Designing Woman

Year: 1957
Genre: Romantic Comedy
Directed: Vincente Minnelli
Stars: Gregory Peck, Lauren Bacall, Dolores Gray, Sam Levene, Tom Helmore, Mickey Shaughnessy, Jesse White, Chuck Connors, Edward Platt, Alvy Moore, Carol Veazie, Jack Cole
Production: MGM

Designing Woman is seemingly one of the most retrograde pieces of apple pie and baseball Americana ever to come out of Hollywood. Told with earnest by Gregory Peck, Lauren Bacall and director Vincente Minnelli of all people, the movie could be on the short list of Phyllis Schlafly's favorite films. Yet underneath it's sentimental 1950's quaintness, there's a tiny bit worth its nearly two-hour run time.

Gregory Peck plays Mike Hagen, a working class, poker playing sports writer who meets the dainty and erudite Marilla who is taking a short vacation from the fashion designing world. They fall in love in the fanciful way movie couples often did in the those days. Then they get married; quickly and without much actual forethought. As the two head back to their homes in Manhattan they suddenly realize they have very little in common and must wrestle with old insecurities and jealousies as well as new high drama when Mike becomes a sought after man.

This film thinks it's pulling a Rashomon (1950) but it really isn't

The film piques the interest of the viewer with an interesting narrative trick. The film is told past-tense with a litany of narrators all coloring in their versions of the story. Most of the narration is filled in by Mike and Marilla who assure the viewer they haven't argued in months now and when they do they make it through. While this tact is an interesting little ploy, it doesn't really change anything. Sure a coy little aside here and there gives audiences the impression of humor but since the events and their relation to one another are not disputed by unreliable narrators, the whole exercise seems pointless.

Oh Cary Grant, you were such a class act.

Peck encapsulates a role first written with Cary Grant in mind. It's easy to tell as Mike is a bit of a cad; goodnatured but still very much the kind of urban illiberal rascal that Grant was famous for. Perhaps it's the fallout of Peck's iconic roll in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) clouding my judgment, but here he just doesn't transcend. His Mike Hagen is broad, pedestrian and seemingly not made of whole cloth but rather an amalgam of earlier snippy leading men like Spencer Tracy's Adam Bonner or Clark Gable's Peter Warne. Lauren Bacall likewise has trouble fitting into her role as the refined Marilla. Part of Bacall's appeal is her earthy sensuousness which is, in a way the opposite of the fussiness required of a woman who is troubled by her beau walking around the apartment shoe-less. Granted, Bacall's early past as a fashion model could have served her well to overcome such superficiality. Unfortunately at the time, her husband Humphrey Bogart was succumbing to cancer of the esophagus.

This man will end you!

Despite two ill-cast leads, Designing Woman still manages to be marginal entertainment thanks to the supporting characters Maxie Stultz (Shaughnessy) and Randy (Cole). Shaughnessy's punchy sidekick is brimming with the theatrical idiosyncrasies that would give any character actor the urge to stand in front of a mirror and say "yeah I can do this!" Is Maxie a cartoonishly broad Guys and Dolls (1955) knockoff? Sure; but unlike the leads, we don't mind so much. the other real showstopper is famed Choreographer Jack Cole who despite less than ten lines, devises a fight sequence so corporeal, you'd swear Jackie Chan had seen it as a kid in Hong Kong and got ideas.

Yet Jack Cole's splashy and spirited brawl is too-little-too-late for this studio-system dud. Designing Woman does little to mix-up the battle of the sexes premise that danced around the Hays Code during the screwball craze of the 1930's. In-fact, in comparison to those films, Designing Woman is rather tame, throwing its matrimonial agenda at the feet of a public that either didn't care or, in today's world are repulsed by its outmoded-ness. Ultimately, it's flat, featureless, dull and doesn't provide anything other than the reliable star power of two Hollywood icons slumming it.

Final Grade: D