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The Girl Who Had Everything
Attorney's daughter falls for one of his gangster clients.
Release : | 1953 |
Rating : | 5.6 |
Studio : | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, |
Crew : | Art Direction, Art Direction, |
Cast : | Elizabeth Taylor Fernando Lamas William Powell Gig Young James Whitmore |
Genre : | Drama Romance |
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Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.
It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.
It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.
A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.
Producer: Armand Deutsch. Copyright 27 February 1953 (in notice: 1952) by Loew's Inc. A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer picture. No New York opening. U.S. release: 27 March 1953. U.K. release: 13 July 1953. Australian release: 25 May 1953. 6,242 feet. 69 minutes.SYNOPSIS: Jean Latimer, daughter of a wealthy criminal lawyer, falls in love with one of her father's clients, Victor Ramondi, the crooked head of a gambling syndicate. Latimer warns his daughter against Ramondi, but she is determined to marry him. On the day before the wedding, Ramondi learns that Latimer intends to bring him before a Senate crime investigation committee. NOTES: A re-make of A Free Soul (1931).COMMENT: Mediocre romantic drama. Were it not for the beautiful presence of Elizabeth Taylor, beautifully photographed and attractively costumes, the rating would be even less. William Powell looks old and tired and just goes through the motions on this last film of his M-G-M contract, while Fernando Lamas and James Whitmore are totally unable to convince us they are ruthless gangsters.Thorpe's direction is at its best in the gangsters' action sequences (the senatorial hearing with flash-bulbs popping), but shows evidences of hasty shooting in the dialogue scenes (Miss Taylor is inadequate in the long take in which she tells Powell she is going back, though the camera is skilfully placed). Production values are not lavish. The film was obviously designed for the lower half of a double bill.OTHER VIEWS: This Hollywood-lush tale has been handled by Richard Thorpe with routine competence but no imagination; dialogue and incident are of the same monotonous order. Of the cast, William Powell turns in a familiarly wise-slick portrayal and Elizabeth Taylor, decoratively satisfying, plays a limited character with limited skill. The whole adds up to a graceless pattern of screen melodrama. - Monthly Film Bulletin.
this is a very short movie and one of the most obscure in Elizabeth Taylor's filmography.Obviously it's not one of her best but she is really gorgeous .She portrays a rich kid "who has everything" (the title tells no lies),with a rather over possessive father -who has excuses ,for he is a widower and she is his only child- and a good-looking but bland and boring fiancé .Enter a shady handsome Latin lover type man (Lamas)and the girl falls heads over heels in love.The most interesting side of this Harlequin Romance is its reactionary side:for the distinguished father ,the hunk will always be worse than a nouveau riche ;he will never be part of the respectable circle of gentlemen and the more he tries to start all over again,to redeem his soul -"even God would give me a second chance"-,the more he fails ,for he's got two kind of enemies now: the fine upstanding people and his former partners from his racy past.
Turner Classic Movies ended an all-day marathon of Elizabeth Taylor movies today with this turkey. I stayed up way past my beddie-bye time in stupefied horror as I watched it. What were they thinking? The waste of usually first-class talent was astounding in virtually every department. Especially worthy of note was Andre Previn's absurdly over-the-top score, not bad as music but entirely inappropriate when laid on with a trowel over the sad and hackneyed proceedings. The always pedestrian director Richard Thorpe, as usual, failed to redeem the enterprise with even a scintilla of visual imagination.A Mr. Art Cohn, who died about five years later in the private plane crash that killed Mike Todd, then Elizabeth Taylor's third husband, is credited with the script. Dare I say it, was that divine retribution for churning out the cliches that the actors whom M-G-M shoved into this mess were forced to speak?Its only virtue is its mercifully short running time of slightly over one hour. This was probably Elizabeth's nadir during her servitude at Metro.
This film is a good example of standard MGM output in the early 1950s - still glossy, with good production values, but dramatically no great shakes. It is perhaps most notable as being William Powell's final film at MGM. Although it must have been appealing to Powell to play the same part that won Lionel Barrymore an Oscar in 1931 (for A Free Soul), the writer of this film let Powell down with a routine script. Also notable is André Previn's score, which seems unnecessarily lush at times given the routine nature of the production.