Critic's Choice

Lucille Ball was TCM's Star of the month a few months back. One of her movies that I hadn't blogged about before is Critic's Choice, so I recorded it in order to be able to watch it for a post here.

Ball is not the critic however; that honor goes to Bob Hope, playing Parker Ballantine. Ball plays Mrs. Ballantine, or at least the second Mrs. Ballantine, Angela. Parker, a theater critic, was previously married to stage actress Ivy London (Marilyn Maxwell), and as the movie opens Parker is at the opening of Ivy's new play, something to which he gives a scathing review in his newspaper column. Apparently, however, Parker's notoriously vicious reviews weren't the cause for the divorce, however, as Parker and Ivy are on amicable terms and Angela doesn't seem to mind Ivy either.

Angela, however, isn't so certain that Parker should be writing such withering reviews, and her way of dealing with this is to decide that she's going to write a play of her own. She's got the perfect idea for it, too, basically thinly disguising the lives of her and her sisters (played at the end by Marie Windsor and Joan Shawlee) along with their mother (Jesse Royce Landis). Parker figures this is one of those things that Angela has gotten in her head to start, but will never finish, just like all the other hobbies she's taken up.

Somehow, though, Angela does finish the play, and without any help from Parker, who although he hasn't written any plays of his own knows a thing or two about what makes a good play. So Angela gives the finished product to Parker for him to review. This turns out to be a big mistake, as Angela's first draft is terrible. Or at least, this is what Parker tells her. If Angela had waited for Act One to come out at the end of 1963, perhaps she would have known the first draft, especially from a neophyte who doesn't even seem to have been botherd to come up with an outline before starting the script, is going to have serious problems. So perhaps Parker has some merit, although we don't know because we see very little of Angela's play. But thanks to Parker's reputation, Angela unsurprisingly things he's being gratuitously mean to her.

What's really surprising, however, is that producer S.P. Champlain (John Dehner) and director Dion Kapakos (Rip Torn) take a chance on the play and decide to produce it. And considering how much reworking they do on the play when it goes into early previews out of town, perhaps Parker was in the right about the play being a mess. In any case, Dion and Angela spend so much time together on the road reworking the play that it seems as though Dion might be trying to put the moves on Angela. Ivy uses this to try to win back Parker. Eventually, we get to opening night on Broadway for Angela's play, which Parker just has to go to in order to do the review.

Some of the IMDb reviewers have positive things to say about Critic's Choice, but I have to admit that I found it a bit of a mess, mostly because I couldn't believe a play like this would get produced that quickly, unless you're trying to come up with a deliberate flop a la The Producers. Bob Hope also isn't quite the right person to take up Clifton Webb's persona from Laura. The movie is, like the much better The Facts of Life, part comedy and part light drama. Here, however, it doesn't get the mix right as the comedy shows up at the wrong times, notably Hope's drunk performance at the premiere of the play. The ending also didn't ring true for me.

So as you might guess, I'd definitely recommend The Facts of Life before Critic's Choice. But you may want to watch and judge for yourself.