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"I don't care what the part is," says Director Vincente Minnelli, "she can do anything." Seeing her on the screen, Scenarist Dwight Taylor (Top Hat) was reminded of his mother, the late famed Actress Laurette Taylor. "The comparison is irresistible," he wrote Director Minnelli. "There are only a few over the years who can say 'I'm going out to buy a can of pork and beans' and find you choking up. Judy Holliday has a lot of that. And Shirley Booth's voice has some of it. But if I had a choice of a performance I'd want my mother to see—if she could come back for 80 minutes—I'd pick Shirley's in Some Came Running."
Blue-Eyed Hindu. Shirley MacLaine's success can be measured in more material terms. Her latest movie, Ask Any Girl (TIME, June 1), is climbing to the top of the box office totem pole largely because of her enchanting performance in a second-rate story. For her next picture, Can-Can, she will get $250,000, and she has just concluded another $250,000 deal with NBC for 15 TV specials—not bad for a girl who only a few years ago was a Broadway understudy at $110 a week.
Her rise was so rapid that it can be traced to her very first picture, The Trouble with Harry (1955), a Hitchcock exercise in ghoulish gaiety. She was the cute little widow who could help exhume and rebury her husband's corpse half a dozen times, looking fond, puzzled, but no more perturbed than the president of a garden club transplanting gardenias. Next came Artists and Models, one of the last joint Martin & Lewis enterprises, in which Shirley ("I was a forward comedienne in a yellow sunsuit") distinguished herself chiefly by becoming the first performer ever to steal a scene from Jerry Lewis. In Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), she tripped into a memorable bit of miscasting—Ouida, the Hindu princess. Despite wig and dark makeup. Shirley looked about as Indian as Miss Rheingold, but she had no regrets. "Golly," she wrote a New York roommate about Producer Mike Todd, "he never came within three feet of pinching me."
In that picture she never came within three feet of acting, either, but The Sheepman, a run-of-the-range western, took her out of saris and put her in Levi's, which did more for her figure. And in The Matchmaker she had a chance to be funny again, as a naive, man-shy milliner, and in Some Came Running, opposite Frank Sinatra, she came close to salvaging a silly story with her portrayal of a pigeontoed, sentimental, small-town trollop. Says Sinatra : "When the idea of casting her came up, I just about fell over, because we'd never thought about her. When we started shooting. I knew she was going to be tremendous. Very few girls could jump in my lap and say 'Please love me' the way she did it. And she has so much pathos, she can take a piece of comedy and turn it around and break you up."