A Mess...


Awful LOOOONG film with most of it Stuart Whitman yelling.

Great footage of Mid-60's downtown LA (most of imnrecognizable by now). Eleanor Parker's high-rise is the old TransAmerica Building, once the tallest building downtown.

Spent years tracking down a copy of this and paid a fortune for it. But it was worth it, if only for the scene of Janet Leigh singing (ok she was dubbed!) the underappreciated Johnny Mandel song, "A Time For Love". That was great.

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I love this movie. Eleanor Parker chewing the scenery is something else!

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The movie may be a mess, but Eleanor Parker's performance is a winner! One really wants to know more about her character, Deborah. Parker is just fabulous! She uses her marvelous voice; purring, screaming, teasing, etc.
And she was brave enough to do her first nude scene. She is incredibly memorable in this movie, indeed as in EVERY movie she ever made. She should have gotten an Oscar nomination for this role.

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That IS the movie! I was howling! Loved it.

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I only caught this flick once on TV way back in the day (early '80s) haven't seen it since---sounds like it would be worth searching for again because it sounds crazy as hell.

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The FLIX cable channel showed it in 1997, when I made a VHS copy of it. I just transferred it to DVDR. The FLIX broadcast used a pan and scanned version with closed captioning. If there were plans to release the movie as a DVD then, they fell through. More than anything else, this movie had the flat lighting look of a Dragnet 1967 TV episode, although the movie precinct station set had more the filing cabinet, single desk with phone and beat up chairs that Jack Webb thought sufficient for a TV set. I must have missed the views of downtown Los Angeles, the only wide shot I saw was some roof top scenes with LA in the hazy background. In 1951, Eleanor Parker was making Scaramouche at MGM. 15 years is a long time, she still looked great in 1966, but this picture shows the decline of Hollywood in the 1960s, with the big studios in big financial trouble. Whoever greenlit this picture should have made sure there was a script before okaying production. The credits say this movie was filmed in Technicolor, but the print FLIX showed looked like a videotape, with flat colors and no depth of field.

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The film was shot flat, not scope. I just got a 16mm print and it's full frame. However, several shots of Eleanor Parker are hard-matted at the bottom. Too bad!! Parker is awesome in this picture!

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I just saw it on TCM and also enjoyed Eleanor Parker's performance. Who knows, she may have seen it, too, at her nice home in Palm Springs. Overall, I just thought the whole thing was weird but watchable.

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