Scanialara You won't be disappointed!

ChanBot i must have seen a different film!!

Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

James Hitchcock Imagine a film called "The Men", dealing with heterosexual love and romance but with an all-male cast. The wives, girlfriends and mistresses of the men are often referred to but never actually seen on screen. What, I wonder, would be the reaction of the critics? I suspect that they would simply dismiss this as a ridiculous idea. As if you could make a film about the relationship between the sexes without showing the female half of the equation! Yet when the gender-roles are reversed, the result is a marvellous classic of the cinema. That isn't, admittedly, my opinion of "The Women", but it seems to be the opinion of most reviewers on this board who regard George Cukor's 1939 comedy with such reverence that any attempt to remake it is almost blasphemous. Hence a lot of the bile directed at "The Opposite Sex" on here. It also seems to have been the opinion of some reviewers in 1956 and also of cinema-goers; it made a loss at the box-office. Unlike some so-called "remakes", this one follows the original plot fairly closely. The main character, here called Kay Hilliard, appears to be happily married, but her husband Steven is actually having an affair with a young woman named Crystal Allen. They say that in such situations the wife is always the last to know, and so it proves, but as Kay has the sort of friends who (in the words of the song) "just can't wait to bring all of that bad news to her door", the interval between the rest of the world knowing and her finding out herself is only a short one. Kay travels to Reno (then the divorce capital of America) to obtain a divorce, but soon starts to regret her decision. The film is mentioned in Esther Williams' autobiography, "The Million Dollar Mermaid". Apparently Dore Schary, studio head of MGM, wanted to cast Williams as Kay, but she refused, leading to her suspension from the studio. The film is hardly a masterpiece, but it does not fall so far below the artistic standards of the average Esther Williams movie (and most of them were pretty cheesy) to make worthwhile the loss of the $3 million in deferred contract payments which (according to her) she forfeited through her obstinacy. I wonder, however, how the film might have turned out had Esther ("Wet she's a star, dry she ain't!") accepted the role? Would it have been an extravagant water ballet with Kay a former Olympic swimming champion and her scandal-mongering friends all members of the same swimming club, ending with a massive cat- fight between Kay and Crystal in the deep end of the pool? (That might have been worth seeing!) As things were, however, June Allyson ("Dry she's a star, wet she ain't!") obviously lacked Esther's aquatic talents, so the film was made as the sort of semi-musical in which the characters sing, but only in situations where people sing in real life, so Kay becomes a retired singer who makes a comeback after her divorce, Steven a Broadway producer and Crystal a showgirl in one of his productions. So is this film better or worse than "The Women"? Well, in some areas the original is definitely superior. Norma Shearer was quite good as the Kay character (called Mary in the original), but Allyson is just dull and stodgy, making it all too easy for the audience to understand why Steven wanted to be rid of her. (Less easy to understand why he wanted her back). The child-star Virginia Weidler was enchanting as Little Mary, but Sandy Descher as the equivalent character, Debbie, is less so. In other respects, however, "The Opposite Sex" is better. It dispenses with the gimmick (dating back to Clare Boothe Luce's 1936 play) of an all-female cast in a story which is as much about men as it is about women, and it includes male actors who portray the husbands and boyfriends, notably Steven and Buck Winston, the handsome young cowboy who plays an important role in developments subsequent to Kay's divorce. It tones down the rather bitchy, misogynistic tone of the original, a film devoted to the proposition that every woman's worst enemy is another woman, often her so-called best friend. It also dispenses with the figure of Kay/Mary's cynical, worldly-wise old mother and replaces her with the more sympathetic Amanda, Kay's one true friend. Joan Collins is a lot better as the seductive Crystal than was that other Joan C, Crawford, who was too old for the role by about a decade and looked horribly miscast. Some have complained that Crystal is not as archly scheming as later Collins creations such as Alexis in "Dynasty", but she is not really a character of that sort. If you like she is what Alexis was before she became Alexis, a stunning young woman who does not need to scheme very hard to get what she wants because she can just rely on her looks. Dolores Gray is also better as the spiteful Sylvia Fowler than was the annoying motormouth Rosalind Russell, who played Sylvia as though she were a contestant in the World Speed-Talking Championships. On the debit side, there seems little point in remaking a non-musical film as a musical if the songs are as dull and forgettable as they are here. Nor is there much point in introducing male characters if the actors who play them are as dull and forgettable as the songs. In my view "The Women" was no classic but a mediocre film which left plenty of room for improvement when it was remade. Unfortunately, the makers of "The Opposite Sex" failed to capitalise on that room. 5/10 (the same mark as I gave to "The Women").

