Matialth Good concept, poorly executed.

Limerculer A waste of 90 minutes of my life

KnotStronger This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Verity Robins Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

dougdoepke An ambitious jazz musician tries to make it in The Big Apple despite hardships. Meanwhile he befriends a desperate taxi dancer trying to hold on to her self-respect.The 105-minutes amounts to a sour valentine to New York City. The ending is predictable from the start. Why else cast two big Hollywood stars in the leads. The fact that Peggy (Reynolds) and Pete (Curtis) finally get together is not because of the City, as we might expect, but in spite of it. Thus the screenplay breaks with Hollywood convention of big cities with a soft heart. Note, for example, how the landlady's morning grouch gets quickly reflected in other grouchy New Yorkers.. That sort of uncompromising attitude may be the movie's best part. Otherwise, it's Reynolds breaking with her malt shop image, as a hard case who registers zero smiles throughout. At the same time, the effort to break with the Tammy image (Tammy And The Bachelor, {1957}) is too pointed and resolute to be convincing. Curtis, on the other hand, is fairly amiable, and not quite as miscast as Reynolds. Still, his Bronx accent sort of comes and goes for a guy supposedly from Milwaukee. Having two stars at the peak of popularity also means giving them adequate screen time to satisfy their fans. But that also means padding a slender storyline with lots of talk that too often drags out the runtime. Note too, how awkwardly the script plays with the key topic of prostitution, a word or even concept that dare not speak its name, thanks to the suffocating Production Code. Anyway, Oakie and Medford supply subtle amusement, while Rickles chews the scenery like he's starving for attention. All in all, it's a 105-minutes that doesn't wear well, despite being cutting edge at the time. All in all, I'm glad that Reynolds soon went back to the personality roles she was so good at.

sensha I am surprised at the reviews thus far posted, as they miss one of the major novelties of this movie. While Tony Curtis is never going to win any awards for his musicianship, the little "group" that he tries to join contains some pretty impressive "ringers", especially for a movie that isn't all that much about the musical side of things.Any group that contains the likes of Gerry Mulligan AND Sam Butera is going to raise more than a few musical eyebrows. As mentioned above, the music used in the film is nothing to get too worked up about, but these two icons (plus the other sidemen that surround them) are reason enough to consider this one "special".A musical note or two about Curtis is in order here as well. He also played a tenor saxophone player in the iconic Some Like It Hot. While his autobiography is silent as to his actual saxophone playing skills, some of the fingerings that he used in that film were right for the music being played (although out of sync with the actual film sound track). It is mentioned that he has some flute playing skills in the biography, so his being a sax player is not out of the realm of possibility.The horns that he is seen playing in this movie all appear to be Selmer instruments. When his horns get "lifted" by the boys in the band, Debbie Reynolds goes to bat for him and buys him a set of horns "to get by" on his cruise ship gig. However, the instruments purchased are Leblanc horns, recognizable by the distinctive tweed covered cases in which they came. But, when he is seen performing on the ship, he is again playing Selmer instruments. Since this was well before product placement in movies became common, it may be that he was playing his own horns and the Leblanc cases were used for their visual appeal.

Martin Pasko If Garson Kanin's stage version were successful enough to earn a movie treatment by producers Perlberg and Seaton, whose adaptation of Clifford Odets's "The Country Girl" is famously exquisite, one can only assume that the play was more honest and less preposterously disingenuous than this laughable adaptation.Written by Kanin himself, who must have swallowed a fair amount of bile at the bowdlerizing mandated by the Hollywood Production Code, the film addresses its central question, which appears to be whether "dance hall girl" Debbie Reynolds (!) is or isn't a prostitute, with pages and pages of jaw-droppingly elliptical dialogue that bears no resemblance to human speech -- lines on the order of, "I'd never think you'd...you know..." and "How could you think I'm the kind of girl you think I am?" Those are not necessarily exact quotes, but you get the idea.The film is sunk by other equally bizarre choices at every turn, including not only the female lead's spectacular miscasting but her co-star's as well. Presenting Tony Curtis as a Midwestern naif being conned by heartless Manhattanites produces such howlingly funny utterances as "And on my foist day in New Yawk!" '30s Paramount comedy star Jack Oakie and Kay Medford, Dick Van Dyke's mother in the stage version of "Bye, Bye, Birdie," comprise a kind of greasy-spoon Greek chorus, a bartender and his only barfly, Reynolds's landlady, whom we first meet sitting at the bar drinking orange soda! In this Times Square saloon which, like many other sets in the film, reveals the art director's painful fascination with red walls, there is more mugging going on than in Central Park.But all of this is topped by the grotesquely overwrought, bug-eyed and nostril-flaring performance of Don Rickles, who quickly demonstrates why he found his true calling in standup rather than film acting. You're better off reading the play, but only reading it, because no impresario has the bad taste to mount a revival of it any more.

moonspinner55 Exceptionally thin drama, written by Garson Kanin from his own play, about a horn player from Milwaukee arriving in New York City by bus, taking over the boarding room usually held by a down-on-her-luck taxi-dancer; they meet and, seeing there are two beds in the place, he proposes they share the room and help each other out. As the naive musician, Tony Curtis is convincing fumbling about nervously with his horn cases, but the moment where he realizes his roommate is really a cute little number never quite arrives. Curtis and co-star Debbie Reynolds do a little bickering, a little soul-sharing, and the next we know he's writing her love letters. Reynolds has a good girl's version of 'tough' down pat, though when boss Don Rickles calls her a "Goldilocks" he's not far off; this is strictly a one dime-a-dance girl who would never sacrifice virtue for rent money. Kanin's script spends a lot of time on extraneous circumstances, particularly when Rickles makes Debbie strip in his office (nothing comes of this, not even a tart exit line). Curtis gets an audition which turns out to be a fake, yet the sequence seems designed only to plug a little music into the scenario, and it's a nowhere moment which doesn't pay off. Throughout, Elmer Bernstein's music seems heavy-handed, as does the writing for the supporting characters. Curtis and Reynolds are seen as a couple of struggling nice kids--not above stepping into the gutter, but not without total remorse. It's all a facade but, for an 'unglossy' glossy star-vehicle, it has its pleasures. **1/2 from ****