Reviews

A superb film that is damaged a bit by a mediocre score (it's Detective Movie Music, and it's all wrong for this movie) and the ending. Davis headlines for Wyler again but Stephenson is the standout as the lawyer at the center of the trouble. Underplaying all the way, he conveys beautifully the mounting hidden strain of an honest man caught between honor and friends. But Davis is also in fine form, and even looks a little sexy. Marshall is as good as he was playing another part (the lover) in the 1929 Jeanne Eagels version, which is also worth seeing. Despite the score and the ending the film is one of the pleasures of the period. The sets and photography are excellent as an atmosphere of Old Malaya is conjured up better than in a hundred color films. The writing carries just the right weight-- it doesn't feel like the adapted play it is. Director and cast all understand what they are doing. Sondergaard is a bit much, but she's not in the movie for long.

Screenplay: tripe Direction: competent FX: good Acting: excellent

A great true story is...made into a Football Movie in space? Harris is the coach, and Hanks the QB. Kevin Bacon? He's the RB who fumbled the ball in the 1st Quarter and must now redeem himself. Paxton? The Tight End who sprained his knee in the 3rd Quarter but somehow pulls through the pain anyway. The man in the simulator? He's the benched chap who is dying to be out there on the field with the boys. You know from Frame 1 that the Hail Mary will be caught. And the dialogue is not simply shopworn, it's so manipulative you can almost feel the heartstrings being tugged at.

And yet...Harris, Hanks, Bacon, and Paxton, play it with the sort of conviction that would be better applied to the last production ever of HAMLET. The last three are shot in close-up, just like M. Falconetti, for almost the entire film. If any one of them doubted for one second what he was doing, the movie would fail.

The 1930s (Rest In Peace) were the Golden Age of screen writing. But right now, right under your nose, is the Golden Age of screen acting, and no one will realize it until it's gone.

A consistently watchable and fascinating peek at the anxieties of assimilated American Jews. Imagine a 1940s movie shot in the style of a shampoo ad, peopled with models, dressed in mail-order catalog furniture and clothes, and tracked with a lot of anxious, booksy verbal exchanges. You'd have this tale of a family of Jewish small businesspeople that marries into Goy-land-- a den of vixens with "foreign" names like TIFFANY and CARLA. LILY's otherness is downplayed throughout the series. This was presumably done to broaden the show's appeal, a detail almost as fascinating than the details of the writing. All the clichés of the Assimilation Genre turn up: the Evil Nordic Boss, the Repressed Wasp Wife, the Funny Jewish Doctor, the Crazy Shiksa, and so on. You can almost tell what the characters are going to say before they open their mouths. But not even Grace shows an iota of curiosity about what lives outside the snug little bubble.

There's even a casting joke: just like the sexy fantasy wives in DECONSTRUCTING HARRY, the sexy Jewish Girls are played by Gentiles-- one of them from Mississippi, no less!

Made with big talent and deep pockets, this movie is almost as poorly made as an amateur film made by a rookie. The camera never moves and the actors don't move either. It is also surely the most flagrantly flaming movie of the Code Era, with the possible exception of COBRA WOMAN. Let's see, there's the triangle of a literally limp-wristed Doc (Hughes shows us this about five times to make sure everyone gets it), an sputtering old rejected Pat, and an energetic hot young buck (Billy) who also has time for Jane Russell. The three men do a lot of glaring at one another while they read innuendo-ridden lines in innuendo-laden blockings. The wah-wah-wah kicks in on the soundtrack whenever there's a really smoldery glare or argument. And so on. They do everything but hold hands. Russell isn't exactly beautiful by '40s movie standards, but she certainly is ripe. Hughes had the money to ignore the Censor, and watching it you can't help but wonder if all this wasn't meant as a joke on Mr. Breen himself. This movie is a little funnier if you see THE AVIATOR first.

There is no point in trying to see this movie as anything other than what it is: a feature-length fantasy. Nothing in it could have happened, been said, been lived in or around, etc., but in the film's terms that doesn't matter. Everything, including the dog and the maid, looks like it still has the price tag on. That doesn't matter either. Even the stupid script doesn't matter:

Big Sister. It's Communism, that's what it is.

Baby Sister. Oh, pooh!

It is easy to see what mattered: in 1944 there were a lot of home-front wives to sell tickets to. What is harder to understand is why a film set in Anytown, USA got made in the Gothic-romantic style of REBECCA. Maybe Selznick was ahead of everyone else (again) in grasping that, in 1944, this glossy banality really was the audience's dream rather than its nightmare. The movie made money.