barrymn1 I'm not a big fan of MGM's classic splashy musicals, but this one is really such a load of poorly written crapola. Of course, the basic story is great; a groundbreaking Broadway play that ran 666 performances, and an even better 1939 film.To my eyes, everything's wrong with this stinker.And, I'm not the only who feels this way...just read most of the other reviews!Only Agnes Moorehead gets the chance to give a good performance; a sophisticated type of part she was not offered too much.Everyone else is quite horrible.

mark.waltz As entertaining as this is (and remarkably well cast although a few talents are greatly wasted), when you compare this to the original screen version of "The Women", you just have to ask yourself "why?". There's a bit of irony in this though which makes it more a curiosity piece considering some of the casting, particularly two Mrs. Dick Powell's, the former (Joan Blondell) and the current (June Allyson), sharing a few scenes as social acquaintances yet not the best of friends. Allyson has taken over the Mary Haines role and now she is a former nightclub singer who gave it all up to marry Leslie Nielsen ("Shirley, you can't be serious!") and raise their daughter. He is bored and takes up with Joan Collins' Crystal Allen (Ironic considering her rivalry with Krystal on "Dynasty"), a showgirl who is roommates with the future Morticia Adams and briefly Mrs. Aaron Spelling (Carolyn Jones) and performs with her in a musical revue that gives the pregnant Blondell morning sickness after eating a huge banana split and having to view the tacky production number "Trees de Banana".If that isn't enough, there's future "Depends" commercial star Allyson singing a song called "Cling to Me" in a horrid looking pants suit (of course complete with "Peter Pan Collar"). At least she gets to reprise "The Young Man With a Horn" as she had in 1944's "Two Girls and a Sailor", once again accompanied by Harry James on his trumpet. Dick Shawn joins Collins, Jones and Jim Backus in the tacky title song in which Backus gets to be amusing giving us his Thurston Howell/Mr. Magoo laugh. Dolores Gray, singing the title song over the opening credits, takes on the Rosalind Russell role, and is the one who ends up marrying Buck Winston rather than the countess, played here straight by Agnes Moorehead. Ann Miller as chorus girl Miriam Aarons has no musical number whatsoever, ending her MGM contract on a sour note, yet at least gets a great catfight with Gray. By this time, the MGM musical was a "hit" ("High Society") or "miss" (this), resulting to remaking their old masterpieces either for the big screen or T.V. ("The Thin Man"), and with many of their contract players on their way out the door (this was long after Louis B. Mayer had left, although he was attempting a take-over around the time this came out), and it is sad to realize that their golden era wasn't quite over but yet never the same as it had been under the old master. A few more musicals and some biblical epics and film versions of Broadway plays would keep MGM a major player, but with T.V. keeping viewers away, it was obvious that they would never recapture the former glory.

Maciste_Brother This glossy musical remake of THE WOMEN, the famous movie which featured a women-only cast, is nothing short of a complete disaster. This film is pretty much toothless and almost completely miscast. June Allyson? Yikes. She looks like a drip throughout the film. Hair, posture, etc, as appealing as a bowl of oatmeal. Granted, Norma Shearer wasn't the scorching beauty in THE WOMEN but she looked, eh, healthy. June looks a bit sick here. In the original, Sylvia was played by Rosalind Russell who almost stole every scene she was in. In this remake, Dolores Gray is Sylvia and looks like an embalmed drag queen-looking mummy. The only good bit of casting was having Joan Collins in the role made famous by Joan Crawford. Whenever Collins is not in the film, the film flat-lines, literally. She's the only spark in this wet firecracker, as clichéd as it is for her to play the conniving man-hungry uber bitch. Remarkably, having men in the film almost added nothing except for handsome Jeff Richards who doesn't have much to do but look good. Leslie Nielsen is wasted and not very convincing. June Allyson and Nielsen as a married couple? Bleech. Some scenes are lifted directly from THE WOMEN, like the bathtub scene. Some things that sorta worked back in the 1930s simply do not work in 1956. The entire Reno bit is truly tired and should have been re-written for the 1950s.Oddly enough, this is a musical remake, probably just to accommodate June, and the musical scenes are mostly horrendous. The bit with Dick Shawn is painful to watch. The whole "Now, Baby, Now" with June singing with a bunch of gyrating male dancers is inexplicable. It's so odd it becomes brilliant if viewed as a total curio. You really wonder what they were thinking.Watching the film, with the characters trying to be classy and the rich types, moving within the tacky studio sets, the overdone gowns and all that stuff and I sorta realized how Hollywood had a truly warped Waspy vision of the world. The end result makes Hollywood look like a playground for philandering film producers who wanted to be surrounded by what they thought were the beautiful people but in reality it was more on the corny & garishly gay side. Dreadful.