MaryLois40 I stayed tuned when I saw it was a Steven Hill movie, and that Patty Duke was in it. Of course I'd seen Kim Stanley before and remembered her from television dramas of the 1950s, but LAW AND ORDER has been my go-to show for comfort because of the presence of Steven Hill as the calm, reserved, and wise Adam Schiff over the years. Hill was one of those young firebrand actors from the Actors Studio, along with Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift, with great emotional depth and range, and too little film remains of him except for his creation of the big boss of all those young D.A's.I enjoyed this clunky film--its flashes of brilliant dialogue by Paddy Chayefsky, the simplicity of young Patty Duke's portrayal of lonely childhood, the miraculous transformation of Kim Stanley to Emily Ann Faulkner (a spectacularly bad name choice, I thought), a chattery teenager and needy adult--but even more, I loved Steven Hill's John Tower. John is neglected, as Emmy has been, but has turned inward to the point of suicide. Steven delivers the self-loathing monologues without sentimentality or melodrama, but as the monumental weight that controls his life. He simply tells his story as a neurosis-ridden introvert might. His performance is direct, uncluttered, rather like Adam Schiff's was to be.The movie is worth seeing, for the writing and for all the performances. It does not paint a picture of Marilyn Monroe--later writers and actresses would go much farther in doing that--and, knowing what we now do about Marilyn we'd hardly connect this film to her. But it is an excellent example of the kind of acting that was breaking ground in the 1950s, through the proliferation of live television dramas and the excellent teaching of the craft of acting in New York and around the country. Kim Stanley is a virtuoso, but Steven Hill was too.

kapelusznik18 ***SPOILERS*** Paddy Chayefsky's thinly disguised biography of Hollywood sex symbol Marilyn Monroe and what fame did to her and those close to her. Kim Stanly plays the part of Emily Ann Faulkner a local girl, from rural Maryland, who made it big in tinsel town and in the end paid for it. Working her way up in mostly non speaking parts in mostly B-movies Emily got her big brake after she married former light heavyweight champion of the world Dutch Seynour, Llyod Bridges, who in fact saw more of Emily Ann then anyone in the movie. This was after a failed marriage with son of major movie star John Towers, Steven Hill, whom she had a daughter with and who deserted them both to go overseas to fight fascism in Nazi occupied Europe wishing that he'll never come back alive. It's much later that a sober and reformed Towers does come back to Emily Ann together with the couples 14 year old daughter, Gial Haworth, but by then Emily Ann is so out of it she's in no condition to see her.The film mirrors Marilyn Monroe's career in Hollywood where she became the biggest star in films but paid dearly in the lifestyle she lead off the screen that in the end, that's 4 years after the movie was released, ended up losing her life at the young age of 36. It's the death of Emily Ann's bible thumping mom Laureen, Betty Lou Holland, that really pushed her over the edge. We see Emily Ann slowly self destructs and become addicted to pills and booze to the point where the only thing left in life to her is the movies that she stars in that make money for the studios. We get to see Emily Ann go from a beautiful and talented actress to a bed ridden pill popping wino in less then ten years, 1947-1957, not at all caring what will happen to her in the future.***SPOILERS*** It's a true story in many ways of how fame can destroy the person who has it and Kim Stanley does an amazing job of acting to make that point on the screen. We've seen so many similar cases in and out of Hollywood of people who seem to have the world in their hands and at their feet and then end up dead or institutionalized because of the pressure it, fame, demands of them which they can't handle.

funkyfry Names like Paddy Chayefsky and Kim Stanley still carry some weight -- and, in this film, they have to. It's not a terrible movie, but it is a weird little film, not the least because Kim Stanley is so completely and utterly miscast. And yet, her performance has stirring moments and the film does have a dark energy, in its early portions, that's dispersed in many vaguely wrong directions as the film winds towards its predictable conclusion.Stanley's miscasting begins with the physical --- she was much too old for the role, even for the later parts of the film, so in the sequences where she's supposed to be a teenager it is really laughable. Sad to say, she's also simply not attractive enough to be cast as a movie star. People on this board may be comparing her to Bette Davis, but at 40 Bette still had some sexy spark. With Stanley, there's no real screen chemistry. I found myself often thinking that Betty Lou Holland, as her mother, was more attractive in her "old age" makeup than Stanley was in her "young age" makeup. There is some movie magic that can be employed in cases like this, but the producers apparently skimped.....They also forgot to cast a compelling male in the film -- Lloyd Bridges tries awful hard here and it's probably best to just leave it at that. Steven Hill is just a stick of wood, just horrible to watch in this film.The film came out just a few years before everybody saw what was so wrong with Marilyn Monroe, on whom the film is so clearly based. There's also a bit of Jane Mansfield in there too, perhaps. In the sense that this came out in the late 50s, instead of the early 60s (when Carroll Baker made a mini-career out of these kinds of roles), it's a prescient film. But it's not a powerful film, because none of the secondary characters are able to match up to Stanley's screen time. It's a confused and confusing movie -- I thought occasionally Chayefsky was reaching for dark humor, in the sense perhaps of Tennessee Williams' contemporary "Baby Doll" with the aforementioned Carroll Baker, but if he was reaching for this then he forgot to tell director John Cromwell, whose work here is just as remote and studied as it was on any of his big Fox productions with Tyrone Power and people like that.

David (Handlinghandel) That is a line from the movie and I'm afraid it fits when rating it.Almost everything seems to be wrong with this odd movie. It seems to be Paddy Chayevsky doing a Tennessee Williams. The Southern setting is somewhat believable. The accents are too but somewhat less so.Kim Stanley, a noted stage actress, is hard to ignore. She's very in-your-face in this role. But she seems to have been miscast: This is kind of a r variation on the story of many beauty queens who are neurotic, make it, and ... But Stanley is no Marilyn Monroe. She's no Harlow. Certainly she's attractive but the camera doesn't love her the way it has loved the great beauties of the screen.Further: Her character is exceptionally annoying. Certainly she's meant to be difficult. But I don't think she's intended to come across as a thoroughly self-involved narcissist.Almost every sentence this woman we're asked to feel for utters starts with "I" or addresses issues involving "me." She's hard to feel bad about or even to care about.One aspect of the movie shines: That is the beautiful music by Virgil Thomson. It's a memorable film score.