Thanks for the memories!

Good idea lost in the noise

A Brilliant Conflict

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The Best of Everything is a fun, if slightly campy time capsule in which to view the working women of 1959. The storyline follows three women working for a publishing company, and their desire to find love and get married. The leader of this troika is Caroline Bender (Lange), who has landed work as a typist and then finds her fiancée has dumped her for another girl. She works with Gregg Adams (Parker), a beautiful aspiring actress who is deeply insecure and April Morrison (Baker), the naive bumpkin from Colorado. Each woman faces a different challenge during the film. Morrison hooks up with a well to do guy named Dexter, but finds what a sleaze he is when she gets pregnant. Gregg falls in love with a stage director, who returns her affections for a time, but then dumps her, leading to Gregg suffering what can only be described as a psychotic break. Also along for the ride is Amanda Farrow, an editor at the publishing house who has a "take no prisoners" style, a lecherous editor named Mr. Shalimar and the office drunk, Mike Rice.The absolute best things about this movie are the costumes and set design, along with the gorgeous scenes filmed in late 1950s Manhattan. The story itself is highly melodramatic and each of the girls seems to lose touch with reality at some point during their respective story lines, whether it be Caroline's ridiculously fast job promotions, Gregg's misadventure by high heel, or April inadvertently using a moving car as a way to land herself a new boyfriend. Joan Crawford is a supporting player here, but she makes one heck of an impression with the limited screen time she gets.This is definitely a good movie. Obviously, the element that these women only think they can find fulfillment by being married to a man is a dated concept, along with the boss who can't stop pinching his female employees, but the performances of nearly all the actors really do shine. And I cannot really overstate just how beautiful the sets and costumes are here. It's an experience not to be missed!

I watched the first few moments on TCM a few years ago but stopped after about 15 minutes. I saw it listed on the schedule at the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto, and I vowed I would make the 40 minute drive. The Stanford is an old fashioned movie house that starts each movie with the curtains still shut Yes, they have curtains. They opened as the Fox logo fanfare began to play. When "The Best of Everything" appeared in huge pink letters spread against the New York City skyline, I knew I was right for waiting.I lapped this movie up. There were so many little moments that added to the look and feel of the movie: When Hope Lange walks into the publishing office for the first time, the titles of the magazines published there are etched on the glass (The Teenager and Elegance); Joan Crawford's swanky apron that she wore so she could serve her guests at her party without mussing her outfit; the way the camera tilted to indicate how crazy Suzy Parker was becoming (it was almost sideways at one point); how Hope Lange kept living at that dumpy flat she shared with the others even though she obviously was making a lot more money than at the beginning of the film (guess it was too scandalous for a single gal to live alone).Hope Lange was so beautiful; so was Suzy Parker. And how about Mark Goddard in a non-speaking role. I fell in love with him when I was a kid watching Lost in Space.Seeing this gem on the big screen prompted me to plan another trek down to the Stanford to see The Old Dark House. Incidentally, I bought a small soda and popcorn at the concession stand, and I was taken aback when the worker asked me for two bucks.

Claire Booth Luce's "The Women" shows relationships with men through a woman's point of view in a play, (and 1939 film that also has Joan Crawford playing a bitch: a character who might have been Amanda Farrow 20 years before), that has no male characters. Here we see the male characters and what a bunch they are. They use women like toys and throw them away, leaving the women to suffer. Ironically, the women in "The Women", perhaps because they are all we see, are shown in a less than favorable light, alternately silly and scheming, with the only "nice" one, (Norma Shearer), growing "claws" by the end. In "The Best of Everything" we see the men for the cads they are while the women are largely innocent and vulnerable.This is a film about women leaping from things. Diane Baker leaps from a car, (in perhaps the most absurd scene in cinema history, which is not in the book). Suzy Parker falls from a fire escape. The women in the film are leaping into the workplace, looking for success and love at the same time. Women would leap into the future and leave this type of soap opera behind in the next decade. But they would come back to it in the 80's and 90's through the novels of people like Sidney Sheldon and Judith Krantz, (although their trashier works aren't as good as this).The best thing about this film is the way it looks. I love the glossy cinemascope films of the 50's and 60's. They look so much better than the pixel-challenged home movies we've been making since, especially in the letterboxed version we see on TV, and the DVD, with the picture so clear you could walk into it. The look of the bevy of young beauties in it is also memorable. This film probably has more beautiful women in it than any other. It has a supermodel, (Suzy Parker), a beauty queen, (Myrna Hansen, who was not Miss America 1954 as Rona Jaffe says in the DVD commentary but rather Miss USA 1953, per the IMDb: but so what), and a Playboy playmate, (June Blair, from January 1957). My vote goes to Suzy, one of the astonishing beauties of all time. Her acting here isn't as awful as people pretend: they are just reacting, as people did then, to the sight of a supermodel, (the first, really), trying to act. Nobody seemed to care how well she did. Her role, that of an apparently worldly woman who turns out to be the most vulnerable, is the most complex in the bunch and she does just fine.The most touching thing about the film now is the age of the female leads at the time. Hope Lange was 27 when they filmed this in the spring of 1959. Diane Baker was 20. Suzy Parker was 26. Hope, who looked to be Grace Kelly's heir, never made it really big and wound up being Mrs. Muir on television and, per the IMDb, wound up living in a home with "crates for coffee tables" because she spent her money on causes she believed in before dying at age 72 in 2003. This film must have seemed a very distant and irrelevant memory to her by then. Baker, always a welcome face in 60's TV, (especially to Richard Kimble), and still active as an actress and acting coach, just turned 67. Parker found "the best of everything" with Bradford Dillman for 40 years before dying at age 70 the same year Lange did. But here they are, young, beautiful and ambitious for success and love, just like their characters.

Watching this hilariously retro but very entertaining career girl tale, I was floored by Joan Crawford's first appearance. All I could think initially was, "My God, it's the same face as Michael Jackson in his notorious booking photo!" About 34 minutes into the movie, Diane Baker and Hope Lange get out of a cab in Greenwich Village. As they walk down the street, you can see part of a sign in back of them for the Stonewall Bar -- scene of the epochal "riots" that are considered the trigger for the modern gay rights movement.Speaking of Baker and taxis, I had to laugh when she gets into one and tells the cabbie, "56th and Sutton Place, please -- and be careful of the bumps." Can you imagine the reaction to that from a driver in today's Manhattan?! She says that, of course, because she's pregnant and doesn't want to hurt the fetus. But that doesn't stop her from JUMPING OUT OF A MOVING CAR when she finds out Bob Evans wants her to have an abortion! Well, they had to find a way for her to lose the baby (1959 and all).Sue Carson is delightful as Mary Agnes. Why was this her only movie? There is no biographical information on her in IMDb.