Cinema: The New Pictures, Nov. 14, 1955

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Mattress farce? Not at all. It's a peptic problem play. The woman-eating orchid gets indigestion when he reaches for just one too many: Debbie Reynolds. He sees her first at a Broadway tryout. She turns her back to him. Sinatra snaps: "This girl has got something." It is a one-sided judgment, and he lives to regret it. When he asks her to dinner, she replies: "Why?" She is a woman, it develops, with a planned he-conomy, and Sinatra, even though he is "attractive in an off beat, beat-up sort of way," does not quite fill the grey flannel suit in her hope chest. In the end she makes the alterations herself, and the tender trap turns out to be Love, though the teeth in it spell SCARSDALE.

The picture, in short, like the Broad way play, does no more than curl up nice and cozy with a bachelor's address book — a fairly entertaining way to spend an evening. What's more, Frank Sinatra as the bachelor turns out to be a good comedian; time and again he takes the play away from such gifted scene stealers as David Wayne and Celeste Holm. They all gang up in one fine scene — teetering about on toxic joints with arteries aflame, gulping slugs of tomato juice from the last clean shot glass — to play a glorious morning after. Sample dialogue: "I found your shoes." "Where were they?" "In the icebox." "Oh."

* "A fink," according to Damon Runyon, 'being such a guy as is extra nothing."

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