Word: gracing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...good deal of the screenplay seems as dated today as the idle rich. Grace Kelly sings a duet with Crosby in a cool, innocuously pleasant little voice, does an alcoholic rumba with Sinatra, and looks thoroughly patrician, but she lacks the gawky animal energy that Katharine Hepburn brought to the 1939 play and the 1941 movie. Crosby seems as comfortable in the role of a singing millionaire as only a singing millionaire (which he is in real life) can be. but saunters through the part rather sleepily, without much of the old Bing zing. Sinatra plays the reporter like...
...music and color to a tested product, in this case Philip Barry's old hit, The Philadelphia Story. Producer Sol Siegel assembled a Who's Who cast. He talked Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra into teaming in a movie for the first time, snagged the services of Grace Kelly for her last screen appearance before embarking for Monaco, paid Cole Porter a reported $250,000 for his first original movie score in eight years, and hired Louis Armstrong to blow and gravel-growl his way through it. The result, unhappily, is strictly plebeian...
...visible reason, John (Teahouse of the August Moon) Patrick's screenplay detours the action from the Philadelphia Main Line to the equally posh confines of Newport. There, frosty and imperious Tracy Lord (Grace Kelly) delicately dithers over the three men in her life: her ex-husband, C. K. Dexter-Haven (Bing Crosby), an aristocratic jazz devotee who insists on calling her "Sam"; her husband-to-be, George Kittredge (John Lund), a stuffy fellow; and brash Reporter Mike Connor (Frank Sinatra), who is on hand to cover the wedding for a picture magazine. The romantic field is soon winnowed down...
...three leads, Margaret, Faust, and Mephistopheles, make the most of their lines and play beautifully together. The brilliance of Frederick Warriner as Mephistopheles stood out like a sizzling fire cracker. He played a green and sparkling devil of serpentine grace and satanic power. A superb mime, Warriner walked the tightrope of maintaining himself as both a loathsome creature and a dilettante of debonair charm. He did not falter. The quiet, brooding force of Robert Evans acted as a good foil for Mephistopheles, and Evans handled his long monologue in the first act with superb skill. Margaret, as played by Frances...
Sure that being guardian angel to a nun "is a lot more fun/in the race to the state of grace" because all nuns do is pray all day, the angel agrees to change places with her new charge, Sister Angelica, to show her how simple a nun's life really can be. In no time the angel is in hot water with the mother superior for her angelic frankness. When Sister Angelica tells her to stop it, the angel complains: "Do you mean I cannot tell the truth in a convent?" No, says the sister. "Use mental reservation...