Names like Paddy Chayefsky and Kim Stanley still carry some weight -- and, in this film, they have to. It's not a terrible movie, but it is a weird little film, not the least because Kim Stanley is so completely and utterly miscast. And yet, her performance has stirring moments and the film does have a dark energy, in its early portions, that's dispersed in many vaguely wrong directions as the film winds towards its predictable conclusion.
Stanley's miscasting begins with the physical --- she was much too old for the role, even for the later parts of the film, so in the sequences where she's supposed to be a teenager it is really laughable. Sad to say, she's also simply not attractive enough to be cast as a movie star. People on this board may be comparing her to Bette Davis, but at 40 Bette still had some sexy spark. With Stanley, there's no real screen chemistry. I found myself often thinking that Betty Lou Holland, as her mother, was more attractive in her "old age" makeup than Stanley was in her "young age" makeup. There is some movie magic that can be employed in cases like this, but the producers apparently skimped.....
They also forgot to cast a compelling male in the film -- Lloyd Bridges tries awful hard here and it's probably best to just leave it at that. Steven Hill is just a stick of wood, just horrible to watch in this film.
The film came out just a few years before everybody saw what was so wrong with Marilyn Monroe, on whom the film is so clearly based. There's also a bit of Jane Mansfield in there too, perhaps. In the sense that this came out in the late 50s, instead of the early 60s (when Carroll Baker made a mini-career out of these kinds of roles), it's a prescient film. But it's not a powerful film, because none of the secondary characters are able to match up to Stanley's screen time. It's a confused and confusing movie -- I thought occasionally Chayefsky was reaching for dark humor, in the sense perhaps of Tennessee Williams' contemporary "Baby Doll" with the aforementioned Carroll Baker, but if he was reaching for this then he forgot to tell director John Cromwell, whose work here is just as remote and studied as it was on any of his big Fox productions with Tyrone Power and people like that.
Stanley's miscasting begins with the physical --- she was much too old for the role, even for the later parts of the film, so in the sequences where she's supposed to be a teenager it is really laughable. Sad to say, she's also simply not attractive enough to be cast as a movie star. People on this board may be comparing her to Bette Davis, but at 40 Bette still had some sexy spark. With Stanley, there's no real screen chemistry. I found myself often thinking that Betty Lou Holland, as her mother, was more attractive in her "old age" makeup than Stanley was in her "young age" makeup. There is some movie magic that can be employed in cases like this, but the producers apparently skimped.....
They also forgot to cast a compelling male in the film -- Lloyd Bridges tries awful hard here and it's probably best to just leave it at that. Steven Hill is just a stick of wood, just horrible to watch in this film.
The film came out just a few years before everybody saw what was so wrong with Marilyn Monroe, on whom the film is so clearly based. There's also a bit of Jane Mansfield in there too, perhaps. In the sense that this came out in the late 50s, instead of the early 60s (when Carroll Baker made a mini-career out of these kinds of roles), it's a prescient film. But it's not a powerful film, because none of the secondary characters are able to match up to Stanley's screen time. It's a confused and confusing movie -- I thought occasionally Chayefsky was reaching for dark humor, in the sense perhaps of Tennessee Williams' contemporary "Baby Doll" with the aforementioned Carroll Baker, but if he was reaching for this then he forgot to tell director John Cromwell, whose work here is just as remote and studied as it was on any of his big Fox productions with Tyrone Power and people like that.