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Everybody Does It (20th Century-Fox), suggested by a James Cain short story, is a dawdling, intermittently funny comedy with a high polish. Its he-man thesis: the musical world is a snake pit of sharpies, floozies, fairies, foolish dowagers, and is thus no place for a red-blooded male like Paul Douglas. The cute plot tells of the agony which Douglas, a professional housewrecker, goes through when his bird-voiced wife (Celeste Holm) decides to follow in Lily Pons's footsteps. With the help of a famous diva (Linda Darnell), Douglas retaliates by putting his own glass-shattering baritone to work in grand opera.
Producer Nunnally Johnson is a facile, sometimes brilliant humorist whose movies (The Senator Was Indiscreet, Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid) are sometimes not as screamingly funny as they should be. Paul Douglas is an able comedian, but he will have to have better parts if he is to be built into the popular favorite he gave promise of being in A Letter to Three Wives and It Happens Every Spring.
Edmund (The Razor's Edge) Goulding was probably not the director who should have been assigned to run this particular enterprise. He gives the movie its glossy finish (Wagnerian-Modern decor, stylized acting), but he also sits on a comedy scene for too long, appears to lose his way, and gives it the diffuse quality of sleepwalking. Douglas' big hangover scene in bed—a slow, ponderous thrashing around of a hippopotamus looking for a peanut—looks as much like imbecility as a tremendous morning-after. Instead of highlighting the farce, Everybody's mannered, grandiloquent acting leads to a generally somnolent film fronted by some heavy facemaking.
That Forsyte Woman (MGM) has sets, lighting and costumes that are plushy enough to make a Ziegfeld production look like sordid realism. Flamboyantly Technicolored, it even brings in London's drab fog in a variety of tints, from pale blue to raspberry. The all-over effect of elegance and hue leaves the viewer with a dull headache.
Among the Victorian bric-a-brac, Greer Garson, in deep moral distress, plays hide & seek with love. Her first marriage (to Errol Flynn) moves her into a clannish, property-minded family named Forsyte. After an unconvincing love affair (with Robert Young), she ends up with her usual movie mate, Walter Pidgeon, who represents the Paris branch of the Forsyte clan.
The movie seems to be trying to do for Victorian England what high-school operetta has done for the rose arbor. It is a flashy bore saved somewhat by a full-blown voluptuousness donated by Greer Garson and some interesting social comment by John Galsworthy, who wrote the original saga.