A characteristic moment: that dazzling smile and sisterly kiss the wife (Colbert) lays on her bachelor admirer (Cotten) as he ships out for danger without his reward. The humane alternative, of course, would have been to make herself unattractive to him-- and then explain why after the armistice. The film being what it is-- a talking issue of a women's magazine-- this was clearly impossible, and the dramatic instincts of both Colbert and Cotton in this scene feel right: "If that chump's got to die for our country," you can almost hear the wife thinking, "at least he'll do it with me on his mind!"

Not a great movie, but it has a few high spots. The first half is a mediocre patriotic musical. The second half is a cobbled-together "variety show" performed for an army camp. Grayson sings sweetly, if you like that sort of thing (opera style + show tunes). As for Jose Iturbe's jazz piano, the less said the better. But Lena Horne sings "Honeysuckle Rose" beautifully, Judy Garland does her number well, and Eleanor Powell does a fun boogie-woogie routine. In the first half, there's a rarely seen Gene Kelly dance that's pretty good. The rest is modestly diverting, and MC Mickey Rooney's impression of Lionel Barrymore (in the variety show) is pretty funny.

This expressionist early talkie, known mainly as a tale of degradation like Jannings' previous roles, is often hilariously funny. Jannings, one of the best actors of his day, is straight man here, and he's the funniest thing in the movie. This film is remembered mainly for Dietrich, because of Jannings' and Dietrich's subsequent political lives; it basically gave Dietrich the role she'd lost out to Louise Brooks in PANDORA'S BOX. At face value, though, the movie ought to be remembered mostly for Jannings. His hapless high-school teacher is brilliantly underplayed-- pathetic and hilarious in the same moments, even in the final scene. What's special about this movie is how Von Sternberg and Jannings keep the black comedy in the air all the way through, even in the scenes of tearjerking pathos.

Most of the cast in the English version are obviously reading their lines phonetically. However, this version is not really so bad as is sometimes claimed. Dietrich and Jannings both spoke English well. The cast's Bad English actually adds to the comedy in some scenes. And Lola Lola is English, so the club would have picked up the slang from her.

This Dietrich is somehow more appealing than the more stylized, streamlined one of her Hollywood films, where she got turned into another Exotic Foreigner-- a tramp version of Garbo. Here she's less serious and more fun. She can't sing, can't dance, and can barely even act (e.g., her reaction shots in the final fracas). Yet when she had a good role, like Frenchy in DESTRY RIDES AGAIN or this one, her nonchalant screen personality could make her more appealing than the usual glamour puss. How she became famous as a singer does remain a mystery. Maybe it's the unique poses-- the way she puts one ankle over one knee for "Falling in Love Again". No one else would sing it quite that way-- not even a man.

All of Brooks' movies are basically one joke. The joke in this first film was arguably his best one to date: no wonder it got adapted and then remade. Unfortunately the execution here is often subpar. It isn't like an early Woody Allen, where the bad jokes just fly by with the good. It's slow-moving schtick, and it's often overplayed as if the actors weren't even sure what kind of shot they were supposed to be in. There are some flat spots and an a-w-f-u-l lot of setup before the heart of the joke, the play itself. After staging this hilarious topper (and it's even cleverer than you expect) there's not much for Brooks to do except try to find an even funnier way to get out of the movie, which he doesn't quite do. A few scenes, like the one with the secretary, also run on and on long after you've got the joke. Was this because the newcomer deferred too much to his actors, especially Mostel? Brooks' later films are cut faster and are often funnier. But overall this was still a pretty impressive debut and worth seeing once. Hewitt and Voutsinas were funny, I didn't care as much for Mars though I don't see how else the part could have been played. Mostel is all over the place. Wilder's underplaying saves the day.

This movie shows how much the director matters in ensemble pieces. Wellman was one of those guys who seemed incapable of making a bad movie, even when stuck with limited resources and censorship, as in this case. This is basically a one-set film and it was shot under more or less double censorship (Code and wartime). But it's highly entertaining, considering what they couldn't show. (If I had been stuck in North Africa or the South Pacific in 1943 I would much sooner have seen this than those dreadful patriotic movies like THOUSANDS CHEER and SO PROUDLY WE HAIL or even CASABLANCA.) It's full of watchable funny girls of the kind that all but vanished (into the kitchen) after Pearl Harbor.

