I'm sure there is a worse romance to come out of the 1950s, but after watching Goodbye, My Fancy, I can't think of one. This movie is so awful, it's hard to describe; but since that's the purpose of this review, I'll have to try.
Joan Crawford stars as a mannish congresswoman who let love pass her by twenty years ago. Lately, she's had a fling with an obnoxious, coarse, crude magazine reporter Frank Lovejoy. Is this romantic: Frank took a photograph of her sleeping in his train compartment then sent it to her as a threat that he could blackmail her at any time during election season. When Joan gets invited back to the college that expelled her for staying out all night with a man to be given an honorary degree, she jumps at the chance and unfortunately so does Frank. He stalks her down there intent on making trouble, and between his un-romantic, creepy gestures, secretary Eve Arden's Debbie-Downer quips, and Lurene Tuttle's endless screeching, the movie isn't very enjoyable.
Where's Robert Young? He's President of the university, and the man Joan stayed out all night with twenty years ago. They're given a second-chance romance, but underneath it all, there's the feeling that something's going to go wrong. When it finally does, to provide the script with a plot, it's very disappointing and incongruous to the rest of the movie. The film subscribes to the 1950s view of "a woman is nothing without a man" so if you don't agree, you're not going to like it. Joan's extremely masculine features, walk, and speech, seem to make that phrase inapplicable, but she must have insisted on the makeup artist applying an incessant amount of cleavage makeup to convince audiences that she was indeed a woman, who was nothing without a man.
Joan Crawford stars as a mannish congresswoman who let love pass her by twenty years ago. Lately, she's had a fling with an obnoxious, coarse, crude magazine reporter Frank Lovejoy. Is this romantic: Frank took a photograph of her sleeping in his train compartment then sent it to her as a threat that he could blackmail her at any time during election season. When Joan gets invited back to the college that expelled her for staying out all night with a man to be given an honorary degree, she jumps at the chance and unfortunately so does Frank. He stalks her down there intent on making trouble, and between his un-romantic, creepy gestures, secretary Eve Arden's Debbie-Downer quips, and Lurene Tuttle's endless screeching, the movie isn't very enjoyable.
Where's Robert Young? He's President of the university, and the man Joan stayed out all night with twenty years ago. They're given a second-chance romance, but underneath it all, there's the feeling that something's going to go wrong. When it finally does, to provide the script with a plot, it's very disappointing and incongruous to the rest of the movie. The film subscribes to the 1950s view of "a woman is nothing without a man" so if you don't agree, you're not going to like it. Joan's extremely masculine features, walk, and speech, seem to make that phrase inapplicable, but she must have insisted on the makeup artist applying an incessant amount of cleavage makeup to convince audiences that she was indeed a woman, who was nothing without a man.