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Utopian Turtletop. Monsieur Croche's Bête Noire. Contact: turtletop [at] hotmail [dot] com

Sunday, September 10, 2006

From the back-of-the-box blurb:

Frank Sinatra, “The Chairman of the Board,” is swept off his feet by America’s Sweetheart, Doris Day, in this timeless love story.

A famous Broadway composer (Gig Young) surprises all when he proposes to small-town girl Doris Day. But no one could be more surprised when she chooses instead to elope with her fiance’s best friend, Frank Sinatra.

The first screen pairing of superstars Sinatra and Day, this Hollywood favorite will have your heart smilling and your toes tapping with timeless tunes from the Gershwins, Cole Porter and Johnny Mercer.

My toes tapped, but my heart did not smile. Frank plays a man suffering from severe depression with shades of delusional paranoia. Doris does not love him and marries him for exceedingly foolish reasons. They do not treat each other well, the audience knows that there is no way that this can end well, and on their first Christmas Eve together Frank attempts suicide. The ending, in which he has miraculously survived and they have forgiven each other and are now happy, is completely unsupported, tacked on, false. And what the title song has to do with the rest of the movie, I have no idea. It’s the least convincingly redemptive of the Christmas suicide movies, at least the ones I know:

It’s a Wonderful Life
The Apartment
Meet John Doe

I’d recommend any of these others, but not this one, Young at Heart, which I hadn’t known. (Are there others?)

It does have some lovely songs, though.
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