Very well executed

A lot of fun.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

On a trip to France, millionaire Jervis Pendleton sees an 18 year old girl (Leslie Caron) in an orphanage. Enchanted with her, but mindful of the difference in their ages, he sponsors her to college in New England.Is this a creepy story? In a way, yes, because you have a much older man with a woman who is barely an adult. The movie plays it off early on, with Astaire's character completely forgetting about the girl for two years until reminded by his staff. Clearly he is not out to pursue her in a creepy way. And yet, this is a romance.Although the film is towards the end of Astaire's dancing career (he did "Funny Face" after this but not much else), it is still fun of the great songs and dances he was known for. If I had to decide, I would say Astaire was the all-time dance master, with Gene Kelly a distant second.

Jean Webster's novel Daddy Long Legs has certainly been popular enough ever since it was written in 1912. First a play the following year that starred a young Ruth Chatterton, than film versions with Mary Pickford as a silent and an early sound film starring Janet Gaynor. There was even a Dutch language version in the Thirties and a couple of years back South Korea filmed a version of the story. Still the best known one is the one with the singing and dancing of Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron.Johnny Mercer who can well lay claim to being the greatest lyricist America ever produced occasionally wrote the music as well for some songs, an example being I'm An Old Cowhand. Another one he did both music and lyrics for is Dream which was interpolated into this otherwise original score and sung by the Pied Pipers. Mercer did music and lyrics for the rest of the score as well which included the Oscar nominated Something's Gotta Give for Best Song. It lost in 1955 to Love Is A Many Splendored Thing.I've got a feeling that Jean Webster took as her inspiration for the Daddy Long Legs Story the marriage of Grover Cleveland. The future President of the United States was practicing law in Buffalo, New York when his law partner, one Oscar Folsom, was killed in a carriage accident leaving a widow and small daughter. Cleveland took over the guardianship and raised young Frances Folsom and when he was president in his first term he married young Ms. Folsom when she came of age in the White House.In this updating of the story, Fred Astaire is a millionaire diplomat on a trade mission to France after World War II. The car breaks down near an orphanage and while there spots and becomes enchanted with young Leslie Caron. He becomes her unseen benefactor, putting her through college in America and she calls him, Daddy Long Legs. Of course like the Clevelands the March/July romance commences.Daddy Long Legs gave Darryl Zanuck an opportunity to try and respond to MGM's classic ballet in An American In Paris, where not coincidentally Leslie Caron danced with Gene Kelly. In an incredible generosity of spirit it's not Fred who dances, but Caron. In her fantasy Astaire just ambles through. It's a nice number but doesn't come close to what Kelly achieved. It's interesting to speculate what might have happened had Fred danced here.Thelma Ritter has some nice lines herself as the usual wisecracking girl Friday and for once Fred Clark is a good guy as Astaire's factotum. That must have been a welcome change for him.If you should be with your beloved watching Daddy Long Legs, you can bet as sure as you live, Something's Gotta Give, Something's Gotta Give, Something's Gotta Give.

