The Best Of Everything (1959)
When I saw Joan Crawford on the phone with a plaintive expression on her face adorning the cover, I figured that I was in for another Torch Song-style epic marked by Joan's descent into the cartoonishness that seemed to define the later stages of her film career. While the movie has a few moments where she snarls and nips at people that are younger and better looking than her, the cover is quite misleading.
Aside from the fact that Joanie is barely in this movie, you will note that according the DVD cover, she appears to have some type of lightly colored blonde hair. I can assure you that after getting past the caterpillar-sized eyebrows she sports throughout this film that her hair is that fire-engine red color that all true Crawford fans go ape over.
If this movie isn't going to get by on the strength of the over-the-hill stardom of its headlining has-been, then how does it fill two hours? Who are these other goofs that populate this woman-eating publishing office, where people spend a lot of time talking about all the work they have to do, but don't actually spend any time doing it? Supposedly the point of this movie was to feature the up and coming stars that Fox had back in the day. Such luminaries as Hope Lange. We were all moved by her performance in the classic Wild In The Country, right? Come on, you remember that one - it starred Elvis!
Then there was Suzy Parker. You probably really loved her in the hit movie A Circle Of Deception where she met, fell in love with, and married star Bradford Dillman. At least I'll bet that movie is real popular in the Dillman household. There is a bona fide star playing one of the super-tan guys though. It's Stephen Boyd! We all cheered when he got ground into Alpo by his horses in the chariot race against some up and coming gladiator named Ben-Hur!
With Crawford, Boyd, and Lange on board, this movie manages to spend most of its two hours on exciting stuff like Joan throwing files on people's desk, making them work late, and watching Lange go from dumb girl who just took the secretary job until her boyfriend gets back from London, to power-hungry wench that doesn't care about men anymore once she's jilted, to gal that is sweet on Mike Rice (Boyd), to dumb girl that is going to break up her old boyfriend's marriage and then realizes that he's only using her.
She isn't the only woman that this movie focuses on though. This is a soap opera which means that you have the lives of a bunch of lonely, pathetic women intertwining. And by intertwining, I mean that occasionally they show up for work together and every so often they'll all be back at their apartment at the same time to mope around about the latest stunt whatever piece of trash they're dating just pulled. The best part of all this is that nothing really interesting happens in their lives. Of course one of the gals meets a tragic end (you can spot her a mile away), but even that isn't very exciting - she just trips and falls off a fire escape!
Hope Lange plays a woman named Caroline Bender who answers an ad to go to work as a secretary at Fabian Publishing. She is engaged to a guy that is over in Liverpool for awhile so she gets this job to kill time until this guy can come back and marry her unambitious ass. Crawford plays Amanda Farrow, one of the editors at Fabian and she's what you would expect if Crawford was really your boss. She makes a bunch of snide comments about Caroline and her college education and how Caroline was really there gunning for her job (As what? Broken down old movie star?)
Caroline is pretty good about not taking too much guff from Amanda, at least better than you would have expected out of a peroxided blonde that is just waiting around for her no-account boyfriend to marry her. You can see that Caroline has a little backbone to her, but you quickly learn to dislike her character shortly after her boyfriend calls from England to tell her the good news. He got married! To Someone else! HAHAHA! This all seemed a bit forced. How do you go over to England for a few weeks and find someone to marry when you already have a fiance?
With her dreams of being a housewife crushed, Caroline puts her nose to the grindstone and immediately decides that she is going to be an editor at Fabian books. She moves up the ladder quite quickly, over the objections of Amanda and soon she even has Amanda's job! She also has managed to start romancing the hunky Ben-Hur refugee Mike Rice.
Mike's character is distinguished mainly because his conversational skills usually involve asking the bartender for "another" if you catch my meaning. He also has a dimple in his chin that would have made Kirk Douglas wince. Most of the time he was on screen, I kept thinking one of two things. The first was that I kept urging Mike not to let his hair get too close to an open flame. The second was wondering whether it would be better to have Harry Hamlin or Lorenzo Lamas play this role when the Lifetime channel remakes it. Lorenzo's cheaper, but Harry could probably get his current or former wives to sign on as well, so it's pretty much a toss-up.
