Based on the 1979 Scott Spencer novel of the same name, the screenplay was written by Judith Rascoe. The original music score was composed by Jonathan Tunick. Although the novel is set in the summer of 1969, the movie transports the action to the early 1980s. The film also discards the non-chronological structure of the novel and tells all the events in chronological sequence.
In suburban Chicago, 15-year-old Jade Butterfield and 17-year-old David Axelrod fall in love after being introduced by Jade's older brother, Keith. The Butterfields' bohemianlifestyle, for which they're well known in their community, allows Jade and David to develop an all-consuming and passionate relationship, including allowing them to have sex in Jade's room. Where her family is open, David's home life is dull; his parents are wealthy political activists who have little interest in his life.
One night, Jade's mother, Ann, sneaks downstairs, catching Jade and David making love by the fireplace. She starts living vicariously through them, but her husband, Hugh, watches them with increasing unease. Jade's nightly trysts begin to negatively impact her grades and her ability to sleep. One morning, she tries to steal a prescription sleeping pill from her father, but he catches her. As a last straw, Hugh demands that David stop seeing Jade until the end of the school year. David is devastated, believing that Hugh wants to destroy their relationship, but Ann calmly assures him that the time apart is for the best and will go by quickly.
Back at school, one of David's friends, Billy, tells him that when he was eight, he tried to burn a pile of newspapers, got scared and put the fire out, and his parents thought he was a hero for saving the house from burning. Inspired by this grim story, David starts a fire on the Butterfields' front porch after their late-night party and walks away. Unfortunately, by the time he returns, the flame has spread too far under the high wind. David immediately evacuates the Butterfields from the burning house before he is subsequently apprehended.
Following the trial, David is convicted of second-degree arson, sentenced to five years' probation, committed into a mental hospital for evaluation and forbidden to go anywhere near Jade or her family again. He continues to write her daily, but the letters are not sent because of the no-contact order. His parents arrange to have him released early from the mental hospital, much to Hugh's chagrin. Meanwhile, David receives his many letters upon his exit, and after realizing why Jade never wrote back, he decides to pursue her, although he knows it is a violation of his parole.
After the loss of their home, the Butterfields have moved from Chicago to Manhattan, where Ann and Hugh file for divorce. David unexpectedly visits Ann at her apartment. At dinner, she intimates she has an attraction to David, but he gently refuses her advances. When she is not looking, he thumbs through her address book, finding out where Jade is and discovers that she now attends the University of Vermont in Burlington. Intent on catching a bus to Vermont, David encounters Hugh on the street. Enraged, Hugh starts chasing him and is hit by a car and killed. Hugh's fiancée, Ingrid, arrives on the scene just in time to see David leaving. He comes close to boarding the bus to Vermont but is overcome with grief and returns to Ann's apartment and consoles her. Keith orders David to leave and tells him that Jade hates him whilst Ingrid, catching a glimpse of David, recognizes him from the accident.
Later, Jade goes to David's hotel room and tells him that they have to leave their relationship in the past and move on with their lives separately. He pulls her back as she tries to leave, throwing her on the bed and holding her down until she admits she still loves him and they stay the night together. The next morning, Jade and David plan to return to Chicago and begin a new life together. Keith and Ingrid arrive at David’s hotel and tell Jade that David is at fault for their father's death. She refuses to believe it at first, but when Ingrid confirms that David was actually at the scene she becomes horrified. David tries to explain, but Keith attacks him, and the two get in a struggle. The police arrive and arrest David for brawling, disturbing the peace and violating his parole.
David is sentenced to five years in a state prison and despairs that he may never see Jade again. At a lakeside, Jade informs her mother that nobody will ever love her as David does, and Ann expresses her understanding and approval. From prison, through his barred cell window, David sees Jade approach the prison to visit him.