The murder-mystery element is played the right way-- completely unseriously. Stanwyck is totally appealing, and Stephanie Bachelor ("Only tramps work in Toledo!") is one bombshell of a funny girl. Iris Adrian, Marion Martin, and Victoria Faust all make a big impression. Pinky Lee gets to do his schtick, including some tricky dancing, and O'Shea is good as the baggy-pants comic who's after Stanwyck. Both the writing (by Gunn) and editing are snappy (and witty: I love that quick cutaway to 'the Princess' reading her fan mail) and nobody just shows up and reads lines. I doubt anyone could have filmed this better in 1943.

The story is pure schlock, but there's enough striking imagery (including the stars) to make this worth watching. This is basically an arty Woman's Picture shot in the style of the Spanish surrealist, with burning blue skies, dark browns and bright yellows, and lonely statues standing sentry at the seashore. You know what you're in for when the Rubaiyat turns up in a drowned man's hand. It's a little clunky and it's not exactly surrealism (expensive to film because you have to build the deformed stuff) but it's an honest attempt to do something like it without the cheap trick of montage, and Lewin gets off some striking compositions. Man Ray did the paintings.

The title tells the story: a cursed sailor from the past (Mason), doomed to sail the oceans forever, finds himself drawn to modern Spain, where a singing American playgirl (Gardner) is tormenting male expats, including an English race car driver and a local matador while an archaeologist investigates. No playgirl ever came from Indianapolis, but never mind. It's surrealism, like putting the Dali museum in Florida. This Indiana Pandora is unable to love...until she discovers that the sailor, who is also a sort of Sunday painter (he gets bored out there by himself) has worked up a portrait of her sight unseen.

I liked this movie in spite of myself, but the truth is its success depends entirely on the casting, not the writing. Like LAURA, it depends on having a beautiful female lead. It needs one even more than usual because Gardner's idea of how to play an enigma is about as credible as the idea of a playgirl from Indianapolis. (In France, where they like beautiful things that don't make any sense, Gardner's performance was celebrated.) Like LAURA it also needs a moody, haunted, self-loathing yet attractive male lead who can play solo scenes and put over brooding emotions in close-up. Gardner and Mason certainly fit this bill and they help make this movie a success on balance. Indeed, no one but Mason could possibly have played this role. You certainly don't confuse this movie with anything else, except maybe VERTIGO (which rips some of it off).

An extravagant production, with multiple sets and locations and lavish period costumes. This is one of the highest examples (like THE SCARLET LETTER, PANDORA'S BOX, and LA PASSION DE JEANNE D'ARC) of what got killed off when smarts replaced beauty at the cinema after 1927. Like SUNRISE it is basically a Weimar Misfit film shot in Hollywood. Like those '20s German films it dwells very long on the scenes of humiliation. The story is old-fashioned, yet the movie is cinematically advanced, with moving camera and a huge range of shot types and compositions, and does not suffer by comparison with today's camera work. There is a lot of simply pictorial work, which for some reason is underused in most movies. Veidt is playing not only without words but essentially in a mask-- without a mouth. Somehow he carries the movie (it wouldn't work without him). Mary Philbin (she's like a Griffith character) is the blind beauty who loves him for what he is. The charismatic, intriguing Baclanova is the fun-loving duchess who comes between them.

One DVD edition aimed at the horror crowd has packaging that shows Veidt tinted a hideous green-- which does not appear in the movie itself. This packaging is basically what the movie itself is attacking.

This is about as good a film as could be made from this material, which suffers from the usual O'Neill faults: it's ordinary, yet stilted; the tragedy seems inadequately transformed; and the language works only through its cumulative yield of tension and gloom. (A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, of roughly the same vintage, covers roughly the same ground-- but it's entertaining and funny and gives you lines you remember later. So does the brutal yet entertaining STAGE DOOR, for that matter, but then comedies don't count.) This is the sort of material that can make you feel proud to be an Irish barroom bore.

The actors certainly do good work here, though Stockwell is a little weak in some of his scenes. Hepburn is very good, and this might be her best performance after ALICE ADAMS. Richardson is even better. And Robards comes through in the end. The young actress playing the domestic also makes an impression. The makers rethought the play in terms of a movie, with outdoor scenes and a nice piano score. They did their job and as a motion picture this is a success. It was shot in attractive widescreen B&W but the only version available seems to be a gritty Pan-and-Scan DVD transfer.

Oddly...this seems somehow appropriate for O'Neill.

