Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Good movie but grossly overrated

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Absolutely Fantastic

Fred Astaire proved he still had what it takes to command the screen in a musical with 1955's Daddy Long Legs.Astaire plays Jervis Pendleton III, a millionaire vacationing in France who meets an 18-year old girl in an orphanage (Leslie Caron) who longs to go to college in America. Enchanted with the girl, Pendleton decides to finance the girl's college education without her knowledge. The girl only knows Pendleton as Daddy Long Legs and unbeknownst to Pendleton, his assistant (Fred Clark) has been corresponding with the girl by letter under the guise of Pendleton and Pendleton panics when the girl insists upon a face to face meeting.The basic idea of this musical is very good. The idea of helping a young girl get an education and keeping it a secret and it is so nice seeing Caron's Julie adjusting to and loving college life, but the film takes a weird turn when Pendleton and Julie finally do meet and he is immediately attracted to her. Astaire and Caron do dance well together, but Astaire is WAY too old to play a romantic interest to Caron and it gave the whole on screen relationship a very incestuous feel that made me squirm.Fred Clark and Thelma Ritter do provide some laughs and as I said before, there is some great dancing, including a dream ballet, but Astaire and Caron as a romantic couple just didn't work for me and cast a pall over the entire film.

"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".

'Daddy Long-Legs', previously filmed silent with Mary Pickford and once more in the 1930s, gets the musical treatment here as the story of the millionaire and the orphan he sponsors gets a Technicolor, Cinemascope, Johnny Mercer update.Fred Astaire, at 55, is a little old for his role as stick-in-the-mud business whizz Jervis Pendleton, but hey, this is Hollywood. And his interest in, and subsequent wooing of, the French girl Julie Andre (played with charm and wit by Leslie Caron) is helped a lot by the fact that the two stars do not actually share screen time until nearly halfway through the film! With scintillating choreography for both Astaire and Caron, those wonderful songs, and support from Fred Clark, Thelma Ritter, and Terry Moore, 'Daddy Long Legs' is an excellent musical just balancing on the cusp of classic musical vs rock n roll.

Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron were such marvelous dancing partners in 1955's Daddy Longlegs.The story line is wonderful. Astaire "adopts" a young Parisian orphan and pays for her college tuition. Throughout the years, she writes in gratitude but he chooses to ignore the letters.Fred Clark and Thelma Ritter, two veteran movie pros, gave terrific support as workers under Astaire. The sentimental Ritter, as Alice, is able to bring the two together and the film takes on a new meaning until Caron discovers that Astaire has been her benefactor. As romance blossoms, we're happy to see that Clark and Ritter have romantic designs on each other as well.The dance sequences have never been better. Both Astaire and Carone show their gracefulness. Fred even knew how to put-over "Something's Got To Give."