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The Best of Everything (1959) From "Bad Movies About Working Girls" by Edward Margulies The author of the best-selling novel this movie is based on, Rona Jaffe, sent notes to director Jean Negulesco (yes, him again) reminding him to keep everything "real, real, real!" So, imagine our surprise to find that, as a trio of secretaries (not them again!) trying to make it in the starlet-eat-starlet world of Manhattan publishing, Hope Lange, Diane Baker and Suzy Parker spend most of their time sitting around their apartment drinking champagne. Lange threatens that if she's not wed "by the time I'm 26, I may have to take myself a lover." Baker sympathizes: "If you're that old, you have a right to live." Parker pours more bubbly and proposes a toast: "Here's to men. Bless their clean-cut faces and their dirty little minds." When this movie remembers to send its gals back to the workplace, we're introduced to their hard-as-nails boss Joan Crawford, who, being tragically beyond 26, chainsmokes, makes sour milk expressions with her lips and--for the sheer sport of it--fires secretaries. To Lange's innocent query about whether to type a report, this career-harpie snarls, "No--beat it out on a native drum!" Everything about Crawford (in fact, everything about the entire movie) warns the fairer-sex viewer who wants a career, any career, "This could happen to you!" Down the hall, patriarch editor Brian Aherne is around to recall, improbably, that "Eugene O"Neill was one of my proteges," and to foist himself on exec Martha Hyer (whose excuse for having a job is that she's an unwed mother. "Who do you think you're fooling?" Aherne drools. "You've been around!" |
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When Crawford, who's called "the witch" by the entire cast, gets an unsolicited manuscript and scrawls her comments across the title page, "Trash... No!" you can't help thinking that she must have scrawled "Trash... Yes!" on this movie's screenplay. Crawford is, of course, like every unmarried working woman, secretly carrying on with a married man. The movie goes into high gear when she closes her office door to take a phone call from him: "I waited and waited," she overacts into the receiver. "You were home? But last night was ours. One night a week is all we have. She did the same thing last week. How many headaches can she have? I will not be taken for granted. You and your rabbit-faced wife can both go to hell!" No wonder that, before long, editor Stephen Boyd advises Lange to "get out quick--and love happily ever after." But she drunkenly throws herself at him instead: "Please make love to me, even if you don't love me," she begs, "26 is too far ahead!" She passes out cold before he can take her up on this offer, but in the morning finds she's been given both a promotion and a raise--the rewards that go to good girls who wait. Parker and Baker don't fare as well. Parker switches careers to become "the toast of Broadway" and meets brilliant playwright Louis Jourdan (him again!). While you've probably guessed that Jourdan will begin his seduction of Parker by murmuring, "Act One, Scene One," and will later kiss her off by murmuring, "End of Act Three, end of play," who'd ever guess that a blank dullard like Jourdan would drive Parker literally mad? She takes up living on his fire escape and one day, when her high heel catches in the grating, she plunges to her death. |
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This, in the movie's view, is far preferable to the fate worse than death that awaits Baker. At the company picnic, she meets playboy Bob Evans and no sooner falls for his come-on ("'No, no, no'--is that all they taught you in school? They give a course in 'yes,' you know") than she finds she's pregnant. On the day they're to elope, Evans brings a bouquet, but once in his convertible, he tells Baker he's really driving her to have an abortion. "I'm not going! Let me out!" she screams, and then she climbs out while the car's speeding. Wll, that's one way to get rid of a love child. Baker lives, if only to spell out the movie's message: "I'm so ashamed," she says from her hospital bed. "Now I'm just somebody who's had an affair." (Because she's learned the error of her ways, Baker's allowed to meet a nice young doctor.) Back at the office, Lange lands Crawford's job when--in the most deranged plot twist of the whole flick--Crawford resigns because she's found true love: "Oh, he talks with a twang and his suits don't fit, but he treats me as if he believes I'm the gentlest, softest woman in the world. And maybe, with enough time and tenderness, maybe I can get to believe it myself." Fat chance. Sure enough, Crawford's back in a flash, sorrowfully explaining, "It was too late for me." Lange, at last, realizes... yes!... "This could happen to me," and rushes out into the street to track down Boyd. What did you think of this movie? Sound off in the Movie Forum. |