Word: minnelli
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...novelette. Once a French movie, once a Broadway play, the spicy little tidbit is now a full-course feast for eyes and ears, an extravagant $3,000,000 cinemusical with four bright stars (Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jourdan, Eva Gabor), a strong supporting cast, a topnotch director (Vincente Minnelli). words and music by My Fair Lady's Lerner and Loewe,* and some flooringly flamboyant sets and costumes by Cecil Beaton...
...rules of the romantic comedy game, as played by Hollywood, are at least as irrational as those that Lewis Carroll dreamed up for the Queen's croquet. But in the last 14 years, by playing cleverly to the rules, and even more cleverly breaking them, Director Vincente Minnelli has turned out half a dozen of the pleasantest comedies and musical comedies (An American in Paris, Father of the Bride) made in Hollywood since the '30s. And in Designing Woman, restricted still further by a plot that should have gone down the drain with bathtub gin, Director Minnelli...
...Director Minnelli plays his game of pseudo-sociological croquet with the careless good form of a man who does not have to worry about making his satiric points. He plays for the box-office score instead, working the sex angles and the big names and the "production values" -yum-yum Metrocolor, flossy furniture, slinky clothes-with the skill of a cold old pro. The comedy is kept on a fairly low commercial plane too. The funniest line concerns a retired pugilist. "Who is that man with no nose?" asks wife Bacall suspiciously. "Oh, he has a nose," says husband Peck...
...movie laudably subdues the sensationalism of Irving Stone's best seller of 1934, which is probably a safe move in an externally more art-appreciating society of 1956. Producer John Houseman and director Vincente Minnelli have taken considerable expense to record as faithfully as possible the tragic life of a talented, frightened man who, tormented by failures and epilepsy, lusted for punishment and death more than for life...
...Harburg-Harold Arlen score (Over the Rainbow, We're Off to See the Wizard) sounded as fresh and enchanting as ever. To kick off the movie, Buffoon Bert Lahr, who played the craven lion in the film, reminisced to Judy's ten-year-old daughter, Liza Minnelli, about the good old days at MGM. If the movie suffered in its new setting, it was mainly because less than 1% of the U.S.'s 37 million TV sets are equipped for color. Otherwise, Oz was clearly as good as anything around the best neighborhood theaters-and far better...