The MPAA awarded the initial cut of Endless Love an X rating. Director Franco Zeffirelli subsequently made several cuts in the love scenes between Brooke Shields and Martin Hewitt to achieve a lower rating. The film was re-submitted to the MPAA five times before they awarded it an R rating.[4]
Release
Box office
The film premiere for Endless Love took place on July 16, 1981, at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York City. The film was released the next day. Despite the poor critical reception, the film was a box office success. It made $4,163,623 on its opening weekend and went on to gross $31,184,024 in total, becoming the twenty-second highest earning film domestically in 1981.[5] Internationally, the film took in a further $1,308,650 bringing its total worldwide gross to $32,492,674.[6]
Reception
The film received mostly negative reviews upon its release. Roger Ebert compared the film unfavorably with the novel, describing Martin Hewitt as miscast and criticizing the narrative, although he did praise Brooke Shields' performance:
Is there anything good in the movie? Yes. Brooke Shields is good. She is a great natural beauty, and she demonstrates, in a scene of tenderness and concern for Hewitt and in a scene of rage with her father, that she has a strong, unaffected screen acting manner. But the movie as a whole does not understand the particular strengths of the novel that inspired it, does not convince us it understands adolescent love, does not seem to know its characters very well, and is a narrative and logical mess.[7]
There are two sorts of people who'll be going to see Endless Love — those who have read the richly imaginative novel on which the movie is based and those who have not. There will be dismay in the first camp, but it may be nothing beside the bewilderment in the second."[8]
Film historian Leonard Maltin seemed to agree, calling the film a "textbook example of how to do everything wrong in a literary adaptation."[9]
In 2014, Scott Spencer, the author of the novel on which the film was based, wrote, "I was frankly surprised that something so tepid and conventional could have been fashioned from my slightly unhinged novel about the glorious destructive violence of erotic obsession".[10] Spencer described the film as a "botched" job and wrote that Franco Zeffirelli "egregiously and ridiculously misunderstood" the novel.[11]
As of November 2021, Endless Love holds a rating of 26% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 19 reviews.[12]
The film's theme song, written by Lionel Richie and performed by Richie and Diana Ross and also called "Endless Love", became a number 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, and was the biggest-selling single in Ross' career. Billboard magazine chose it as "The Best Duet of All Time" in 2011, 30 years after its debut. It spent nine weeks at #1 and received Academy Award and Golden Globe Award nominations for "Best Original Song", along with five Grammy Award nominations. The soundtrack peaked at #9 on the Billboard Top 200 and was certified platinum. It also featured a second duet between Ross and Richie, "Dreaming of You", that received considerable airplay but was never released as a single.
The film was released on Blu-ray by Shout! Factory in mid-August 2019, with enhanced 5.1 surround sound. It is also available in the streaming format via various providers.
Ingrid Bergman was a Swedish actress. With a career spanning five decades, Bergman is often regarded as one of the most influential screen figures in cinematic history. She won numerous accolades, including three Academy Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards, a Tony Award, four Golden Globe Awards, BAFTA Award, and a Volpi Cup. She is one of only four actresses to have received at least three acting Academy Awards. In 1999, the American Film Institute recognised Bergman as the fourth-greatest female screen legend of Classic Hollywood Cinema.
Gian Franco Corsi Zeffirelli was an Italian stage and film director, producer, production designer and politician. He was one of the most significant opera and theatre directors of the post–World War II era, gaining both acclaim and notoriety for his lavish stagings of classical works, as well as his film adaptations of the same.
BUtterfield 8 is a 1960 American drama film directed by Daniel Mann, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Laurence Harvey. Taylor won her first Academy Award for her performance in a leading role. The film was based on a 1935 novel of the same name by John O'Hara.
The Blue Lagoon is a 1980 American coming-of-age romantic survival drama film directed by Randal Kleiser from a screenplay written by Douglas Day Stewart based on the 1908 novel of the same name by Henry De Vere Stacpoole. The film stars Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins. The music score was composed by Basil Poledouris, and the cinematography was by Néstor Almendros.
Martin Hewitt is an American businessman and former actor. He is best known for his film debut as David Axelrod in Franco Zeffirelli's Endless Love (1981). His last role was a 2003 episode of ER.
Endless Love may refer to:
"Endless Love" is a song written by Lionel Richie and originally recorded as a duet between Richie and singer/actress Diana Ross. In this ballad, the singers declare their "endless love" for one another. It was covered by Luther Vandross with R&B-pop singer Mariah Carey, and also by country music singer Shania Twain. Billboard has named the original version as the greatest song duet of all time.
