JohnHowardReid Producer: Charles Brackett. Copyright 1958 by 20th Century-Fox Film Corp. New York opening at the Paramount: 22 May 1958. U.S. release: May 1958. U.K. release: 29 June 1958. Australian release: 11 September 1958. 9,158 feet. 102 minutes.SYNOPSIS: It is 1945 and Joe Chapin is dead. At the funeral reception in his home at 10 North Frederick in Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, his daughter Ann recalls the last five years of his life ... Goaded by an ambitious wife, Edith, who aspires to be the First Lady in Washington, Joe throws his hat in the political ring by offering a one-hundred-thousand dollar bribe to political boss Mike Slattery. At about this time, Ann meets trumpet player Charlie Bongiorno. When she falls in love, becomes pregnant, marries and then has a miscarriage, Joe protects his career by "buying off" Charlie and having the marriage annulled. Heart-broken, Ann leaves home for a book-store job in New York. Double-crossed by Slattery, Joe fails to get the nomination for lieutenant governor.COMMENT: A well-acted, but rather turgid and slow-moving melodrama. Director Dunne seems determined that not a word of his deathless dialogue be lost. Every word is meticulously enunciated — a stratagem guaranteed not to improve an already funereal pace. In other respects, unfortunately, Mr. Dunne is less scrupulous. He makes no attempts even to utilize the scope of the CinemaScope screen, let alone spice up the anti-heroics with dramatic and powerful compositions or imaginative camera placement and movement. His direction, in short, is stolidly uninteresting.Gary Cooper, Geraldine Fitzgerald and company fight a valiant but losing battle to keep the film alive for 102 way-overdue minutes.

thedivo I watched this movie last night after having not seen it in many years. In the very first scene we are told it is the year 1945. Then a string of cars are seen pulling up to a house. The second car is a 1950 Lincoln Cosmopolitan which of course did not exist in 1945.

Michael O'Keefe Gary Cooper plays Joe Chapin, a very successful man turning fifty years old, prodded into state politics by his nagging wife, played by Geraldine Fitzgerald. Chapin shuns the political scene when he finds it going against the standards and principles he lives by. His wife soon makes him feel a loser and he finds solace in the arms of his daughter's roommate, half his age.Romantic and consuming; from the pen of Philip Dunne. This is an over looked drama shot in black and white. Daughter Ann is played by Diane Varsi and her roommate Kate is played by the lovely Suzy Parker. Also in the cast are Stuart Whitman and Ray Sticklyn.

Kirasjeri Powerful older man romances gorgeous woman a third his age; daughter gets pregnant by a bandleader who is threatened and bought off by the powerful father, etc etc. Sound familiar? Yes, it's a well-acted Soap with a good cast. If you love Gary Cooper or think Suzy Parker looked marvelous, check it out. But you've seen this kind of thing before - and this is really a dated antique vis a vis values. I just want to know where the "psychotic evil twin sister" is, and other stock Soap characters.