It Should Happen to You (Columbia).
Gladys Glover (Judy Holliday) is a nobody with an all too mortal longing to be a Somebody. Fired from her job in a Manhattan garment mine, she heads for Central Park to have a daydream of grandeur. Wistfully she gazes at a big, empty billboard on Columbus Circle, imagining how her name would look there in 12-ft. letters: GLADYS GLOVER. What happens next is a hilarious example of dumb-blonde logic. Since her name would look wonderful on the sign, and since she has $1,000 in the bank, why not rent the sign and put her name on it? She does—and nothing happens. Then everything begins to happen at once. A dashing young soap millionaire (Peter Lawford) dashes after her, demanding her billboard at several times the rent and her body at any price short of matrimony. Before Gladys is through, she has parlayed her single billboard into six strategically located billboards in midtown Manhattan.
Soon the whole town is talking about the "mystery girl." Crowds mob her in Macy's, TV types paw her, the soap man bills her in a big ad campaign as "the average American girl," the Air Force hails her as "The Girl We'd Most Like to Be Up in the Air With." Gladys has at last become a Somebody. But there is a moral: a Somebody is sometimes only a nobody that everybody has heard about. With this thought in her pretty head, she is patiently led away by the boy (Jack Lemmon) she has really loved all along.
The comedy situation is worked for all the laughs it's worth by Scripter Garson Kanin and Director George Cukor. It gets more from the faultlessly schooled comedy of Actress Holliday and a fresh, sharply timed performance by Actor Lemmon, making his screen debut.
In It Should Happen to You, Judy plays, for the fourth time in a row, essentially the same poor man's Pygmalion that won her an Oscar two years ago for the screen version of her 1946 Broadway hit, Born Yesterday. Practice has made her almost perfect in the part. She seems an incarnation of the big-city blonde who is so dumb that she doesn't even know she's beautiful.
All this makes a little masterpiece of Judy's big seduction scene, in which she drifts dazedly down the old millstream of her instincts (absentmindedly slipping off her shoes and undoing an earring), right to the crucial point when she remembers that Lawford had billed her as "the average American girl," who shouldn't be doing such things. Nevertheless, Judy is so good at this one role that it would be interesting to see her play another one.
Man in the Attic (20th Century-Fox). Jack (Shane) Palance is a movie heavy so heavy that he makes Jack the Ripper seem no more than a sort of lovable nuisance on a late date. In this picture, in fact, he literally does just that. Director Hugo Fregonese lets himself get caught between his old-fashioned devil (the screenplay is based on Marie Belloc Lowndes's 1913 thriller, The Lodger) and the deep blue sea of modern psychiatric interpretation.
As a result, the audience is asked more often to sympathize with the killer's hidden motives than to feel horror for what he is up to.