tedthomasson

Very pretty New England scenery etcetera but that's about all this stinker has going for it. I saw this when it first came out and by the end of the first reel I expected there would be some sort of wry humor would emerge out of it but no, it just went on and on, and got sillier with every scene. I always wondered why Paramount didn't stop production when they saw the final script and I can imagine it would now be just an embarrassment for the entire cast. Like most of Hitchcock's post-Psycho movies it should have finished him in Hollywood but then he redeemed himself with the very watchable To Catch a Thief. This tiresome load of nonsense ranks high in my personal list of the ten worst movies of all time.

The Model and the Marriage Broker was one of those delightful light comedies that Twentieth Century Fox (and Columbia) did so well in the early '50s. It was released here in Australia as a supporting feature. I saw it then and it's never been seen here since then, sadly, so I'm relying on memory. It's hard to imagine anyone else but Thelma Ritter as the matchmaker, Jeanne Crain was gorgeous and suitably aloof as the model, and Scott Brady was just right as the wolf. George Cukor's direction was flawless: handling sensitive issues without becoming mawkish or cruel, and totally un-self-conscious. It ranks equally with his 'The Marrying Kind' and slightly above his 'It Should Happen to You' (aka 'A Name For Herself'), both made with Judy Holliday at Columbia about the same time. I still remember the classic line delivered by Thelma (as only she could) when she tries to persuade a sad-sack male client to take an interest in the plain-Jane character played by Nancy Kulp: "She's a real live-wire - low voltage, but steady."

I first saw this when it was screened as a supporting feature in Australia in 1951/52 and hasn't been seen here since. A pity, because it was rather more cerebral and realistic than almost anything else seen in that era. I was only 14 when I saw it so I can't remember much about the plot but its realism came through (I was a pretty savvy kid movie-wise, I must admit). I could only remember Lloyd Bridges until I looked it up just now and was surprised to see who else was in it: Anne Francis, Ernest Borgnine, Carleton Carpenter, Murray Hamilton etc, before they became known. I'm also a little surprised director Robert Siodmak didn't run into strife with the McCarthy hearings in those years as it seemed to me the movie could be seen as a tad leftish, but I may be wrong as I was too young to understand that at the time, and this was not an issue in Australia then. Anyway, the semi-documentary treatment and the (apparent} filming on location added to the straightforward treatment. Columbia made some interesting movies around that time, some that I would suggest are a high-water mark in American movie-making and should be seen more often. If it's as good as I remember it, it should be seen as a minor classic.

This movie was shown on Australian TV in the mid-'60s and never been seen here since. True, this is not an out-and-out romp like Mae's earlier films but it does have a more subtle comic line about a movie star in small-town America. The scene where Mae is lying down in the hay is surprisingly explicit: she reaches out her arms to Randolph Scott and says: "I love it." She was actually talking about the country life or something but in the context it was pretty strong stuff for 1935. I'm sure this is the movie where she is chauffeur-driven in a fantastic Rolls-Royce town car with "rattan"-work around the rear of the car, rather like Norma Desmond's in Sunset Boulevard. The car would be worth a fortune today. Also featured was the wonderful Elizabeth Patterson as the cynical granny of the house, a characterisation she made her own, and reprised it as late as 1957 in Pal Joey. It's a bit more subtle than Mae's earlier films but it has a certain maturity and a low-key humour as a gentle poke at country folks. The young Randolph Scott is quite a hunk in this too. I quite enjoyed it.

I saw this movie when it was re-released as a supporting feature at a cinema here in Melbourne about 1951. Don't remember much about it, except the scene where the hero (Hope) loses control of a tank and runs it into the side of the colonel's Cadillac limo (it might have been a Chrysler) but the audience was appalled, as I was, because luxury cars like this were rarely seen here in those years. It wasn't faked either, as I recall. Can someone advise what the car was? I'm compiling a list of cars used in the movies. Apart from that I thought it was a quite passable comedy and I'm hoping it might come up on late-nite TV sometime as they have occasionally shown other Paramount movies of the era. TT.