The Best of Everything

If there's one thing this film does well, its capturing the appeal and allure of New York City. This is a fun time-capsule of a film from this period and it beautifully captures some truly iconic images of midtown Manhattan, and a couple other shots of the city. The beautifully stylized representation of office life, the cloths and apartments of NYC explains why these girls along with millions of others like them dreamed of coming to New York City to achieve their dreams - be it a dream job as a successful executive or a rich husband. As for the story itself, it is a bit cliched and is filled with some stereotypes. Despite some issues I think this film is great fun and worth checking out.

Every few years, Fox would go to a favorite story of theirs - Three girls rooming together, looking for career and romantic success and finding lots of heartache along the way. The first time Fox did this was with the 1936 film "Ladies In Love", set in Budapest. Later incarnations were "How To Marry A Millionaire", "Three Coins in the Fountain", and this film. There may be others of which I am not aware.

In this incarnation, three women trying to break into the publishing business decide to room together in a tiny apartment in Manhattan. Caroline Bender (Hope Lange) is a recent graduate of one of the female Ivys - Radcliffe - and that prime education buys her a ticket into - the stenographic pool??? She has aspirations of being editor, a job currently held by Amanda Farrow (Joan Crawford), but in the words of Highlander, "there can be only one", and she has lots of competition in the steno pool not to mention Farrow likes her view from the throne.

Complications ensue. And those complications include out of wedlock pregnancy, affairs with married men, and various men lecturing women who aspire to be more than stenographers, given their Ivy League educations, about how the road to success will sap their femininity. Note that these lecturing men are NOT having to serve time in the steno pool on their much more abbreviated way to the top!

I can't blame Fox too much for this repetition. WB had a fondness for a few stories that they did retreads of during the production code era too. See the film "Slim" for reference, along with all of its remakes and forerunners.

Although dated, this film is definitely worth a watch. I saw it about eight times as a teenager when it opened and it changed my life...I just HAD to live in New York. It has great opening shots of the Manhattan skyline with Johnny Mathis crooning "Romance is still...the best of everything..." that rival those of West Side Story. There is a rather stilted performance by the world's REAL first Supermodel, Suzy Parker (sorry about that, Janice D.), but it's great eye-candy! It also offers a bit of insight into late 1950's American mores--our obsession with (and repression of) sex (in the workplace, no less!), romance, and marriage before women's lib. It represents an era in which New York was at it's finest and a super-bitchy performance by Joan Crawford is just the icing on the cake.

A classic late 50's film. The superannuated headliners (Joan Crawford and Louis Jordan) are not at their best, but the direction, cinematography, and acting of the younger cast are compelling. In a 50's sense (which I love).

The look and feel of the artsy (over-artsy?) contemporary film "Far from heaven" reflects exactly this sort of film (and I suspect this film may be one of the models). A silly plot, of course (hey, it's 1959!), but as a film-- glorious! As a reflection of the society, extremely interesting. And as witness to how Hollywood breaks away from the idealistic portrayal of American sexual mores, fascinating.

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.