Dory Previn wrote the teleplay (and the songs) for this Hugh Hefner-produced television drama about an aging chorus girl (Kim Novak, looking stunning) coming to a crossroads in her life: her thirteen-year relationship with a popular lounge singer is going nowhere, and the club where she works is going topless. What's a classy hoofer to do? Kim takes up with a strapping, 23-year-old delivery boy who promises her the moon, which lights a fire (finally) under her boyfriend. With gritty New York City locales and fabulous Gayne Rescher photography, this 'woman's picture' certainly looks terrific. It also features one of Novak's best performances, a fine job from a singing Tony Curtis, and lots of terrific character actors (as well as Hefner's then-squeeze Barbi Benton) in supporting roles. The sub-plot involving handsome lunk Michael Brandon doesn't really work (his early scenes with Kim are totally fabricated), though it gets the picture where it needs to go, and the freeze-frame ending is downbeat yet provocative.
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planktonrules8 March 2017"The Third Girl From the Left" is a film that is less a complete story and more just a character study of a woman who is getting older and is vaguely dissatisfied with life when the film begins....and is pretty much the same when it ends.
The story begins with Gloria (Kim Novak) reaching another birthday and realizing her life is passing her by. She's been dating Joey (Tony Curtis) for 13 years and she's getting a bit old to be a chorus girl. Surely, some sort of change is in order. The first opportunity for change is Joey asking her to marry him...though the film seems to imply that this has happened before and nothing came of it. The other change is a young man who is inexplicably smitten with her. He doesn't have a lot of ambition but is very sweet...sort of the opposite of Joey. Will she have a fling with the new guy, stick with Joey or just say none of the above?
This is how the film starts and, for the most part, it's where the film ends. Because of that, there's a vague feeling of dissatisfaction when you watch it. Interesting but missing something...and, by the way, the theme song is annoying and way overused. -
mark.waltz10 December 2020Seen in a rather dull dance chorus (which should be referred to as the Pebblequettes as opposed to the Rockettes, or maybe as the Rickettes), aging glamour girl Kim Novak (referred to as New York's most popular chorus girl) wishes that she was still dancing for Chez Joey in "Pal Joey". She's the lead of this middeling movie of the week that would give any aging former star vertigo. As luck would have it, she's involved with another Joey, here played by Tony Curtis, also her manager, and breaking away from him rather than join him in Las Vegas so she can try to finally find herself.
While Curtis is away, Novak begins to become involved with the much younger delivery boy, Michael Brandon, who follows her to Las Vegas while Curtis is seen with the rather nasty chorus girl played by Barbi Benton, a familiar name in the 1970s, but quite forgotten now. Curtis breaks into song several times, a indication of why he rarely appeared in musicals. There is an inside joke of one chorus girl doing the road company of "Sugar", the musical version of Curtis's 1959 classic "Some Like It Hot". Like in "Pal Joey", Curtis pulls Novak onstage against her will while she's barely wearing anything. The script seems to find all sorts of minor references to the cast's old works which would have worked better had this been a decent flick.
Probably the dullest folksong in music history is heard over and over again, threatening to put the viewer asleep from the moment it is heard in the opening credits. If dancing in a second string cabaret is considered top notch in New York, then those who later gave their blood, sweat and tears for "A Chorus Line" must have been exaggerating. Novak still looks great, but it's a real shame that she couldn't get a good script with believable characterizations. It's a middle of the road combination of the wretchedness of "Valley of the Dolls" and the later "Showgirls", minus the camp.