mdmphd

Robert Wise is perhaps better known as a director of musicals - West Side Story, The Sound of Music, Star!,etc. However, he was also adept at grabbing our attention and holding it, as with The Day The Earth Stood Still (classic sci-fi) and Somebody Up There Likes Me (launching Paul Newman as a prize fighter). Here, he takes an incredible cast, gives them each something to chew on and let's us in on the fun. It also won Academy Award nominations for Best Art Direction, costumes and Cinematography. It won a special jury price at the Venice Film Festival and Golden Lion and WGA nominators for director and writer, so there's some laurels attached. There are many standout scenes and performances -- June Allyson proving she can make more out of the generic housewife and a negligee, Frederic March as a scheming, palm sweating numbers man, Shelley Winters in her bombshell mode, but remarkably restrained(and no one wants to kill her in this movie!), and then there are the standouts of Walter Pidgeon (& that voice)behind leaded glass spectacles and a wild mop of hair, Barbara Stanwyck stealing the thunder away from the major roles just by listening in her chair, with William Holden blustering his way into a couple of decent monologues(his angry white man bit isn't always as compelling from movie to movie)but Nina Foch won a best supporting actress nod for her caring and steadfast senior admin. Only Paul Douglas doesn't seem to be completely connected with his head salesman caught in a scandalous jam. Never one for a subtle role, he doesn't quite have the hang of pretending to talk to someone on a phone, but he does bring a gravitas to his situation once it's a Sword of Damocles over his head. Despite all of this mincing about characters, EXECUTIVE SUITE is a remarkably fascinating power struggle that holds up nearly fifty years later. The few quirks of the film that ground it in the the 50s are easily overpowered by a brilliant ensemble. Wise allows that none of these characters is perfect, but that makes them all the more watchable as they try to wend their way thru the maze put before them. Who needs a Max Steiner soundtrack when there's so much more to the silences between great actors. Four stars out of five - MDMPHD

This is a prime example of 50s excess, as it seems the notion of how gambling is detrimental to a new marriage is lost in a jumble. I suspect Graham Greene wanted to do a screwball comedy but it winds up an excuse to set two winsome but entirely mismatched stars loose in a romantic, foreign locale, filmed in Color and Cinemascope. Glynnis Johns had been getting really good roles in England and had just come out of Around the World in 80 Days. She'd played plenty of roles but here, she's inexplicably floating thru the movie like an excited child. Rozanno Brazzi was barely the bigger star, already a sensation in Italy from the early 40s and having made Three Coins in the Fountain, Summertime and the professor in the June Alyson version of Little Women. He plays a man good with numbers, but by all appearances is too old for his wife - she wears him out just by talking and he seems frustrated by his inability to keep up when she's on the fly. There are some cute, albeit brief glimpses of why this couple are together, but at heart, I didn't buy Brazzi, a master brooder, as an accountant in love with a numbers system that gets them wads of cash. They don't seem to be able to connect as a team most of the time and hence, we don't really care if they get out of their gambling troubles or not. There's a little screwball suspense around an imagined gambling debt and how they'll get out of their expensive hotel bill, and Robert Morley wanders in and out, barely blinking. Altho Glynis's wardrobe may have been eye catching and the casinos were put to good use for publicity, what we bankroll is a whitewashed Monte Carlo, complete with the two stars whisking by on a moped. Must've been charming in 1956, but today it's a test of endurance. I give this one and a half stars out of five. - MDMPHD (PS - You'll notice it's never mentioned as one of the great romantic comedies, much less as a film of note in any article or text. You'd do better with Brazzi in SUMMERTIME and Johns in NO HIGHWAY IN THE SKY to get these talented actors in their prime.)