Watch The Rat Race For Free

Brilliant and touching

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Tony Curtis is an ambitious young saxophonist who shows up in New York looking for a job. He's from Milwaukee. (!) He hasn't brought much money, only his instruments, and he's stumped when the Dixie Hotel (!) demands seven dollars a night for a room. (!) LOL. God, I loved New York City in 1960. As a young feller I was on a first-name basis with every one of its park benches in Washington Square.Curtis manages to find a room for a few dollars a night in a boarding house run by a tough old broad. Oh, she's crust on the outside. But underneath that, she's a real softy. And underneath THAT, she's a real MEAN barracuda.She finds a shabby room for Curtis by the simple expedient of throwing Debby Reynolds out because she's in arrears. But Curtis, a gentleman of the Midwest, offers to share the room because Reynolds has no other place to go and is one step away from becoming a working girl. Do they fight, you ask? Do they argue? Do they trade favors? Do they fall in love? You're kidding.It was written by Garsin Kanin who knows the tough underbelly of the city. It began as a play and maybe that accounts for the extended talk fests involving Curtis and Reynolds. The viewer already knows what's going to happen the moment they meet. Neither is going to wind up in the booby hatch. This is not Tennessee Williams.The writing is uneven. If Jack Oakie, as Mac the bartender, was any more avuncular it would have launched me into a series of clonic spasms. But when Kanin gets the right actors in the right scene, he wins every time. Take Don Rickles, as Reynolds' boss at the dance hall. Kids, a dance hall is a place where you can pay to enter and where lonesome men go to buy tickets to dance with the ladies. The most famous of them was, and maybe still is, Roseland, where I took an attractive young lady named Rose Brown. I don't remember what she looked like but who could forget that name -- "Rose" "Brown." Anyway, Reynolds doesn't make much money dancing with the drunks and the goaty customers, and she's in debt to Don Rickles, who is constantly urging her to "have drinks and a dinner" with a nice rich customer. Just be accommodating. In a completely unnecessary scene, Rickles forces her to remove most of her clothing.Best scene in the entire film: Tony Curtis gets a chance to audition for a famous combo called The Red Peppers. He shows up, bringing all his four reed instruments, eager for a job. The group is a phony. After a bit of practice, they send Curtis out for beer and pretzels, steal all his instruments and his seersucker jacket, and exit through the window. It's heartbreaking but it's hilarious. The dialog is exquisite. The cynical leader of the group is played by Ed Bushkin, a well-known pianist and composer ("Just Look At Me Now"). And when the saxophonists toot, they really toot, making Curtis look like the tyro he is. Elmer Bernstein, who wrote the musical score, is a group member. Later on, Gerry Mulligan makes a brief appearance.Both Curtis and Reynolds are professional performers and it shows. But they're miscast. Tony Curtis, born Bernie Schwartz in the Bronx, is a naive youth from Milwaukee? And Debby Reynolds is sexy in a dramatic role but she's too girlish. She has a piping high voice. She's just not convincing as a tough New Yorker, not here and not in "The Catered Affair." Somebody attractive but deeper could have handled it better, maybe someone like Patricia O'Neal.It's not badly done, not insulting in any way, although it would have been nice to have more than just a few second-unit shots of Jack Dempsey's and the Port Authority Bus Terminal. The comic interludes alone make it worth catching.

In watching The Rat Race today, I was struck by the fact that this film did not lead to any more parts like the one she played here for Debbie Reynolds. She was quite a revelation as the girl who's been around the block a few times and just struggling to stay alive in that meat grinder called New York.By the time The Rat Race came out, Tony Curtis was already being taken quite seriously as an actor with The Sweet Smell Of Success and The Defiant Ones behind him. But Reynolds was America's sweetheart, still basking in the sympathy of the American public when Elizabeth Taylor stole husband Eddie Fisher. She played good girl roles almost exclusively, but here she takes on a part that you would have more readily cast Elizabeth Taylor.Curtis is from the Midwest and an aspiring jazz musician who comes to New York, but gets quickly victimized by a cruel city. Reynolds is a woman who is an aspiring model who does what she has to in order to survive. But that's coming to an end as landlady Kay Medford wants her money and thug Don Rickles who she's into wants something else and quick. The two of them decide to move in together without benefit of clergy, something that was still quite daring with the Code firmly in place. It's strictly economic at first, but you know these two people living one step from the gutter would fall for each other.The film was based on a play that Garson Kanin wrote and ran 84 performances in the 1949-50 season on Broadway. It starred Betty Field and Barry Nelson on stage and repeating his role from the original cast as a musician con man is jazz great Joe Bushkin. Besides Reynolds the performance to really watch out for is Don Rickles as murderous hood Nellie. For those of you who think of Rickles as insult comedian to the stars, his performance will knock your socks off. He far more than Debbie was the real surprise here. Jack Oakie has one of his last roles as a philosophical bartender, serving drinks in the downstairs of Kay Medford's boarding house.I have a sneaking suspicion that Debbie Reynolds might have taken this part to prove she had every bit the acting chops Elizabeth Taylor did. She certainly proved it to me and The Rat Race ranks as one of the best performances by either of the two stars.

