Valley of the Dolls meets the world of publishing

One of the movies that's come out of the vaults to run on FXM is The Best of Everything. It's going to be on FXM tomorrow afternoon at 12:55 PM, and again Friday at 9:55 AM.

Hope Lange plays Caroline Bender, who at the start of the movie is on her first day at her new job in the secretarial pool of Fabian Publishing, a New York publishing house with its fingers in a lot of different things. She's got a fiancé Eddie (Brett Halsey) who has gone off to England to study for a year, and whom she's going to marry when he gets back. She also has dreams of moving up the ladder to become a reader and possibly even an editor, but that would be well down the line.

But before that, there's getting used to the new job, her colleagues and her bosses. Among the fellow secretaries is Gregg (Suzy Parker), who has dreams of becoming an actress on Broadway and who probably should have been fired by now considering how many absences she has for auditions and what not. There's also virginal, naïve Apirl (Diane Baker). The two of them need a third for their apartment, so they invite Caroline in.

And then there are the bosses. Mike (Stephen Boyd) is the "good cop", if you will, in that he takes a professional interest in Caroline but other than that drinks too much. Mr. Shalimar (Brian Aherne) is of a piece with the bosses in The Apartment a year later, who probably would have used one of his employees' apartments for his assignations if he had male employees and had thought of the idea. As it is, he just pursues all the nice-looking secretaries. And then there's miss Farrow (Joan Crawford), who's a bitch and a half, treating the secretaries like dirt for getting even the tiniest little thing wrong.

There's lots of sexual tension, at least 1950s Production Code style, going on, Caroline's two new best friends try to navigate the world they're in. April meets Dexter (Robert Evans), who seems nice until something happens to April, while Gregg has her eyes on stage director David Savage (Louis Jourdan), who is about as bad as Mr. Shalimar at going through women. The fact that Gregg can't really act doesn't help her cause either, and she becomes more and more paranoid about David. Caroline is doing fine until she hears from Eddie that he got married to a rich girl who's dad owns oil wells.

It goes on like this for a good two hours, with the movie being in some ways a whole lot of silliness. Not that it's bad; it's just that it's very much a product of the late 1950s and stuck there so fabulously. There are the cultural norms of the time; there's Joan Crawford who is a hoot every time she's on; and there's the progression of poor Gregg, which might be the most hilarious. As for Lange, she gets to play the same sort of role that Barbara Parkins does in Valley of the Dolls, that of the bemused observer who occassionally gets too close to things.

Unfortunately, the print that FXM is running is screwed up, in that it's both letterboxed and pillarboxed, so if you don't have a big TV (and mine's only 32", I think), it's going to look pretty tiny. Thankfully, The Best of Everything is available on DVD. It's not exactly a great movie, but it's a hell of a lot of fun.