Thursday, June 9, 2011

Quick Reviews: Bells Are Ringing (1960), Sex and the Single Girl (1964)

"BELLS ARE RINGING" (1960)
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A highly successful 1956 stage musical, Bells Are Ringing, like Born Yesterday, took Judy Holliday from the stage to the big screen, reprising a role that I don't believe anyone else could pull off with such dippy, adorable finesse. 
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As the prime member of a ramshackle answering service, she falls in love (sight unseen) with a dwindling, deadbeat writer (Dean Martin) and conceals her identity so as to confront him and help him out with his reckless lifestyle. The cast is brilliant and the tone is never far from wonderfully nutty, but the musical numbers (as with most from its era) are rather immobile and only sporadically catchy. [B-]
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"SEX AND THE SINGLE GIRL" (1964)
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A gossip rag columnist (Tony Curtis) flirts with a sex psychologist (Natalie Wood) for a story in this wildly kooky sex comedy that also stars Lauren Bacall, Henry Fonda and Edward Everett Horton
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Part satire, part screwball, the film is pure 60's camp at its worst - sexually risque, brightly colored, musically flavored - until it even flounders in its own starpower. Natalie Wood is the only one who escaped unharmed. [C-]

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