Titreenp SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

Kodie Bird True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

Janis One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

TheLittleSongbird With great actors like Joan Crawford and James Stewart, how could 'The Ice Follies of 1939' possibly go wrong? Also like musicals and ice skating (seen especially with Sonja Henie) has dazzled on film. So 'The Ice Follies of 1939' had a lot going for it.Sadly, 'The Ice Follies of 1939' did go wrong. Badly wrong. It is among the worst films for both Crawford and Stewart and career-worsts for them in terms of performances. Very little of 'The Ice Follies of 1939' works, but it is not irredeemable by all means, then again this is coming from somebody who always tries to see good in bad films. The best thing about the film is the ice skating sequences, in both choreography and dancing they are dazzling and where 'The Ice Follies of 1939' sparkles the most.The production values are another redeeming quality. It is a beautiful-looking film and looks expensive, shot in gorgeous rich Technicolor and lavishly produced in the set design. The costumes are both distinguished and elegant. The music has energy and pathos and fares well on its own as well as within the film.Unfortunately, neither Crawford or Stewart are on top form, quite the opposite. Crawford tries but overdoes it, while Stewart simply walks through his role. They do in all fairness have a pathetic script to work with that is impossible to rescue at any rate. As do the rest of the cast that fail to distinguish themselves in forgettable roles other than perhaps Lew Ayres (Lewis Stone is pretty wasted).The script is just full of clunky rambling dialogue, sickly sentimentality, badly written clichés and the cringe factor. The underdeveloped and flat characters also don't help, even the best of actors old and new would struggle to do anything with them.Nor the mostly non-existent story, and when there is a hint of one it's tired and contrived with terribly dull pacing and scenes that go on for too long. Reinhold Schunzel's direction throughout is incredibly dreary.In conclusion, sparkles in three areas, melts completely everywhere else. 3/10 Bethany Cox

wmss-770-394192 I can only imagine that when Joan Crawford,then a reigning star at MGM was handed this script, she asked,"Seriously,LB?" Let's face it, the only reason this awful mess was made was GREED. LB Mayer wanted to cash in on the millions being made by Darryl Zanuck at FOX with the skating pictures Sonja Henie was doing. Joan Crawford and Jimmy Stewart as a couple (no way) of skaters(no way) that get married and end up temporarily separating because she becomes a BIG MOVIE STAR within moments of meeting a movie mogul! Boy,those studio contracts must have been iron-clad because nobody in their right mind would have read this horrible script and decided to make this film unless there were dire consequences to not doing so! Miraculously, this pile of manure didn't kill her career and later in '39 she made The Women. Fortunately, Jimmy Stewart also survived this horror.The color sequence at the end is interesting because it was the first time Crawford was seen in color, and the actual Shipstad-Johnson skaters are good,but the God-awful blue gown she was in almost ruined that.Maybe,I'll try to dig up some actual critic reviews from 1939 of this film. It will be interesting to see what they thought of this train wreck.

MartinHafer In the career of every big star, there often seem to be a few films that in hindsight you wonder why they chose to be in this doomed project. While Jimmy Stewart was NOT an established star in 1939 and can't be blamed for appearing in such an awful film, you wonder how one of MGM's biggest stars could get hooked into this awful mess! Joan Crawford certainly deserved more than this, though I must say that she seemed to try very hard to be a professional--even if the writers were apparently chimps. Even Joan's later super-low budget films like TROG and BERSERK are amazingly competent films compared to THE ICE FOLLIES OF 1939! The biggest problems with the film were the wretched writing and the impossibly dumb casting. Imagine Stewart and Crawford cast as ice follies skaters! Interestingly, you never really see them dance or skate--yet it's THE central theme of the movie. And who would have thought that the public would have wanted THIS sort of a film?! My assumption is that Fox's Sonja Henie movies must have been box office smashes for MGM to try to cash in on this ice skating craze in such a cheap and haphazard fashion.Now if you remove the silly ice follies elements, you still are left with an incredibly terrible film. The movie actually made my entire family cringe at the terrible clichés--especially when the film tried to rip off A STAR IS BORN. How Crawford was "discovered" and became a star was totally ludicrous--and had the worst "discovery scene" in film history. It really looked like every rotten cliché about film-making was thrown into a goulash-like mess of a film--including the (uggh) ending where the studio makes Stewart a producer and director--even though his greatest prior success was directing and skating in an ice follies show! Horrible writing, dumb situations, terribly long and ridiculous Busby Berkeley-style ice skating numbers and an over-abundance of clichés sink this one. I truly feel that the other reviewers were being far too kind to this turkey--perhaps because Stewart and Crawford have a lot of fans out there.As far as the magnitude of this bomb, I'd rank this up among PARNELL (Clark Gable and Myrna Loy) and SWING YOUR LADY (Humphrey Bogart) for 1930s bombs by mega-stars. In Bogart's defense, he was not yet a major star when he made his bomb--what's Crawford's excuse?

mukava991 This harmless piece of fluff is moderately interesting for reasons having nothing to do with its intentions, which must have been to tap into the lucrative ice skating fan base that was packing theatres to see Sonia Henie in 20th Century Fox features at the time. This opus does have a stellar cast (Joan Crawford, James Stewart, Lew Ayres, Lewis Stone) all at their best even though utterly wasted and a vivid Technicolor ice show sequence at the end in which we get to see the above-mentioned personages in color. It is also a way to satisfy the curiosity of MOMMIE DEAREST viewers who have always wondered what FOLLIES was about since it figures in the plot of that biopic. Well, it's about nothing much and was a good example of why Joan Crawford's career wasn't a bed of roses, even though she triumphed in THE WOMEN the same year. She's actually quite good in this, playing a nice girl who chooses marital bliss over movie stardom. For half the movie she is coiffed in an unusually severe and darkly tinted manner which accentuates the severity of her features, giving her a rather cruel and drawn appearance. In some of these scenes she strongly resembles Merle Oberon. Stewart gets a chance to practice pratfalls and inventive prop handling and excels at both. At one point after his character hears joyous news, he does a somersault from a chair onto a bed and back onto the floor like a skilled acrobat. He was a consummate actor even then.