Totally charming-- a Cinderella farce that's one of the forgotten peaks of '30s comedy. It's so well-paced that you never feel like you're waiting for the next scene, and it's over fast. It's written like a Continental farce, with familiar high and low and pretend social types, but it has the distinctively sour Brackett-Wilder tone-- plus the in-jokes typical of '30s comedies (Colbert has no French, jokes about her nose, etc.) The actors, even Ameche (a block of wood in the Fox musicals but effective here) all seem unusally relaxed. Maybe it's because they have such good lines to read. It's all high artifice with every line turned and polished; it never touches the ground. Colbert is the American showgirl who floats into Paris high life on a cloud of lies and luck. She gets ensnared in a plot made up by a man (Barrymore) whose wife (Astor) is cheating (with Lederer). Meanwhile, an honest cabbie (Ameche) who's fallen for her turns up and complicates everything. Ameche and Colbert, totally different types, look magnetic in their scenes together-- but maybe it's because she keeps staring at him with those beautiful eyes. What makes it funny is that it's all entirely plausible. Remade in 1945 and 2008, but if you like '30s comedy don't miss this one.

In the '40s Sturges was compared to Voltaire, but he's got at least as much in common with Petronius. Their target is Bad Taste and since everything is vulgar from someone's point of view it's open season. In this one, as ever, everything gets it: marriage, divorce, the rich-- and their parasites, furniture, food, shoes, public signs, the Deus Ex Machina, Happy Endings, THE WOMEN (the running off to buy a divorce), slang, stupid jokes, even jewelry. Two choice bits: the lady vulgarian's doubled-up rope of jumbo pearls turns out to have a clasp-- and flanking her bed are a pair of 'Negro lawn ornament' statues in Greco-Roman costume. (Some of the props from EASY LIVING are also here-- like the censor-proof Greek Bust in which the model is covering up her breasts.)

Every Sturges film was also a satire of those ever recyclable Hollywood Formulas. This one goes at all those Marriage Movies in which a Self-Sacrificing Woman pretends to be somebody else or makes up some scheme in order to win her husband over all over again. One kicker is that the sap is a parody of a real person (Rockefeller III). Another is that in this one it's the idle woman who's bored with her hard-working husband and it's only sex that keeps them together. She sets out to leverage the most of hers ("You know, The Look") to help him earn the living she deserves so she can go back to living on it. Sturges, who had his own marriage woes, doesn't bother to stop short, or anywhere, in the satire of the fair sex in this one.

This film didn't knock me out the first time I saw it. I should have waited. A few viewings have convinced me it's even better than THE LADY EVE, although it's a lot more uneven. (There is a scene on a yacht that goes on too long). It has more witty nonsense in it than any other Sturges film. And more improvised patter (once a basic skill for movie comedians; Sig Arno's here is the best). The writing here rewards close listening-- because the breakneck overlapping dialogue of the early '40s is part of what's being satirized. McCrea, Colbert, and Vallee each get a whole screenplay's worth of talk. Mary Astor (the best thing in the movie) would get even more except she's only in the second half.

Give it a chance, it'll grow on you, like, you know...

It's always hard to know what might have been, but it's hard to believe that what got cut was two hours of exciting action sequences. In 1949 Zanuck had made Mankiewicz's A LETTER TO THREE WIVES workable by cutting (Mank wanted four wives, which, what with the adulteress in there, was probably two too many but it was the '40s when everything came in threes because there were three social classes and all the social scientists had three names). Mank's style is so uncinematic that you wonder if it was meant as a jab at Hollywood, which he never liked. He shoots in the style of the Early Silents, before the introduction of magic like cutting on movement and combining shots into scenes. Everyone in this one seems to be nailed to the floor, too. Maybe the trouble was all those uppity Italian extras. Harrison makes a good Caesar, Macdowell is over-the-top in a fun way as Octavian (how else could he have played it? he looks like Caesar's "boy"), and Burton is unexpectedly off form. Taylor plays the Queen of the Nile like a girl who will stop at nothing to become prom queen.

What Mankiewicz was apparently trying to do was to make a sort of flattened modern version of what Shakespeare and Shaw handled ornately. So the movie is a reasonably smart but rather plodding and uncinematic filmed Rome play shot in the style of a perfume ad. You feel it's really dying to be a musical (I kept waiting for Burton to burst into a love song). A lot of the sets looked suspiciously like the ones in the film version of THE KING AND I. But they are entertaining. Thanks to the army of designers and Leon Shamroy, this movie is worth seeing once. If a movie looks this good it can be chopped up and static and still be watchable.

