Reviews

Hard to say what could be a spoiler here, as the title gives away the entire plot to anyone who has watched one or two classic comedies-- and the first five minutes give it away to someone who hasn't. The two leads enter, for business reasons, into an in-name- only marriage that turns into a real one. It also doesn't take Albert Einstein to figure out what becomes of the two supporting players.

A sparkling script could have compensated for the predictability of the story, but this one just lumbers on from one lame incident to another to drag out the phony marriage in a way that obeys the Production Code. The one that breaks it is a cliché that has itself been the basis of several other movies, and is no less plausible for that. Brian Aherne--the poor man's David Niven--has no sex appeal, or at least no chemistry with Rosalind Russell, and Virginia Bruce isn't half as good-looking as the other characters claim she is, at least not in her hideous pompadour hairstyle. Robert Benchley has no funny lines, is asleep through part of the movie, and looks as if he is trying to sleep through the rest.

But then there's Roz. Rosalind Russell was a fabulous comedian of the glossy, unflappable school, a superwoman who never (at least, so far as I can remember) gave up meaningful work to be the little wifey baking cookies (although, annoyingly, the movie does show her taking some kind of "delicious" baked goods out of the oven in her career-woman kitchen. What funny lines the picture does have are given to her--indeed, most are created by her, because, on paper, they are just ordinary lines, and would remain so without her crisp delivery, rich implication, and more-than-perfect timing.

You wouldn't be wrong to think this movie is not worth the time of anyone except Rosalind Russell fans. On the other hand, if you don't know her work, this could make you one.

I'm at a loss to understand the favorable reviews of this turkey. Gary Merrill (why?), after an overlong prologue, survives a plane crash and decides to call on the families of the three people he got to know during a stopover. The whole thing has a dreary, self-consciously solemn tone as Merrill and the survivors, nearly all of them prim and stiff, exchange homilies. The only point I can see to this movie is that it serves as a series of revenge fantasies. Spouses who misbehave are punished with death, infirmity, and/or humiliation. A nasty mother- in-law is also humiliated (though only a little, and in private--after all, she is a mother, and it is the Fifties). Bette Davis, in her star cameo, is excruciating, using her special, toe-curling wise-woman voice. Aside from one terribly acted and directed comic fantasy scene, this movie is very heavy going.

This film may have garnered high praise and many awards, but is it..all...that...interesting? The Gene Hackman character, who does not just dominate the movie, but who IS the whole movie, is very secretive, shuns contact with other people, but what is he hiding? He's the sexless equivalent of a tease, making a huge fuss about his privacy but not having any secret facts or emotions to be private about. To speak plainly, he is dull. Not only is he an empty shell to begin with, he never develops or surprises us. We feel we have been led up the garden path, taken on a confidential mission at the end of which we are just told goodbye without anything happening.

Yes, there is a bit of plot, in the form of the adulterous couple whom Hackman is paid to shadow. But his struggle to disrupt his own secrecy and the switch at the end that shows us that Harry has deceived himself- -these are not nearly enough to fill up the emptiness of the movie. The premise of the film and the San Francisco setting reminded me a bit of a Ross Macdonald novel. The differences are that Macdonald would have had an interesting, witty hero, and either the plot twist would have been dealt with about a quarter of the way through, or it would have been one of a dozen clever misunderstandings and missed connections. The Conversation, by comparison, is a pale and feeble piece of work.

Grace Kelly (in return for the great sacrifice of wearing dowdy clothes and glasses) got the Oscar, but it was Bing Crosby who deserved it for his portrayal of a man who lies as naturally and as often as breathing to preserve his image as a nice, sweet guy. His alcoholism seems a lesser flaw than his essential phoniness--he blames his wife for things she has not done so that everyone can admire how graciously he forgives her; he vilifies in private a fellow actor to whom he is charming in public. It was far more courageous of Bing to show what people might have conjectured, with some justice, was the dark side to his public happy-go-lucky persona than it was for Kelly to wear baggy cardigans. Anyone who has had one of these men in their lives will relish this characterisation, given tremendous force by its being done by such a beloved entertainer.

The best performance, though, is William Holden's, and the only one with energy and sex appeal. (What do you say of a woman who makes a picture with William Holden and Bing Crosby and has an affair with...Bing Crosby?) Yet all of them are at the mercy of Clifford Odets's couch-bound drama--and that's the analyst's couch, not the casting one. This is a story in which characters who live a life of secrecy or lies, on being confronted with The Truth, suddenly exhibit a remarkable degree of honesty and self-knowledge and come out with an articulate expression of their psychology. And for all the self-consciously sophisticated dialogue, the instigation for Bing's alcoholism is a piece of Victorian sentimentality-- he stops holding the hand of his cutesy-wootsy little blonde son for one minute, and the kid rushes into traffic to get run over. Poor Bing also has to deliver one of the most tasteless lines in the history of cinema: "I gave that woman ten years of the worst kind of hell outside a concentration camp."

The songs Bing is given, though they are by Ira Gershwin and Harold Arlen, are limp and mediocre, and the ones he sings onstage, at his audition and as part of the musical in which he appears, are dire. In fact, the stage show is so awful it is hard to believe it was not written in a spirit of parody--it's a combination of the worst parts of Oklahoma! and Our Town; the sign on the hotel in the set even says Our Town Hotel, for God's sake! Everything we see is, like the audition song, stuff that would have been considered dull and corny 20 years earlier. The scenes backstage, however, are rich in amusing theatrical atmosphere.

Odets was a notorious misogynist, a trait that he cannot keep from creeping into the movie. When Holden makes scathing remarks about Kelly, his ex-wife, or women in general, he sounds much more believable than when he has to express his love for Kelly in uninteresting, awkward dialogue. And though the music surges at the end to bless Kelly when she decides to reject Holden and return to Bing (and was there ever any question she wouldn't? come on, who has top billing?) I couldn't buy the tragic nobility. The alcoholic and his enabler, both characters who live by sucking the blood of other people, have done it again: they have leeched off the warm, impulsive Holden, screwed him up, and then tossed him aside, having gained the strength to go on. One can't help wondering--did Odets know this and cynically misrepresent it to his audience, or did he fool himself?