Starring Van Heflin, Clifton Webb, Lauren Bacall, June Allyson, Arlene Dahl, Fred MacMurray, Cornel Wilde

(7-Very Good Film)

Involving. Plush. Attractive.

Ernest Gifford (Webb) runs the biggest auto company in 1950’s America. Needing a new General Manager, he invites three potential candidates to New York in order to examine them…and their wives. There’s the Talbots (Heflin and Dahl), a working-class husband with a gorgeous, ambitious wife, the Baxters (Wilde and Allyson), down to earth with the wife being a bit of a klutz, and the Burns (MacMurray and Bacall), estranged and on the verge of divorce. Each character is distinct and interesting and the story is slight but involving. The director, Negulesco (How to Marry a Millionaire, Three Coins in the Fountain), excelled at the so-called “women pictures.” His vibrant, technicolor, character-based dramas are always compelling.

-Walter Tyrone Howard-

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