The Worst Film Ever

Good idea lost in the noise

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

It has been said: "The decision to leave the couple engaged at the end of the run was largely the idea of Thomas herself. She did not want to send a message to young women that marriage was the ultimate goal for them and she was worried that it would have defeated the somewhat feminist message of the show."And also: "The final episode was originally going to have Ann and Donald getting married but Marlo Thomas (who was an executive producer of the show as well as the star) refused, claiming that it sent the message to young girls that a woman's main goal in life was to be married."And yet, for five years, she portrayed her independent feminist character as a paranoid, eternally confused, insecure woman (with a sore throat) who constantly needed the help of her father and boyfriend in almost every episode. But God forbid she send the wrong message by getting married.Feminist message? I think not. But rather, pure hypocrisy masked in the largest false eyelashes known to mankind.

... or if not that, Ted Bessell as one of the most sexually frustrated men of 1960's New York City. If the Mary Tyler Moore show had first aired in 1966 instead of 1970, it would have been this show. American culture changed that quickly. Marlo Thomas plays a young woman, Ann Marie, from the village of Brewster, New York who comes to the big city to become an actress, which is a tough career to break into, thus she takes a series of quirky jobs to get by which often become the central theme of certain episodes. In the very first episode she meets Donald (Ted Bessell), a writer for a magazine, and they are a couple for the next five years, a couple that - apparently - never has sex.Back home, Ann's dad (Lew Parker) never quite trusts Donald's intentions with his daughter, and believes that girls should live at home until married. Thus a mainstay of the show is dad bursting in on Ann and Donald, either incidentally or intentionally, only to find them in what appears to be a compromising position (Ah ha! I've got him!) that in the end has a logical and platonic explanation.If you didn't live through this period in history, you might think of the 1960's and believe it was nothing but an endless parade of hippies, pot smoking, and student/police confrontations over the Vietnam War. The fact is, most people in 1960's America were still living in the 1950's at the time, and women were still largely accepted only in traditional professions - teaching, nursing, secretarial work, acting - you know, jobs that involve either serving men or children. So That Girl was about as far as network TV could go with this topic - a young woman living in her own apartment pursuing a career in ANYTHING in New York City - without raising middle class eyebrows.It was bright, funny, and innocent, sometimes to the point of being naive, but I'll always look back fondly on "That Girl" of my youth.

I love this light hearted comedy. Marlo Thomas is so sweet. Her wardrobe was very hip! She wore the coolest clothes. The show had many guest stars like her dad Danny Thomas, Ethel Merman, Milton Berle,and Sid Caesar. Ted Bessell was the perfect choice to play Ann Marie's boyfriend. They had a wonderful chemistry on screen and remained close friends till his death in 1997. Season 1 & 2 are available on DVD now. So go and buy them and enjoy! The show took our minds off of what was really going on in the world. The Vietnam war was raging, the civil rights movement was tearing the nation apart, and Dr. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were murdered during the shows run from 1966-1971.

I wonder how many preteen boys had a crush on Marlo Thomas like I did during the run of this program. She was soooo beautiful, and Ted Bessell seemed like an awfully lucky guy to me, except that he had to live in constant fear of Ann Marie's father, which was realistic enough as Mr. Marie was rather menacing, which by the time the series ended I realized was because he considered the Donald Hollister character a threat to his daughter's virginity. (Wonder how much different, if any, Danny Thomas was about that issue in real life?) In retrospect, this show requires suspension of disbelief even more than most sitcoms, as Ann, a supposedly struggling actress, had a better apartment and nicer clothes than many steadily-employed New Yorkers could have possibly have afforded, then or now. It's a shame that the show only went as far as Donald's bachelor party; it would seem to have been better if they had actually shown the wedding with the implication that "they all lived happily ever after" and that this show, after all really was a modern fairy tale. A fun aspect of the show was seeing how they were going to work the words "that girl" into the opening sequence.