Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

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

Brenda The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

jovana-13676 How unpopular have Freud and Jung become in the post-Sex and the City era! Therefore, this films gets panned by the suddenly enlightened "critics". I'll give it a 10 to fix its overall score and for very good reasons: exceptional photography, extraordinary musical numbers that could have been written by the above mentioned geniuses Freud & Jung; great acting, great screenplay, spectacular costumes and sets... Really, is it so offensive that a domineering woman needs a domineering man? I personally enjoyed watching their battle. In the end, she LETS him dominate. Her Mr. Big is such a potty mouth that my jaw dropped at his insolence, but being shocked is such a pleasure - I did not expect it from a Hays Code era movie. Since feminism or misogyny are not and should never be considered art criteria, let's talk about the color palette, the deep, dark blues to pale greens and pinks of our heroine's reality to vibrant blues, gold and white of her dreams in which she dances in white and red princess dresses and her domineering man sports a purple sequined suit and top hat (her prince is busy signing autographs and the married man she wants to marry is her father figure). One needs to know the symbolism of colors - our repulsive Mr. Big who is about to tame our heroine wears a traditional feminist color. And can't freedom also be defined as a lack of fear to be dominated? "Poor is the man (or woman!) whose pleasure depends on the permission of another."

Richard Chatten For three minutes towards the end of this overproduced travesty of Moss Hart's 1941 Broadway musical we eventually get a hint of what might have been, when Ginger Rogers is finally allowed to sing a song from Kurt Weill & Ira Gershwin's acclaimed score - the magnificent 'Saga of Jenny' - the only song from the original production to make it into the film. (The flashbacks to her childhood and youth that follow actually manage to be quite touching.) At $2.6million the most expensive film yet made by Paramount, at the box office the studio received a handsome return on its investment. But the hectoring misogyny that makes this film almost unwatchable today is probably just one reason that nobody has yet bothered to do a decent restoration of the film, so we don't really get the full benefit of the Oscar-nominated Technicolor photography and art direction that wowed critics and audiences in 1944.Ray Milland is excruciatingly misused as a charmless boor who Ginger is required by the script eventually to fall into the arms of (Cary Grant might just have pulled it off), and her rejection of Warner Baxter and Jon Hall for being insufficiently Alpha is just another twist of the knife of the already unpleasant sexual politics of this piece. (Ginger, by the way, actually looks pretty cool to my eyes in her 'unattractive' mannish suits.) But at least we don't get Danny Kaye's mugging from the Broadway original as the camp fashion photographer Russell Paxton (Mischa Auer is a far more agreeable substitute), and are spared his 'hilarious' patter song 'Tschaikowsky (and Other Russians)'. Mary Phillips does her best in an underwritten part (as indeed are most of them). Edward Fielding, by the way, who plays Ginger's physician in the opening sequence, also appeared uncredited as Dr.Edwardes in the dream sequence of Hitchcock's 'Spellbound' (1945), Hollywood's other high profile exercise in cod psychology from this era.

calvinnme ... in spite of all of the talent involved. Directed by Mitchell Leisen over at Paramount, who, by now, certainly knew how to direct Ray Milland, who showed real chemistry with star Ginger Rogers if you have ever viewed "The Major and the Minor" from two years earlier, based on a story by Moss Hart, and even giving a minor role to Warner Baxter - what went wrong when so much talent produces something that lands with such a thud? Part of it, I am sure, are the changing times. Ginger plays Liza Elliott, the editor of fashion magazine "Allure", dresses in rather mannish dresses, and keeps all men at arm's length except Kendell Nesbitt (Warner Baxter), with whom she claims to be in love. She goes to her physician saying for some reason she has become a nervous wreck, just certain that disaster is upon her. The doctor refers her to a psychiatrist, the idea of which at first she rejects. But then she has another hallucination and changes her mind. The psychiatrist, Dr. Brooks (Barry Sullivan) is really very demanding, claiming he KNOWS the meaning of Liza's dreams and problems before she is barely through telling them to him. The end lesson, with which Liza heartily agrees, is that she doesn't really love Kendall - he was just safe because he was tame as a kitten, reminded her of her dad, and was technically taken with an estranged wife who would not give him a divorce. What she needs is to be dominated by a man! The kind of man who would talk about her behind her back, embarrass her in public, and try to take her job, trying to justify his actions by claiming that a woman editor "flies in the face of nature" - in short, a real heel, Charley Johnson (Ray Milland). So it turns out that every Virginia Slims girl is just looking for the Marlboro Man according to this film.Well, if I am going to watch the films of 1944, I had better be prepared to deal with the values of 1944. I think what made the movie a difficult slog for me were all of the elaborate yet dull tableaux numbers with completely untuneful songs and the extended dream sequences. They were meant to explain Liza's predicament from her point of view, but I just found myself staring at my watch and getting restless.This whole film is just a case of reverse synergy. And one more thing. I do wish Liza had sprung up off of her analyst's couch and said "I get it doctor! The reason I am avoiding long term commitments with men and dressing in drab clothes is ...I am gay!" And then ran out of the room. Not in 1944. Not with Joe Breen as head censor.I'd say if you are a film history buff it is probably worth it just to say you've seen it, to be able to cite an example of a film that should have worked and failed. For the viewer just wanting to be entertained, I'd look elsewhere.

ptb-8 The lady is in the 'dark' about being a lesbian. Oh why can't somebody just say it. I guess you could on Broadway and with Gertrude Lawrence in 1940 but at Paramount in '44 with Ginger, well, she just had to stay in the dark and have repressed sexual dreams about her fur in a cage and her eggs at a circus (see the Jenny number) ... and see that dress she unfurls.. a vagina representation of ever I saw one on a movie screen that wasn't x rated. In this ultra glamorous dreamy musical film Ginger is a business woman in business attire (read: lesbian .....) and she is tormented between her real business and society's demands that she marry and be with a man. Hence dilemma, dreams and fur openings and the egg circus (see the Jenny number) ... the storyline demands she relate to a man when she does not want to hence the dream sequences of antagonism and sexual wonderings. Ray Milland is the sop she is deemed to marry when anyone from this century can see she really wants to stay in a women's world and stop being a frustrated big angry prowling pussy in a cage (see the Jenny number) .... Kurt Weill knew what he was on about and so do we... but Paramount, in masking it for the masses in '44 pushed the pussycat into the fantasy sequences, hired a gay director and let loose on the dreams and shot the lot in the best most stylish Technicolor you ever saw outside of YOLANDA AND THE THIEF and THE PIRATE. In this according to Paramount, all Ginger needed was a jolly good roger.... ing.....