TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Janae Milner Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Keira Brennan The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

JohnHowardReid Astaire's favorite film. And you know me. Always a pushover for a January-May romance. And when January is played so pertly by the vital, bright-eyed Leslie Caron, and May so masterfully by Fred Astaire, how could I resist?The Ephrons have turned out an amusing, engaging script, which makes full use of Astaire and Caron's talents, provides plenty of opportunities for lilting song and energetic dance, and fills in some most agreeable character sketches for Fred Clark, Thelma Ritter and even Larry Keating. Negulesco has directed with his usual sure hand; photography, whilst a little grainy, is certainly colorful; sets and costumes are appealing. There are a couple of really bright, catchy songs too: "Dream" and "Something's Gotta Give". In fact, I have just one bad mark against this musical. The music. Not Mercer's, but the doleful stuff composed for the so-called "Nightmare Ballet" by Alex North. This is dissonantly functional, atmospherically urban all right, but it fails to inspire. A pity, because the designs are so imaginative. A smaller complaint is that not much use is made of CinemaScope. Some aerial shots of New York, a crowded dance floor and two or three other sequences excepted, compositions are center- framed, with acres of just waste space on either side. As to why the film is Astaire's favorite is difficult to say. Charming as it is, it comes nowhere near the seemingly effortless sparkle, gaiety and zest of his RKO vehicles. And its whimsical sense of fun is way outclassed by The Belle of New York. By comparison Daddy Long Legs sometimes seems ponderous and heavy- handed, sometimes lacking the light touch such a caprice surely needs. One feels that not sufficient editing was done on the dialogue and that Negulesco is sometimes inclined to pace it too slowly. The key word in these minor gripes is "sometimes". More often than not, Daddy Long Legs is everything we expect an Astaire musical to be: Catchy, inventive, effervescent, joyous, touching, witty, satirical and light-hearted. It's a pity it fails to fly the heights all the time. Perhaps about twenty minutes of masterfully judicious trimming would do the trick. Cut out the Paris ballet segment of the Nightmare Ballet, which is not only dull, but forced, contrived, unimaginative, unappealing and unflattering. Delete the scene at the airport. It's not necessary to know that Terry Moore has the sniffles and we can also get rid of all that graceless leering by Damian O'Flynn. However, these are as stated, minor matters. Daddy Long Legs is so charmingly played, stylishly set and for the most part so attractively scored, it is definitely one of CinemaScope's most appealing musicals. (Not that there are that many CinemaScope musicals to select from: New Faces, How To Be Very Very Popular, Carousel, Carmen Jones, The King and I, Love Me Tender, The Girl Can't Help It, There's No Business Like Show Business, Bernardine, April Love, Sing Boy Sing, Mardi Gras, The Best Things In Life Are Free, Hound Dog Man, A Private's Affair, State Fair, Swingin' Along. For all the much-vaunted wonders of stereophonic sound, it's certainly very odd that the studio's output of Scope musicals was so lean).

sam_i_amgirl For a book so popular it spanned (at least) four movie adaptations over the last century and countless plays, musicals and anime series - it's a shame that the most famous adaption was SO adapted it barely resembled the original. Where the original book is witty and funny and sweet - because the leading lady is AMAZING - this version is just sweet and icky based on a may-December (or should I say, may-next-December) romance. Yes, the original book is slightly romantic, but only at the end. And the book focuses on so many societal and political issues such as the suffrage movement and equality and the class rank, that it's modern for it's time and remarkably intelligent. This 1955 adaptation - true to the anti-feminist 50s ideals - completely ignored all that and made Judy (er.. Julie) into this sexy French maiden with a geriatric playboy beau. Gross. And they accused the book of being dodgy?If you don't compare it to the book and look at it on it's own, it has it's merits. But as a huge fan of the book, I can't help but feel that this is an insult to the author Jean Webster herself. I love Fred Astaire, but I don't like the film makers' clichéd and backward views on a classic female story. Imagine if they adapted Anne of Green Gables or Pride and Prejudice* into something like this? There'd be an outrage! Well, I'm part of the outrage for Daddy Long Legs. READ THE BOOK Y'ALL Judy is Lizzie Bennet meets Anne Shirley meets Sybil Crawley. And she's actually funny.*Bride and Prejudice... no comment.

