A Kiss in the Dark

I love it when snobbish Phillips (Niven) suddenly surveys the lovely Polly (Wyman) as she stands across from him in bare-legged short-shorts. Up to now the concert pianist has enclosed himself in a haughty world of the upper-class, too elevated to bother with either concerns of the flesh or those of everyday commoners. But now, oh my gosh, is that the sudden knock-knock of fleshy hormones on his closed door. Happily for me, his aren't the only male hormones the movie's activating.

Catch how snobbish Phillips is when he wants to evict the poor tenants from his newly acquired fancy hotel. Seems they don't measure up to his elite standards. But what does he care that neither kids nor adults have a place to go. Thus, enlarging his withered sense of humanity becomes a key plot thread amid a rather clogged screenplay. And guess who helps him.

Anyhow, the flick's much better at romance than comedy, the latter being clumsily overdone at best, Crawford shouting up an annoying storm, for one. Nonetheless, it's a good thing ace performers Wyman and Niven are on hand to salvage things, especially Wyman just coming off her Oscar winning deaf-mute in Johnny Belinda (1948). Together, the twosome make the gradual humanizing of the haughty Phillips believable, despite the contrived scheming going on behind their backs. That last part, I think, needed a rewrite.

All in all, it's a 90-minutes mainly for fans, or maybe even non-fans, of the two leads. Too bad Wyman and future President Reagan divorced in '49. She would have made a heckuva First Lady in short-shorts, and I surely would've voted Republican.