(Lyrics excerpt from title song) - "I give it all to you - My endless love." Giggle-giggle-giggle.... DavidLovesJadeLovesDavidLovesJadeLovesDavid... Uh.... Seriously, folks!Over the years, 1981's Endless Love has somehow turned into one of those ill-fated Teen/Tragedy/Love stories that gets itself royally trashed, time & again.But regardless of its clichéd corniness, its peculiar character idiosyncrasies, and its emotional dysfunction overload, I found Endless Love to be a helluva lot better than I expected it to be. In fact, I had initially thought I was gonna hate this one, big-time, but that didn't turn out to be the case.Far from being the greatest love story ever told, Endless Love (a very bitter study of erotic obsession and the inability to let go) was generally entertaining but, at the same time, it was also a mighty hard pill to swallow, as well.*Trivia Notes* - Endless Love's title song (written by Lionel Richie and performed by Richie and Diana Ross) was an instant #1 hit on the record charts.In the part of "Billy", Tom Cruise, 19 at the time, made his feature-film debut.

In 2014 the newest version of this story came out in movie form. Both are based on the same book, and the core story is the same, but overall the two are developed quite differently and end quite differently. I just watched the 2014 version, so I re-watched this one so that I could have a same-time comparison of the two.This one has a lower IMDb rating but in many respects it is a better movie. It was quite daring for the time, with a fairly graphic love affair between a high school senior boy and a 15-yr-old girl in Chicago. In fairness, the young actress used a body double for the most revealing scenes, but it was till pretty daring. As was the scene where the girl's mother discovers the two of them naked, making love in her home, and only watching. And even more daring, a few years later tries to seduce the young man, now in his early 20s, character-wise.Not at all new to controversial roles, playing a 12-yr-old prostitute in "Pretty Baby" and playing a stranded girl getting pregnant in "Blue Lagoon", Brooke Shields is the 15-yr-old love interest Jade Butterfield. Her family seems pretty normal, until she and the boy, Martin Hewitt as David Axelrod, begin getting very close. So close in fact that he begins to sleep in Jade's bedroom. Mom doesn't seem to mind, she is happy that Jade is finding love, but dad gets to the point where he will do almost anything to break them apart for good.This version, probably closer to the source book, is quite dark and the ending is more ambiguous. It also has a very young Tom Cruise in a very small, but very important role.SPOILERS FOLLOW: As David and Jade get too close for comfort, and David is asked to stay away, one night he applied an idea he got from the Cruise character, he lit some newspapers on Jade's family's porch, started a fire that burned down their house. He received a suspended sentence if he would go into a mental hospital for therapy. He got out after two years and Jade's family had moved out east, and her parents had split up. When David went to NYC and the dad saw him, was hit and killed by a car while chasing David. Then he and a brother got into a fight, David ended up back in the prison hospital because he broke parole. The movie ends with him looking out a window with bars, as Jade walks in the direction of his building. As the title says, "endless love."

Endless Love (1981) ** (out of 4)Insane love story about teenage lovers, the 15-year-old Jade (Brooke Shields) and the 17-year-old David (Martin Hewitt), who are forced apart by her father and soon the boys obsession turns to tragedy. I really, really, really wanted to like ENDLESS LOVE. In fact, this was at least my third viewing of wanting to love this movie but it's hopeless because sadly the movie is just a complete mess from start to finish. I've heard that the novel is something truly terrific but all of that has been lost in this feature that is so heavy-handed and at times so crazy that you can't help but wonder if director Franco Zeffirelli was wanting to create something bad. I'm really not sure where to start but I guess we can begin with the story, which just never makes any sense. The movie has one dumb sequence after another and it contains some of the dumbest and most unexplained characters that you're ever going to meet. So, daddy gives pot, alcohol and throws wild parties on school nights yet he flips out when he discovers that his daughter is in love? Her mother catches them having sex in front of the fireplace and decides to just sit there and watch? David decides to have a complete mental breakdown after accidentally burning his loved ones house down yet he doesn't seem to know what the big deal is. Then there's the ending, which I won't ruin or should I say the at least three endings that really don't close anything up. Oh yeah, and lets not forget the sex scenes, which are so incredibly laughable that you wonder what the director was thinking.ENDLESS LOVE should have been a good movie as the story of pain, losing the one you love and redemption are things that make for an interesting story. Everything here is just handled so poorly that you can't help but laugh at just about every scene. The movie never makes any real sense. It never explains why these two are so strongly connected. It never explains anything. As a fan of bad movies I can't help but have a certain fondness for this movie because it reaches of level of insanity to where it becomes so bad that it's good. The film contains weirdness unlike any other movie and the entire thing is just so heavy in regards to the "love" of these two people that it really kills the movie even more. Both Shields and Hewitt have a lot of problems with their performance as they never really pull them off or make them believable. Shirley Knight is good as the mother, Don Murray is over-the-top as the father and we even get James Spader and Tom Cruise in brief parts.The one scene that works is when the title song is first played and we see the two fall in love. This sequence is about the only thing that comes off as good and of course you've got the Lionel Richie and Diana Ross song to close things out. ENDLESS LOVE is a film that desperately needs to be remade.

I will have to read the novel this is based on because, overall the effect of the story in unrealistic, and frankly, strange.Yes, Brooke Shields looks lovely. Her sometime boyfriend is apparently obsessive. We see the usual nebulous references to psychiatry, which was a prevalent plot twist during this time period. When a story plot could not gel, the psychiatric angle would be thrown in to the story (Think: "Prom Night", "Halloween" or "Lipstick").Don Murray as the ever concerned but clueless father, once again. Disjointed families, divorce and early 80's drama. Not the worst, but certainly could have been better. The hospital and diagnosis of the obsessive boyfriend were completely surreal. 4/10