High Society (MGM) is simply not top-drawer. It should have been. The formula was sound: add music and color to a tested product, in this case Philip Barry's old hit, The Philadelphia Story. Producer Sol Siegel assembled a Who's Who cast. He talked Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra into teaming in a movie for the first time, snagged the services of Grace Kelly for her last screen appearance before embarking for Monaco, paid Cole Porter a reported $250,000 for his first original movie score in eight years, and hired Louis Armstrong to blow and gravel-growl his way through it. The result, unhappily, is strictly plebeian.
For no visible reason, John (Teahouse of the August Moon) Patrick's screenplay detours the action from the Philadelphia Main Line to the equally posh confines of Newport. There, frosty and imperious Tracy Lord (Grace Kelly) delicately dithers over the three men in her life: her ex-husband, C. K. Dexter-Haven (Bing Crosby), an aristocratic jazz devotee who insists on calling her "Sam"; her husband-to-be, George Kittredge (John Lund), a stuffy fellow; and brash Reporter Mike Connor (Frank Sinatra), who is on hand to cover the wedding for a picture magazine. The romantic field is soon winnowed down to Millionaire Crosby and Reporter Sinatra. Grace gets tight and thaws visibly. She dives into a swimming pool fully clad, and is fished out by the reporter (in the original version, they went swimming nude together), an episode which somehow persuades her that her ex-husband Crosby is O.K., or "yare." after all.
A good deal of the screenplay seems as dated today as the idle rich. Grace Kelly sings a duet with Crosby in a cool, innocuously pleasant little voice, does an alcoholic rumba with Sinatra, and looks thoroughly patrician, but she lacks the gawky animal energy that Katharine Hepburn brought to the 1939 play and the 1941 movie. Crosby seems as comfortable in the role of a singing millionaire as only a singing millionaire (which he is in real life) can be. but saunters through the part rather sleepily, without much of the old Bing zing. Sinatra plays the reporter like a dead-end kid with a typewriter. The two of them come off best together in a song-and-dance number, Well, Did You Evah?, in which Bing boo-boo-boos as Sinatra cock-a-doodle-doos.
But then there is Louis Armstrong. When Satchmo does an eye-rolling duet with Bing (Now You Has Jazz) or belts out a hot wedding march on his trumpet, High Society becomes really yare.
Bigger Than Life (20th Century-Fox) is the story of a medical case history wildly sensationalized with an eye for box-office returns. It will predictably outrage an army of doctors, frighten thousands of patients, and justifiably annoy drug manufacturers. The medical mischance it purports to describe was always rare, is now almost obsolete. The whole story is only remotely faithful to its original, one of The New Yorker's "Annals of Medicine" articles, a sober, sound piece by Writer Berton Roueche that was titled "Ten Feet Tall."