Why the producers decided to cast New Yorker Tony Curtis in the film, I just can't understand. Why would they cast him of all people considering he is supposed to be playing a guy from Milwaukee who gets lost in the big bad city of New York? With his very strong New York accent, it just didn't make sense. Listening to him, he sounded like he should have been perfectly at home in the Bronx or Brooklyn! Fortunately, the rest of the movie is so good that I really didn't mind the odd casting. In fact, Tony Curtis and Debbie Reynolds were excellent in the film--with acting and dialog that seemed pretty realistic. They both play "starving artists" who come to New York but find success is somehow always out of sight. I teach at an art school and would like to show this to my students so they can, perhaps, see what it usually is like on the slow road to making a living.I also appreciated how the writers didn't allow the film to slide too far into sentimentality even though this was a romantic-comedy of sorts. That means when there can be a magical scene where things all work out perfectly, the writers chose instead to allow for a more realistic moment where things worked out,...somewhat. My favorite example was near the end when it appeared that Curtis' musical instruments unexpectedly re-appeared. This LOOKS like a "happily ever after moment" but there is a great twist--a twist that reminds us that in this film, just like in real life, Murphy's Law so often applies. To me, the real magic in the film is how despite all these setbacks and problems, the couple STILL manage to find each other and some shred of happiness. And, if you think about it, this is a great lesson for everyone.A nice, romantic, funny but occasionally sad and cynical little film about life and little people.By the way, look for Don Rickles in one of his earliest roles. He plays a guy who is amazingly creepy and cruel--quite a change from his later comedic roles. Also, the sweet guy behind the bar is Jack Oakie in one of his later roles

If Garson Kanin's stage version were successful enough to earn a movie treatment by producers Perlberg and Seaton, whose adaptation of Clifford Odets's "The Country Girl" is famously exquisite, one can only assume that the play was more honest and less preposterously disingenuous than this laughable adaptation.Written by Kanin himself, who must have swallowed a fair amount of bile at the bowdlerizing mandated by the Hollywood Production Code, the film addresses its central question, which appears to be whether "dance hall girl" Debbie Reynolds (!) is or isn't a prostitute, with pages and pages of jaw-droppingly elliptical dialogue that bears no resemblance to human speech -- lines on the order of, "I'd never think you'd...you know..." and "How could you think I'm the kind of girl you think I am?" Those are not necessarily exact quotes, but you get the idea.The film is sunk by other equally bizarre choices at every turn, including not only the female lead's spectacular miscasting but her co-star's as well. Presenting Tony Curtis as a Midwestern naif being conned by heartless Manhattanites produces such howlingly funny utterances as "And on my foist day in New Yawk!" '30s Paramount comedy star Jack Oakie and Kay Medford, Dick Van Dyke's mother in the stage version of "Bye, Bye, Birdie," comprise a kind of greasy-spoon Greek chorus, a bartender and his only barfly, Reynolds's landlady, whom we first meet sitting at the bar drinking orange soda! In this Times Square saloon which, like many other sets in the film, reveals the art director's painful fascination with red walls, there is more mugging going on than in Central Park.But all of this is topped by the grotesquely overwrought, bug-eyed and nostril-flaring performance of Don Rickles, who quickly demonstrates why he found his true calling in standup rather than film acting. You're better off reading the play, but only reading it, because no impresario has the bad taste to mount a revival of it any more.