Scanialara You won't be disappointed!

Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

jacobs-greenwood This is a very funny movie starring Gregory Peck and Lauren Bacall in a film with a set-up similar to the Hepburn-Tracy classic Woman of the Year (1942). It deservedly won George Wells his only Oscar (on his only nomination) for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay - Written Directly for the Screen, and was directed by Vincente Minnelli.Peck is a New York sportswriter who's on the West Coast on assignment, doing a story about a horse race. He wakes up from a drinking binge during which he had met New York fashion designer Bacall, though he doesn't recall it. While he struggles to recover from his hangover, she relates the events of the previous evening which included filling his latest story. He notices how beautiful she is, and they begin a brief torrid affair which leads to a hasty marriage. Of course, each is a "fish out of water" in the other's world, which they begin to discover when they return to New York. Since his apartment is a typically small, messy male abode, they decide to live in her fancy, pastel colored place. This leads to some amusing scenes when he holds his regular card game, with his beer drinking-cigar smoking buddies, in their new home, especially those which involve a punchy ex-boxer Maxie Stultz (Mickey Shaughnessy).Before his West Coast trip, apparently Peck was dating a leggy actress (Dolores Gray), who's a bit surprised, and none to happy, to find out that he's gotten himself married. Bacall knows nothing about this, though she does find pieces of a torn up picture, the actress's legs, while cleaning out his old apartment. Bacall's then hired to work on a film whose star is, of course, the ex-girlfriend. Though the three of them dine together, Peck pretends not to know Gray. One of the film's most hilarious scenes occurs when Bacall's theatrical crowd attempts to do their creative work (including "dancing" by Tom Helmore) for the film at the same time that Peck's macho friends are having their regular card game at the apartment.Besides failing to reveal his relationship with the actress to his new wife, Peck's character has also kept secret the fact that his life is in danger, because he has been writing a series of expose columns about a gangster (Chuck Connors), who's been corrupting sport. When his editor (Sam Levene) decides that Peck should "disappear"for a while in order to finish the series, Bacall finally makes the connection between the legs in the torn photograph and those of her film's leading lady, and assumes the worst.Without revealing too much more, I wanted to make sure to mention the funny scenes which involve Shaughnessy's character, who accompanies Peck for protection when he goes undercover. Though the two never leave New York, Peck is able to convince his punchy bodyguard that they're in a new city every time they change hotels. And, when he hears a bell ring, the ex-boxer thinks he's just been called to begin another round in a fight. Lastly, Jesse White plays the character that helps gangster Connors locate Peck, who will learn to respect Helmore's dancing ability.

SnoopyStyle Sports reporter Mike Hagen (Gregory Peck) and fashion designer Marilla Brown (Lauren Bacall) as well as others recall their whirlwind romance and marriage. It begins with Mike attending a golf invitational function in Beverly Hills. He's hungover the next morning and can't remember that he's met her the night before. They have a fun time together and quickly get married. They fly back together to NYC and their lives back home start to drive them apart.It's a functional rom-com with two Hollywood stars. They have reasonable chemistry together. The constant narration with the main premise of these people recounting their story got a bit annoying. I wanted the characters to just have the relationship and not be constantly commenting on it. The movie has its cute moments but no big laughs. Both leads do a fun job.

secondtake Designing Woman (1957)I continue to disappoint my own optimism about movies from this period--that decade between the real end of the Old Hollywood and the real start of the New. (Let's say the nether zone of 1956 to 1965). But seeing a movie like "Designing Woman" is a chance to see what exactly these movie makers were up to. After all, the actors, directors, photographers, and writers were the same, almost to the letter, as ten years earlier. They were not idiots or failures in any sense. So...What has happened here to my eye has to do with style, an intentional shift to a very glossy, very false, very stylized kind of late 1950s mise-en-scene. Sometimes (in other movies) this rises above. Hitchcock's late 50s films come to mind. And exceptions for particular subsets of the audience exist (and blossom) like the Doris Day films and other period comedies. Some dramas that really still have resonance like "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and "Charade" also show the slick detachment of the movie machinery working out well, though with affectations, too.So, here's director Vincente Minnelli, who directed the remarkable 1951 romantic critique of the end of Old Hollywood, "The Bad and the Beautiful." And here are the two towering leads. Lauren Bacall is of course a legend linked first of Bogart, and to hard core Old Hollywood dramas. And Gregory Peck is better known for more serious movies like "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Cape Fear." Even the great cinematographer John Alton has a resume a mile long. The writer, I admit, is less known, and the story here is thin, for sure, but he won an academy award for it, which shows how time changes perceptions. But, in all, the larger artistic intentions of the writer and director really bring a cool, dry dullness. It's a revelation to see it for what it is.It's almost like the director and producer know this isn't going to be a serious movie no matter what, that it can't be. Even the gruesome boxing match turns into a lighthearted repartee, and the glitzy high society stuff is generic and oddly lifeless (Billy Wilder does this material better, for example). And be warned, the format is itself uninvolving, with key parts switching to a simple voice-over, explaining what was happening, but not in a moody film noir way, just information.Is it worthless? Of course not. The scenes are often very complicated visually, with a huge array of extras. The filming really is gorgeous, though more static than it needs to be. There is dancing shoehorned into the plot (though both dancers are fairly dull as people, try as they do). There is a classic kind of clash of cultures that is meant to be the set-up for all the gags, Bacall the rich pampered woman of culture and Peck the working class sportswriter. Ugh, so the timing is off, the jokes flat, and the progress utterly slow. All these high production values are disposable. I hate the fact that I love all these people and thought the movie a dud. See for yourself.

slothropgr A Tracy-Hepburn picture sans Spence and Kate. Of course, when it had those two it was called "Woman of the Year"--complete with the punch-drunk pug (Wm Bendix there, Mickey Shaughnessy here). This one tries to hide its origins by loading up on subplots, taking on in addition to romance sports writing, boxing, Broadway, fashion design, and Damon Runyon's world of gangsters. Toooooo much, it does none of them well and they stumble over one another. The gangster angle is especially clumsy and intrusive. The subplot that does work is the ex-partners subplot, which adds the single bright spot in the whole thing: Dolores Gray, who steals the flick without half trying. It doesn't help that Peck and Bacall appear to be 4th choices for their roles. Neither is a good fit--Peck plays the kind of liar and conman William Holden could get away with easily, but Peck is just too staunch and upright. You end up disliking him for being so dishonest. Bacall plays a rather ditzy flake, with the same problem--she's just too solid and down-to-earth to carry it off, and ends up mugging. It's just plain embarrassing to watch her fly off the handle. Chemistry? None. Must've been a terrible year for stories and screenplays if this manipulative junk won an Oscar.