This isn't just Caroline's story of bad self-esteem and poor choice in men, however. She also has two roommates that also work at Fabian. One of them is a tall gal that is named Greg. This caused me a lot of confusion, because where I come from Greg is a boy's name, so whenever someone starting prattling on about how Greg was out sick from work because she was an aspiring actress, I kept assuming that Greg was off auditioning for something like an off-Broadway revival like La Cage Aux Folles.
Greg is one of those aspiring actresses whose talent is wildly outstripped by her enthusiasm. She finally gets her big break though when famed director David Savage takes an interest in her various assets in spite of her total inability to read her lines right. She quits her job at Fabian and becomes the director's love interest full time. She is understandably disappointed then when he tells her that she sucks and he's going to replace her. She quickly demonstrates the utter lack of pride or self respect she has when instead of kneeing him in the nads and cutting up his clothes, she begs to stay on as an understudy!
She further sinks into Fatal Attraction territory when he tells her that she can hit the bricks and that they are through and she takes that to mean that she should hang out on his fire escape and collect bits of garbage for her own demented purpose. (I was hoping it was for some type of voodoo curse thing, but I think she was just plain-old obsessed.)
Caroline's other roommate goes by the nickname of Colorado. This is because she comes to the big city via her home state of Colorado. Colorado is really code for "Small Town Rube" and she learns all about life in the Big Apple the hard way. From the chronic sexual harasser, Fred Shalimar, to what happens when a rich young cad named Dexter gets her preggers out of wedlock.
Colorado thinks that they are going off to get married, but really they're just going to Maryland because Dexter knows a guy that can do an "operation" on her and straighten all this out. I suppose this movie was a bit out there with its abortion story line, but it doesn't really address any of the issues associated with it since Colorado spazs out when she hears Dexter's plan and tries to get out of his speeding sports car while the dang thing is still in fifth gear! The next thing you know, Colorado is all laid out on the side of the road and no longer has to worry about making a decision whether to keep her baby or not!
At the hospital it's confirmed that she lost the baby. But it's like my grandma always said, "when God closes one window, he opens up another to air out the fetid stink of your life." Even though she lost the baby and Dexter is needing to be "out of town" for awhile, she hooks up with the hunky and tan doctor that treated her (Shoot, he already knows she's easy!) and Colorado's story line is wrapped up all nice and neat.
And what of Caroline? Just when things seemed to be going well for her and Mike Rice, her ex-boyfriend calls up and wants to see her again while he's in town for business. Proving that she hasn't done a single bit of growing up since he pink slipped her in the beginning of the movie, she agrees (while Mike is in the room with her) and then she proceeds to meet him, make out with him, dump Mike and starts planning on getting her dream job as bored housewife back.
Unfortunately, when she starts talking to this dude about dumping his wife, he explains that he'll just open up an office in New York and do his business with her a few days a month and then go back to his rich wife and her rich daddy. Gals, it's really tough to compete with your boyfriend's wife's rich father, so don't even try.
Caroline figures out that maybe Mike Rice, wasn't such a bad catch after all and she ditches the ex-boyfriend. Meanwhile, Amanda Farrow has quit her job and come back again. All of this happened for no good reason other than to give Joan Crawford something, anything, to do in this movie. Her role is clearly unimportant and they don't even bother trying to hide that fact from us, by shuffling her off screen for a good portion of the last half of the movie.
The film has dated badly and was clearly someone's romance novel idea of what it was like for women in the workplace, rather than any kind of serious treatment of the subject. Here the women don't have to worry about the challenges of juggling work, office politics, and home life. The only thing that concerns them is what their crappy boyfriends are up to.
What you end up with in this movie is a variety of fantasy situations. There's the woman finding Prince Charming in her doctor (woman's fantasy #16), a woman dumping the man who loves her for one more shot at her ex, but then dumping him and finding the new boyfriend still receptive to dating her traitorous ass (woman's fantasy #7), and finally you have the crazy ex-girlfriend falling off her ex's fire escape to her death (men's fantasy #1). A soap opera with nominal stories, irritating characters, and a blandly insensitive treatment to a variety of issues, make this drama a comedy that just isn't quite funny enough to justify viewing it even for laughs.