Not the sitcom in Atlanta

There are a couple of movies airing Thursday afternoon that I want to blog about, so I decided to start a day early and mention one of them today and the other tomorrow so that you have enough lead time to watch both. First up is Designing Woman, at 12:15 PM Thursday on TCM.

The movie uses a brief opening narration to introduce us to the dramatis personæ:
Gregory Peck as Mike Hagen, New York sportswriter;
Lauren Bacall as Marilla Brown, fashion designer who has some sort of difficult relationship with Mike;
Dolores Gray as Lori Shannon, Mike's former girlfriend;
Tom Helmore as Zachary, Marilla's ex-boyfriend; and
Mickey Shaughnessy as Maxie, a boxer who relates to all this somehow.

Flashback to how Mike met Marilla. Mike is one of those sportswriters who covers a lot of different sports; one week he gets sent out to Los Angeles to cover a golf tournament. He won big in the writers' betting pool on who would win, and uses that money to get extremely drunk, meeting Marilla the next morning and having no idea who she is. The two start one of those movie romances that you know is going to lead to a marriage much too soon, before they find out they might not be compatible for each other.

Sure enough, they get married, and upon returning home, Mike has to deal with ex-girlfriend Lori, who's been trying to break into the showbusiness world, with at least modest success. But the nature of Mike's telling Lori he's gotten married, followed by Marilla's meeting Mike just after Lori left, leads Marilla to worry about Mike possibly having had a former boyfriend.

The married couple is less-than compatible in other ways; Marilla has all sorts of friends in the hoity-toity theater world and gets hired to do the costumes for a big play. One night Mike tries to have the rotating poker night with his sportswriter friends at the couple's apartment while Marilla has her theater friends over. Needless to say, it doesn't go well.

Marilla also doesn't like Mike's coverage of boxing, since she sees it as a much too violent sport. It's also risky for Mike, as he's doing an exposé on boxing promoter Martin Daylor, who Mike says is in with the Mob and Mike is going to prove it. This prompts Martin to send a bunch of goons to Mike's apartment, led by Lucas McCain doing a Brooklyn accent (er, actually Chuck Connors), telling Mike to knock it off or he's going to get harmed. Mike goes into hiding without telling Marilla the truth, and Martin decides he's going to nab Marilla instead.

A good portion of the plot made me think of the Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn vehicle Woman of the Year, and I'm not the first. That one was a bit better, although I think both it and Designing Woman are not the best movies in any of the stars' catalogs. Dolores Gray is badly cast, while Bacall is not a favorite of mine and comes across a bit bland again. There's also some script problems in that I found it implausible that Marilla would consider a man having had a girlfriend in the past a deal-breaker. That and Mike's not telling Marilla the truth about the danger he faces.

Still, Designing Woman is more or less watchable, and if you're a fan of Lauren Bacall or the theater world, you'll probably like it more than I did. It did get a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive, although the last time I checked, it's another of those movies that the TCM Shop oddly says is on backorder. Amazon has it on DVD and streaming, I believe.