Charles Walters

A young woman enters a contest to be the first to swim the English Channel.Read More »

A young woman who is unable to pay her rent gets some unexpected help when the other tenants throw a last-minute rent party in her apartment. In the process, they all charm the landlady out of a year’s rent. The entire story is told in song (swing music) and dance (Jitterbug, Lindy Hop etc.).Read More »

A young woman enters a contest to be the first to swim the English Channel.Read More »

Otis L. Guernsey, Jr., in the New York Herald Tribune (1952):

Joan Crawford has another of her star-sized roles….Playing a musical comedy actress in the throes of rehearsal and in love with a blind pianist, she is vivid and irritable, volcanic and feminine. She dances; she pretends to sing; she graciously permits her wide mouth and snappish eyes to be photographed in Technicolor….Here is Joan Crawford all over the screen, in command, in love and in color, a real movie star in what amounts to a carefully produced one-woman show. Miss Crawford’s acting is sheer and colorful as a painted arrow, aimed straight at the sensibilities of her particular fans.Read More »

Plot:
Members of a circus troupe “adopt” Lili Daurier when she finds herself stranded in a strange town. The magician who first comes to her rescue already has romantic entanglements and thinks of her as a little girl. Who can she turn to but the puppets, singing to them her troubles, forgetting that there are puppeteers. A crowd gathers around Lili as she sings. The circus has a new act. She now has a job. Will she get her heart’s desire? Read More »

Three For Two finds Lucille Ball and Jackie Gleason in short vignettes about couples. In “Herb & Sally,” they’re on vacation in Rome, where Sally wants romance and Herb feels like she’s always angry at him, perhaps with good reason. “Fred & Rita” finds two adulterers meeting in secret. In “Mike & Pauline,” a couple is angry because their kids want to go out on New Year’s Eve.Read More »

Quote:
The film was originally to have starred Gene Kelly, but Kelly was injured just prior to production and Astaire, who had announced his retirement from film, was coaxed back to replace him. (Astaire would “retire” several more times over the next decade, but he would also go on to make a number of additional classic musicals in between retirements.) This film marked the major MGM debut of tap-dancer Ann Miller (who had previously been under contract to RKO), replacing Cyd Charisse, who also had to bow out of the production.Read More »