Goodbye Charlie (1964).....if nothing else, was way more ambitious than your average high gloss Color By DeLuxe CinemaScope rom-com.....
We can understand why Fox offered it to Marilyn Monroe....Just imagine the comic possibilities of America's number one sex symbol inhabited by the wandering soul of a dead horny guy.
The ultra-feminine Monroe turned it down, thinking she could never effectively channel a male persona......but then neither could Debbie Reynolds, who ended up with the part.
Debbie tried affecting the character of late screenwriter Charlie Sorrell. A notorious randy cad, Charlie's getting it on with the wife of flamboyant movie producer Leopold Sartori (Walter Matthau as his hammiest). This all occurs at a party on Sartori's yacht, where Sartori shoots Charlie several times in the ass, sending him overboard into the drowning deep.
Charlie's only friend and fellow writer George (Tony Curtis) presides at a sparsely attended funeral held at Charlie's sumptuous beach house. Then along comes young wealthy scion Bruce (Pat Boone) who just rescued a bedraggled naked girl (Reynolds) staggering down the highway.
Ah, you guessed it....she's no less than a reconstituted, reincarnated Charlie, now living inside the diminutive, cutie-pie form of Debbie.
All the expected jokes and scenes tumble out, one after the other - George stammers and yammers as he copes with the idea of Charlie's sex-swap resurrection while female Charlie, still a conniving heel, plots to extort cash out of his-her previous conquests (Joanna Barnes and Ellen McRae, later to become Ellen Burstyn).
A few things here we did in fact like:
The sporadic, but still funny spoofing of Hollywood culture. (Especially Matthau's deliberately fake Hungarian accent, which fades back into pure Brooklyn gangster). It's a hoot watching Matthau chew up the scenery with the kind of abandon that would make him a bona fide star 2 years later in Billy Wilder's "The Fortune Cookie".
A great bit for wonderful character Roger C. Carmel who makes the very most out of his one primary scene as a homicide detective slyly interrogating Curtis. (which accounts for the film's one singular terrific sight gag, as Curtis later hopes to avoid Carmel's surveillance by ducking into an elevator.)
The film's final twist.....doling out yet another dose of apt, deserving karma to Charlie......(hint: he's not ready to say goodbye.)
"Goodbye Charlie" turned out a massive box office failure for 20th Century Fox.....Reynolds was barely convincing as the predatory Charlie and the film-biz spoofery didn't land well with audiences either.
But for those of us buffs steeped in 1960's big studio cinema nostalgia and love a good wallow in it from time to time, we found this one an entertaining bauble to dig up and enjoy. 3 stars (***)
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