's observations, sure, this is an adaptation from a novel, and apparently the main character is an obnoxious lout who happens to be a genius.Here's where this film fails in just about every department.Not for a second do we buy that Sean Connery's Samson is a "genius" in any sense of the word. He's a thick-headed brute who hollers anti-establishment rants that really aren't enlightened nor are they particularly radical. The fact is, though, that he hollers a lot. There is no modulation to Connery's performance. No sense of a human being in there. His character is drawn to just be the hunky societal interloper whose mere physicality and scowls suggest a counterpoint to everyday norm. Genius, he is not.Topping poor Connery in the shouting department is the screeching yowl of Joanne Woodward, whose hapless wife character of Samson, Rhoda, is given all the depth of a punching bag (literally). Connery takes swipes at her head, connecting with her skull in the end, along with throwing every dish in the apartment in her direction. He even shoves her down the staircase resulting in a broken leg, and perhaps, 1960's sentiments saw this as an uproarious moment of hilarity. You know, madcap abuse of the wife is always so mercilessly humorous. Anyway, you get the picture (reference the above reference to "thick-headed brute").Jean Seberg is absolutely wasted in this performance. She plays the stifled wife of a renowned psychiatrist, Patrick O'Neal, who for some reason, and quite illogically I can only add, winds up having sex with Connery in a whirlpool bath and then dumping him the next time she sees him. There is no logic in having her character even in this film other than to flesh out the above-the-line star wattage on the marquee.Only Clive Revill, playing a hare-brained psycho-therapist in every sense of the word, cuts loose with the material and lends a Peter-Sellers-like diversion for a total of 3 minutes screen time.I cannot conceive of any audience, whether in the '60s or today, eliciting anything more than ho-hum chuckle and a wan smile over this pale comedy with absolutely no focus and one of cinema's most ill-conceived one-note main characters.My rating: 1 out of 5 stars.