Penelope Dale Milford is an American stage and screen actress. She is best known for her role as Vi Munson in Coming Home (1978) for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She also originated the role of Jenny Anderson in the Broadway musical Shenandoah, for which she was nominated for a Drama Desk Award in 1975.
Theresia Anna Lilian Maria Shields was an American actress, who was the parent and manager of actress Brooke Shields.
Intermezzo is a 1939 American romantic film remake of the 1936 Swedish film of the same title. It stars Leslie Howard as a married virtuoso violinist who falls in love with his accompanist, played by Ingrid Bergman in her Hollywood debut. Bergman had played the same role in the Swedish original against Gösta Ekman. The film was directed by Gregory Ratoff and produced by David O. Selznick. It features multiple orchestrations of Heinz Provost's title piece, which won a contest associated with the original film's production. The screenplay by George O'Neil was based on that of the original film by Gösta Stevens and Gustaf Molander. It was produced by Selznick International Pictures.
A Kind of Loving is a 1962 British kitchen sink drama film directed by John Schlesinger, starring Alan Bates and June Ritchie. It was written by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall based on the 1960 novel of the same name by Stan Barstow which was later adapted into the 1982 television series A Kind of Loving. The film tells the story of two lovers in early 1960s Lancashire. It belongs to the British New Wave movement.
Scott Spencer is an American author who has written fourteen novels. He also wrote the screenplay for the 1993 movie Father Hood. Two of Spencer's novels, Endless Love and Waking the Dead, have been adapted into films. Endless Love was first adapted into a motion picture by Franco Zeffirelli in 1981, and a second adaptation by Shana Feste was released in 2014. Waking the Dead was produced by Jodie Foster and directed by Keith Gordon in 2000. The novels Endless Love and A Ship Made of Paper have both been nominated for the National Book Award, with Endless Love selling over 2 million copies. Spencer has heavily panned both film adaptations of Endless Love.
Lord Love a Duck is a 1966 American teen black comedy-drama film produced, directed and co-written by George Axelrod and starring Roddy McDowall and Tuesday Weld. The film was a satire of popular culture at the time, its targets ranging from progressive education to beach party films. It is based on Al Hine's 1961 novel of the same name.
Brooke Christa Shields is an American actress. A child model starting at the age of 11 months, Shields gained widespread notoriety at age 12 for her leading role in Louis Malle's film Pretty Baby (1978), in which she appeared in nude scenes shot when she was 11 years old. She continued to model into her late teenage years and starred in several dramas in the 1980s, including The Blue Lagoon (1980), and Franco Zeffirelli's Endless Love (1981).
Endless Love: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack is the soundtrack album to the film of the same name. The album was released worldwide by Mercury Records and PolyGram in 1981.
The Lost Valentine is a 2011 Hallmark Hall of Fame made-for-television drama film starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, Betty White and Sean Faris. It is based on the novel by James Michael Pratt of the same name, previously titled The Last Valentine, a 1998 New York Times and USA Today bestseller. In December 2011, Betty White received a nomination for the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Miniseries or Television Movie for her performance.
Split Image is a 1982 American drama film directed by Ted Kotcheff and starring Michael O'Keefe, Karen Allen, Peter Fonda, James Woods, Elizabeth Ashley, Brian Dennehy and Ronnie Scribner. It tells the story of an all-American college athlete who becomes involved in a youth-oriented cult, and his family's struggle to bring him home.
The 3rd Youth in Film Awards ceremony, presented by the Youth in Film Association, honored outstanding youth performers in the fields of film, television and music for the 1980-1981 season, and took place in December 1981 in Hollywood, California.
Endless Love is a 2014 American romantic drama film directed by Shana Feste and co-written by Feste with Joshua Safran. A second adaptation of Scott Spencer's novel, the film stars Alex Pettyfer, Gabriella Wilde, Bruce Greenwood, Joely Richardson and Robert Patrick.
American actress Brooke Christa Shields started her career as a child model and gained critical acclaim at age 12 for her leading role in Louis Malle's film Pretty Baby (1978). She continued to model into her late teenage years and starred in several dramas in the 1980s, including The Blue Lagoon (1980) and Franco Zeffirelli's Endless Love (1981).
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