theowinthrop "Daddy Long Legs" was one of those movies that were made again and again in the teens up to the 1930s, sometimes under it's own original name (the name of the novel it was based on) and sometimes, like in a Shirley Temple version called "Curley Top", under a different name. Although Mary Pickford was in a silent version, the best known early version was a 1931 film with Warner Baxter and Janet Gaynor. However, aside from Temple's "Curley Top" (which had a plot difficulty changed by a rewrite), the most successful version to modern audiences is this one that starred Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron in 1955. It was one of Astaire's last musicals, and was one of the series of musicals from "An American In Paris" through "Lili" that led to Caron's best remembered musical starring role in "Gigi" (1958). The plot of "Daddy Long Legs" was about a millionaire who sees a young girl in an orphan home and secretly adopts her. His shadow on the wall is noticed and he is referred to as "Daddy Long Legs" The girl grows up and meets the man when she is reaching adulthood, and her secret guardian falls for her, and eventually marries her. It is a kind of wish fulfillment plot - and it's unintentional overtone of twisted sexual relations between an adopted father figure and and adopted daughter figure has been commented on. In fact it really gets a going over in the current version from the American Ambassador to France (Williamson) played by Larry Keating, who points out how really scandalous the matter is to Astaire. It causes a bump on the road to a happy conclusion, but it is a big bump. Only in "Curley Top" was this avoided by having Shirley Temple have an older sister who could be romanced by the millionaire.Oddly enough, the 1931 version has an unintentional eerie footnote to the strange sex issue. When that version came out, one of the people who saw the film (it is, apparently, one of the last films she ever saw) was the ill-fated Starr Faithful, whose still mysterious death (murder/suicide/accident?) is debated to this day. Starr had been having an affair with her mother's older cousin, Andrew Peters (the Mayor of Boston in the early 1920s), which somewhat looked like the relationship between the guardian and the young orphan in the story. Whether Starr went to see "Daddy Long Legs" for that reason or not is a minor mystery in the last days of her life.I've never seen the Baxter-Gaynor version. This 1958 version was shown on the 20th Century Fox Cable network this afternoon. Forgetting the central problem mentioned above about the twisted relationship, it is a good musical. There are several good musical numbers, such as the "slue-foot" dance at the college prom (that Astaire does with Caron) to the music of Ray Anthony's orchestra. There is also the use of two popular tunes: "Dream (which becomes a type of theme tune for Caron, while thinking of Astaire), and "Something's Got To Give", which unconsciously summarizes their odd relationship (Astaire being the old unmovable object hit by the unexpected force of Caron). But the major musical number of the film is rather odd.When (after his unfortunate conversation with Keating) Astaire breaks with Caron on a sexual level, she has a dream sequence which in design reminds one of Caron's earlier dance/ballet sequence with Gene Kelly in "An American In Paris". She dreams she is back in the hallway of the luxury New York City Hotel that she was in when Astaire was romancing her, but all the rooms have "3203" (her room number) on them. But the hallways and doors are all drawn (they are not solid wooden doors. It's like the backdrop of Paris that Kelly stands in front of when he begins his dance sequence regarding Caron in "An American In Paris". It gets weirder, as Caron changes styles of dancing - first ballet, then tango, than carnival - as she enters rooms representing Paris, Buenos Aires, or Rio. What makes it weird is that Astaire does not dance with Caron or alone - he appears as an onlooker, either in an opera/ballet box, a table on the side, or a tourist looking at the carnival. It is the only time I can recall Fred Astaire in a musical number where he does nothing!The cast is good, particularly the outspoken personal secretary Ms Pritchard (Thelma Ritter) trying to get Fred to reveal himself, and the long suffering lawyer/business adviser Griggs (Fred Clark) trying to keep Astaire aware of what he should be doing, and what he is doing all wrong. It's a good musical, once you swallow that odd sexual connection between the principals. Due to the cast, the musical numbers (even the one where Fred does nothing), and the light touch of director Jean Negulesco I would say it gets an "8" out of "10".

rooprect I tried playing the drums once. I poked an eye out. Lucky for me it wasn't my own eye. Still, that catastrophic experience told me that I should leave the drumkit to the pros. Neil Peart, John Bonham, and Fred Astaire. Yes. Fred Astaire.Drum fans, you have GOT to check out the opening number where Fred sings and dances while playing the drums (and he's really playing, too). It's one of those overlooked gems like his golf routine in "Carefree" (1938) where he does a little tap whilst driving a few 300-yarders. Innovative dance routines like these are what made Fred Astaire so great and what make his movies so entertaining.I'm not really a Fred Astaire Fan; in fact, "Daddy Long Legs" and "Carefree" are the only two films of his that I've seen. But if they're any indication, I'm going to start hunting for more. I watched "Daddy Long Legs" mainly because I really enjoyed the 2005 Korean remake "Kidari ajeossi" (which is not a musical). Now that I've seen the original, I appreciate both films.My only gripe with this film is that it didn't seem to get personal enough. We rarely get any closeups of the stars, which is a crime considering how stunningly beautiful the leading lady Leslie Caron is. But if it's any consolation, she does a lot of twirls, and each time she does it, we see her dress fly up. Yeah babay! Spin! SPIN!! Oh sorry, I got carried away there. Well, now that I've talked about drums, Korean flicks and spinners, maybe I should talk about the actual film. Naah.