GEEZER BABY!..........WIPING COBWEBS OFF OF "NEVER TOO LATE"

Never Too Late (1965)    Can't make the usual 'consider the era' excuses for this one........

               Arriving in 1965, it was already grotesque and way out of date........like a museum piece freshly smeared with Technicolor and Panavision to hide its ancient origins......

                It was based on a Broadway comedy that ran several years......no doubt regaling and tickling loads of middle-aged tourists and theatre-party matinee matrons........

                 But blown up on wide screen and color, it's one weird horrorshow,......overacted, badly acted......with its cast reduced to screaming hoary gag lines at each other.  Oh, it's got all the smarmy, sniggering attitudes of 60's romantic comedies about sex, sure enough........then as it drags on, you realize it sensibilities are still firmly rooted in the early 1950's......

                Simple, primal premise........golden agers (Maureen Sullivan, Paul Ford) find themselves.......catch your breath......PREGNANT!!!!!

                To begin with, audiences would need science-fiction level imaginations to picture the beauteous, genteel, gentle hearted Sullivan conceiving a child with the bulbous-nosed, bowling pin shaped gasbag Paul Ford.

                  Ford was a character actor with exactly one color in his paint-box........sputtering rage. Funny enough in small doses.......but the idea of basing an entire film around him is sadistic. Watching him for an hour and 44 minutes is like listening to an air raid siren that never shuts off.

                  As if the perpetually braying Ford isn't enough, the abysmal script  has him treating the news of his expected child with profound shame and deep embarrassment......as do his equally repulsive daughter and son-in-law, wretchedly acted to obnoxious excess by Jim Hutton and Connie Stevens.

                  Poor Maureen Sullivan functions here as a lone island of sweet sanity in sea of technicolored vomit......

                  Add to this the townspeople leering at Ford like they've never heard of anyone having sex after 40 and you've got the perfect nightmare of "Never Too Late".......complete with a 1950-ish syrupy title tune warbled by Vic Damone.

                   BQ normally loves exhuming 1960's films from obscurity.........but this one's more of mutation,.....it smells of some rotten 1940's film tarted up enough to try to pass for a 1965 release.

                   Doesn't work. At one point, Sullivan gathers up enough gumption to call Ford on the phone and blurt out, "Go to hell!"......(this movie's equivalent of F*** you!).....

                    You tell 'em, Mags.  Zero stars (0).