Everything's better now. The acting, the photography, the sound, the editing, the costumes (Roman indigo too, not purple), the effects and the art design. The action sequences, the location work. OK, there are some anachronisms and the history is fictionalized, and the stunts were impressive in the 1920s too. Still, everything's better now. Except the writing.

If Charlton Heston, Yul Brinner, and Anne Baxter were reading this film's dialogue you would hear how dreadful it really is. It's a tribute to modern actors like Crowe and Phoenix that they can make even things like "I shall have my vengeance-- in this life or the next!" sound as if someone might say them, somewhere, ever. Try it! This fight between quality actor and poor script is fought out within nearly every contemporary Hollywood blockbuster. Why? How much does a joke cost? Do audiences accept this as good writing? Why don't they demand better? To prove all this: watch the DVD with the sound off and the subtitles on. Yes, that's how hard Crowe and the rest had to work. THis movie deserves a 6 (a 9 with a -3 for the writing), but it gets an 8 because the actors are able to put the banalities over and make it sound convincing.

Burton & Co. get points for trying something new. They could have made a slicker version of the '71 film. It would have made money. Everyone must have been shown that film ten times and told "Don't do that", because the new one very carefully avoided any reference to that one.

So they tried something different. The new subplots don't hurt the film and opening up the tour with flashbacks was a good idea. The Oompa trickery is cool, it was worth doing. The songs are OK, just not very memorable (a shame because the '71 version's will stick with you forever). No one seemed to understand what's funny quite as well as the underpaid kid who played VERUCA far over the top in '71 like a mini Margaret Hamilton. Of course, those who haven't seen the first version can easily rectify the mistake with a 1-euro trip to the local video rental joint.

No actor could read any part in this film and make it work, and that's probably why the cutting is so quick. There isn't a line in this dog worth hearing. So once Burton's run through all his satirical set, costume, and makeup gags-- and you can only show Veruca's teeth twice before it gets stale, go and try that in front of a club audience-- he has nothing to do but say "speed" let the actors read what all those official producers vetted and hope the graphics kids and animal trainers come up with something. What they came up with is worth looking at, but it's all empty calories.

Poor Johnny Depp. He worked hard. He came up with a good new idea for Wonka-- one that's intrinsically funny and also very clever (since the plastic surgery would have covered up Wonka's age). But he has to carry the movie-- in color tinting-- for two hours. And the poor guy is given nothing to read. The audience should come out of this movie laughing and saying "Freaky-- but wasn't that funny when Wonka said...?" Not with a confused "If I think 'Art' is bad does that mean it's good?" look.

Can you really make a slick costly movie about a poor boy who defeats four slick costly monsters? Yes but you'd better make it funny. Since there's no SLUGWORTH to set up the wrong decisions by the 4 kids their big crime appears to be just being born to tacky parents. They spent huge $$$ to make a giant seahorse-- lifted from the Esther Williams 1944 BATHING BEAUTY, by the way-- and they can't afford a joke?

This movie starts very well (and is still worth watching) with its close examination of a domestic breakup. Unfortunately, it goes pear-shaped and slapstick in the second half. It gets 2 extra points for being surprising and unusual.

Pauline Kael called this the most revealing movie of its era. What she meant is that it's like ANNIE HALL, ORDINARY PEOPLE, KRAMER VS KRAMER, and all those other Failed Relationship movies merged into one sloppy heap. The only thing that's missing is the drugs-- if you don't count the joint the wife smokes. It goes all over the road trying to hit everything. There's even a courtroom scene. Even Parker must have wondered at times what the writer, Goldman, was trying to do. It rubs you raw and it also makes you giggle.

The four adult leads (all veterans) do as good a job as any actors could do with what they are given. And Keaton does an amazing job in the solo bathtub scene where she has to sing and then break down. But even she and Finney look baffled by the restaurant and hospital scenes; they seem to be saying "How do we play this?" The child actors are, sadly because they are good, given the job of either being a bratty chorus or setting up the adults with things no real kid would say. However at one point one of them (they all look alike) is allowed to cut loose and ad lib a Wicked Witch impression while her TV plays the 1939 OZ. It nearly stops the show (it's the best thing in the movie).

The ending is actually pretty logical: Goldman had written himself into a corner and how else could he get out?

