It was misunderstood from the beginning because since early childhood we have been taught such nonsense as "beauty is only skin deep" , "don't judge a book by its cover," and "look for a soul mate with brains." Endless Love is about the overwhelming beauty of teenage Brooke Shields. Yes, she was and is a horrible actress, but in EL that didn't matter. It was about a boy obsessed with her unearthly beauty. This is a very hard theme to accept in a world where "everyone is beautiful in their own way" because everyone isn't beautiful to anything close to the degree that Brooke was at that age.

Like Flaubert's Madame Bovary, the story was inspired by a more or less unresearched news clip about a similar incident (boy obsessed by girl burns her family home),but there was no attempt made to explore motivation other than the moth-in-flame attraction of Martin Hewitt. The movie can drive, therefore, straight to the psyche and skip the dull niceties of psychological inquiry. In its own way the film is simple and brutally honest. It explores a facet of the human existence that we often wish to ignore: the worship of pure physical beauty. This theme creates anger and derision in many people who simply feel that intellectually the human race has progressed beyond the point where Hewitt is at in the story. The reaction comes off as something like "grow up." But we have not totally grown up with regard to our attraction to physical beauty. It is just something we try to stifle intellectually, like the thing to do and think.

The movie also recalls the later-in-life trials and tribulations of Leni Riefenstahl, her quest for 3rd Reich-like eugenics in the 1970s-80s among the physically stunning Nuba of Africa. Few people are aware that Riefenstahl was once again nearly blackballed (especially in Europe) for her cinematography with the Nuba. First it was beautiful people on mountains, then beautiful Nazis, finally beautiful naked African bodies.

There is a direct relationship between Riefenstahl's eugenics and Endless Love. Both create a kind of poo-poo porn rejection in viewers who prefer repressing their non-intellectual magnetism to human aesthetics. As I said, our mothers taught us to "look at what's inside." A great part of our make-up does not always want to look there. In this way, EL is counter-cultural and even threatening. It is easier to call the acting bad (which it is) and the motivation flimsy (which it is not) than to confront this part of our human character.

I rate the movie high for its daring theme, the beauty of its teenage actors (not just Shields, but look also at James Spader at that age)and its bold originality. Yes, it was a paen to Brooke, but she deserved one at that time. Nature did not produce many of her ilk.

"Endless Love" is one of those films that asks you to accept some rather inappropriate and bizarre behavior as normal, and to sympathize with an obsessed stalker. Throw in gratuitous nudity and it's hard not to see why this ruined Brooke Shields' movie career.

The film basically demonstrates what happens when two teens, David and Jade, start dating and their parents let them do whatever they want. David's parents have the excuse of being oblivious but Jade's parents... oh wow... where to begin?

They do drugs with their kids and throw wild parties. They condone David spending the night in Jade's room. Both parents catch them and while the father does get mad the mother calmly stands there and watches them have sex! Her father even sees David brazenly walking around naked in his daughter's room with the door wide open.

It's only when an exhausted-from-constant-lovemaking Jade tries to swipe some sleeping pills and starts dozing off in class that common sense finally prevails and the father forbids David and Jade from seeing each other albeit temporarily. David protests and pleads his case, which is normal. What he does next, however, is not.

An idiot friend of David's talks him into anonymously setting Jade's porch on fire with the intent that he would come back to rescue them. The big dummy actually does this, the fire gets out of control, and the house burns down. Gee, who could've seen THAT coming? David confesses and gets sent for psychiatric observation. While I applaud that they didn't gloss over the consequences of his actions, this is where the movie takes a really dark turn as David starts to become obsessed, and I mean "Fatal Attraction" obsessed.

He does nothing but pine for Jade and write letters to her every day. He blows off therapy sessions and begs his parents repeatedly to get him out despite the fact that he refuses to get better. In addition, Jade's parents divorce and they move to New York. David's parents do likewise and I can't say I blame them.

Finally, he gets released and what does he do? He goes to New York to track her down. The craziness only escalates as he finds Jade's mother only to have her hit on him but David's too obsessed to care. Jade comes to his hotel room to let him down easy only for him to shamelessly beg her to take him back and pretty much rape her. Since no one behaves like a real person in this movie, this wins her over. Then he has a contrived encounter with her father just so the idiot can be run over as he chases David across the street.

This culminates in a scuffle in a hotel lobby when Jade's brother accuses David of killing their father and ends with David being arrested and likely sent back to the nut house which is where he sadly belongs. Jade, who still can't get the hint, has a heart-to-heart with her mother about taking him back and the movie closes on her coming to visit him while he's locked up. I think my heart skipped a beat.

The film's biggest problem is that is treats David and Jade's relationship as one you're supposed to root for when, in reality, it's puppy love gone horribly wrong. We never see how they got together, they never fight, disagree, or have any kind of meaningful conversation, and they constantly have sex. Everything about the movie wants you believe this is true love: the writing, the acting, even the soundtrack. Sort of makes you wonder if anyone ever told Lionel Richie what the movie was really about before he wrote the classic title track. It doesn't help the film beats you over the head with the song either.

The film also has pacing issues once David gets locked up. It says two years have passed but there's not much to indicate this and there's even less sense of time once David goes to New York. The movie shifts focus solely to David and Jade just drops off the face of the earth for forty-five minutes. What's especially weird is that two years would only make Jade seventeen and probably still in high school so how's she wandering around New York and making trips to David's hospital unsupervised? And you can definitely tell that Brooke Shields can not pass for seventeen or eighteen.

The Razzies would have you believe that the main cast gave bad performances, but I have to disagree on this one. Shirley Knight puts in a believable performance for perhaps one of the worst mothers ever portrayed on film and Martin Hewitt does a respectable job playing essentially a crazy stalker. A young James Spader proves early on that he plays a great smug jerk. Brooke Shields does the best she can pretending to have sex when it's quite obvious she hasn't, although instead of pulling her toe couldn't someone have at least demonstrated the kind of faces a person makes when they're making love? And she's still nowhere near as bad as say, Jaden Smith in "After Earth" or Selena Gomez in "Getaway."

It's the story that really fails them. It's one of those stories that the more effort the actors put in, the worse it looks. The movie wants you to believe it's true love when what's shown on screen is unhealthy obsession. Instead, it ends up a cautionary tale about mistaking lust for love and what can happen when parents don't set boundaries for their children and I really don't think that's what they were going for here.

After my look back at Sean Connery's Filmography, I have decided to do one Tom Cruise.

Endless Love (1981)

Plot In A Paragraph: David A high school student's love for a 15-year-old girl is thwarted by parental disapproval.

I used to enjoy this movie, however after reading the book in the early 90's. I realised how they messed it up, and it's a pretty poor movie. I think the biggest mistake was moving the movie into chronological order. The book begins with David, committing an act that will end all of his happiness, as a result of this, David is sent into a mental institution, where he remembers, with full grief, the great love of his life. The movie seriously loses something by changing this, and the less said about the ending the better.

For me, Brooke Shields is the best thing in the movie, I think Martin Hewitt is awfully miscast, despite being a talented actor. As Tom Cruise, he has a small role, but it's an important one, as it's his character that puts the idea in the head of the main character to do something, that starts a tragic chain of events. It's worth noting this character was not in the book

Endless Love grossed £31 million at the domestic box office (more then Escape From New York, An American Werewolf in London and both of Sly's offerings Nighthawks and Escape To Victory) to end the year the 22nd highest grossing movie of 1981.