"Daddy Long Legs" was one of those movies that were made again and again in the teens up to the 1930s, sometimes under it's own original name (the name of the novel it was based on) and sometimes, like in a Shirley Temple version called "Curley Top", under a different name. Although Mary Pickford was in a silent version, the best known early version was a 1931 film with Warner Baxter and Janet Gaynor. However, aside from Temple's "Curley Top" (which had a plot difficulty changed by a rewrite), the most successful version to modern audiences is this one that starred Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron in 1955. It was one of Astaire's last musicals, and was one of the series of musicals from "An American In Paris" through "Lili" that led to Caron's best remembered musical starring role in "Gigi" (1958). The plot of "Daddy Long Legs" was about a millionaire who sees a young girl in an orphan home and secretly adopts her. His shadow on the wall is noticed and he is referred to as "Daddy Long Legs" The girl grows up and meets the man when she is reaching adulthood, and her secret guardian falls for her, and eventually marries her. It is a kind of wish fulfillment plot - and it's unintentional overtone of twisted sexual relations between an adopted father figure and and adopted daughter figure has been commented on. In fact it really gets a going over in the current version from the American Ambassador to France (Williamson) played by Larry Keating, who points out how really scandalous the matter is to Astaire. It causes a bump on the road to a happy conclusion, but it is a big bump. Only in "Curley Top" was this avoided by having Shirley Temple have an older sister who could be romanced by the millionaire.Oddly enough, the 1931 version has an unintentional eerie footnote to the strange sex issue. When that version came out, one of the people who saw the film (it is, apparently, one of the last films she ever saw) was the ill-fated Starr Faithful, whose still mysterious death (murder/suicide/accident?) is debated to this day. Starr had been having an affair with her mother's older cousin, Andrew Peters (the Mayor of Boston in the early 1920s), which somewhat looked like the relationship between the guardian and the young orphan in the story. Whether Starr went to see "Daddy Long Legs" for that reason or not is a minor mystery in the last days of her life.I've never seen the Baxter-Gaynor version. This 1958 version was shown on the 20th Century Fox Cable network this afternoon. Forgetting the central problem mentioned above about the twisted relationship, it is a good musical. There are several good musical numbers, such as the "slue-foot" dance at the college prom (that Astaire does with Caron) to the music of Ray Anthony's orchestra. There is also the use of two popular tunes: "Dream (which becomes a type of theme tune for Caron, while thinking of Astaire), and "Something's Got To Give", which unconsciously summarizes their odd relationship (Astaire being the old unmovable object hit by the unexpected force of Caron). But the major musical number of the film is rather odd.When (after his unfortunate conversation with Keating) Astaire breaks with Caron on a sexual level, she has a dream sequence which in design reminds one of Caron's earlier dance/ballet sequence with Gene Kelly in "An American In Paris". She dreams she is back in the hallway of the luxury New York City Hotel that she was in when Astaire was romancing her, but all the rooms have "3203" (her room number) on them. But the hallways and doors are all drawn (they are not solid wooden doors. It's like the backdrop of Paris that Kelly stands in front of when he begins his dance sequence regarding Caron in "An American In Paris". It gets weirder, as Caron changes styles of dancing - first ballet, then tango, than carnival - as she enters rooms representing Paris, Buenos Aires, or Rio. What makes it weird is that Astaire does not dance with Caron or alone - he appears as an onlooker, either in an opera/ballet box, a table on the side, or a tourist looking at the carnival. It is the only time I can recall Fred Astaire in a musical number where he does nothing!The cast is good, particularly the outspoken personal secretary Ms Pritchard (Thelma Ritter) trying to get Fred to reveal himself, and the long suffering lawyer/business adviser Griggs (Fred Clark) trying to keep Astaire aware of what he should be doing, and what he is doing all wrong. It's a good musical, once you swallow that odd sexual connection between the principals. Due to the cast, the musical numbers (even the one where Fred does nothing), and the light touch of director Jean Negulesco I would say it gets an "8" out of "10".

Let's begin with the obvious: the complaints about the age difference between Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron. Yes, there is one. But I think there's a night-and-day difference between this film and, say, 'Charade' or 'Entrapment' when the leading man is grandfatherly and the leading lady is a sweet young thing, and we're not supposed to notice. The brilliant thing about DLL is that the age difference, or discrepancy, is front and center at the plot of the film. But the film broaches this rather sticky material in a very chaste and innocent way. After seeing her from afar as a teenager, Astaire's courtship with Caron becomes anonymous. For two years. The film's first masterstroke comes in the guise of Thelma Ritter acting as an armchair Cupid. Through a gentle push on her part we begin to see the pair finally interact. (And when they first dance together, it isn't even real.) Astaire also attempts nobility- several times!! But everything is in an elegant and tasteful courtship, leading up to the stunning rooftop turn of "Something's Gotta Give." I didn't like the Roland Petit ballet towards the end of the film as much as others did, just because I felt that the point of loss had been beaten to death. But the ending is especially fine because two love stories resolve instead of just one. And how cool is it to dance with someone on your roof terrace, step into your hat, spin into your wrap, and dance out the front door?!!