OPEN RANGE is like a piece of good reproduction furniture-- you've seen it before, but the vintage one fell apart when you sat on it. This time the photography and editing and sound and so on are so good that you can ignore the old-school dialogue and still follow the satisfyingly conventional story without any trouble. And it's fun to see an old-school Western (though they all do this now) with proper period costumes, hair, furniture, lamps, vehicles, typefaces, muddy streets, misfiring weapons, etc., and also with women who don't wear eye liner and shadow. Like all of Costner's films, it's unexciting. There's nothing really mean-spirited in it, which also means there's also nothing really funny in it. But it's politically neutral, in the style of most of the big Westerns made since the '80s, being neither mythic nor agitated. Rather like Bill Clinton, it wants to do good yet sell tickets; the impulses cancel one another out, leaving only a highly entertaining show behind. Amen. And Costner had the sense this time around to stay out of the way and let Duvall do a lot of the work. It's as if he's finally accepted that he's never going to be Richard Widmark, let alone John Wayne. The man can't carry a movie in the big traditional way (ROBIN HOOD). He's good only when he's the man things just happen to.

This movie, which combines a sailors-on-leave plot (the 1930s couldn't get enough of these) with a backstage musical plot (ditto), is reasonably entertaining and diverting. Francis Langford is a charmer, and Una Merkel and Raymond Walburn were always under-appreciated comics. It's fun to see Buddy Ebsen dance and even funnier to hear Jimmy Stewart sing. Stewart and Powell don't have much chemistry but they do have a natural rapport; they were both frank, sporty, outdoorsy types.

But today there is really only one reason to hunt down this movie: the big finale by the 24-year-old Eleanor Powell. Though both the battleship set and the naval costumes are "a monument to bad taste", Powell's dancing is an amazing display of strength, speed, rhythm, endurance, precision, and control, and has to be seen four or five times in order to take it all in. It is shot mainly in long takes and combines tap, ballet, and athletics in the way only Powell could quite manage. The Cole Porter song ("Swingin' the Jinx Away") used as backing is also very clever, although "Easy to Love" is better and is the song that is usually remembered from this movie.

This B musical (still available only on VHS) has four things in it worth looking at today: the big "Leader Doesn't Like Music" vaudeville number with singing Marx Brothers impersonators and Gracie Allen got up as Mae West; and Powell's three dance numbers. The first shows off Powell's ability to tap while skipping rope. The second, a blackface tribute to Bill Robinson, would be cornball if Powell weren't so good. The third, a long hula in two acts, isn't Powell's best number but it seems better suited to her big athletic style than her dressy nightclub-style numbers. For once she is not dressed like the mailman, and it's possible to see the unbelievable condition she was in at that time as well as the speed and power of her movements. Fred Astaire surely saw this film while the preparations were underway to make "Broadway Melody of 1940", which teamed him with Powell (or rather, the other way around). No wonder he was scared.

The debris left after the breakup of the studios that made the old movie musicals. It is neither bad nor good, just awesomely, doggedly, expensively mediocre. I give it 6 rather than 4 because of the nice period costumes and sets (it looks expensive). The rest of it is pretty lousy, to use a period word (did they really say "teriff" in the 1920s?) despite having some nice sight gags, satirical refs, and good songs, including the clever title song and the catchy BABY FACE-- which, significantly, no one connects with this movie.

Movies like this are why kids in the 1960s got so frustrated that they started doing drugs and going to see even worse movies like EASY RIDER and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY before hurling themselves in front of National Guard bullets to end the agony. Corny old MGM made all-ages musicals, too-- and if as I did you watch this one right after SINGIN' IN THE RAIN or even GOOD NEWS (both set in the 1920s) the experience is particularly painful. And isn't Millie supposed to be from Kansas? The Midwest-to-Manhattan joke never pays off because Andrews, a singer who learned acting later, did not even attempt an accent. Why didn't they just rewrite it so Millie was from the East End? Her singing voice is superb here, as ever-- but her style is all wrong. She sings these slick, Jazz-Age-style tunes in the same light schoolmistressy tone she used on those Austrian kiddies. And whenever she tries to play Bad Girl, here as elsewhere, it's just embarrassing. She doesn't fall down on the job, she's just not a very good actress and whoever produced this to take advantage of her new stardom expanded the role in a way that just made too many demands on her skills in 1967.

Mary Tyler Moore, you say? Is she in this movie? Is Carol Channing not in it? For Andrews vocal fans only.