Goodbye Charlie (1964)

Too much of everything

best movie i've ever seen.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

George Axelrod adapted the unsuccessful Broadway play by Harry Kurnitz about a womanizing Hollywood screenwriter named Charlie who is shot and killed on a yacht after being found in a compromising situation with a party girl. After Charlie's remains are buried at sea, a petite blonde shows up at his beachside pad claiming to be Charlie's reincarnation. Unfunny comedy is all concept and no payoff. Debbie Reynolds works extra-hard in the lead, sitting with her legs apart and talking tough, but the role itself hasn't been thought through (at least not with Debbie in the part). Tony Curtis (Debbie's co-star from 1960's "The Rat Race"), playing Charlie's best friend, stays incredulous for nearly two hours, though the light touch he brings nearly saves the picture from disgrace. Vincente Minnelli's direction (with stagy left-to-right action) may be his very worst. Blake Edwards stole the concept (there's that word again) for 1991's "Switch". *1/2 from ****

I'm still wondering why Lauren Bacall who played the title role of Goodbye Charlie on Broadway was not cast in the film. The story concerns a man who was both shot and drowned at sea, one Charlie Sorel who comes back as a woman and starts haunting the people she knew in her former life as a he. Bacall's voice in the lower registers as it were probably added a dimension to the performance on stage that could never be appreciated by the screen audience.Charlie was a real cad in life and now coming back as a the beautiful Debbie Reynolds is truly some bad karma coming home to roost. The only one who knows the secret is best friend and fellow writer Tony Curtis who flew in from Biarritz to both be executor of an estate in debt and to preside over a sparsely attended memorial service.In her recent memoir Debbie Reynolds who had worked with Tony Curtis in The Rat Race and had no problems said that Curtis had now taken the side of buddy Eddie Fisher in the breakup of the Fisher/Reynolds wedding. He quoted Eddie and said that she was obviously a lesbian as Fisher's manly charms she eventually found resistible. That set the tone for their relationship off screen.On the other hand Curtis in his memoirs talked about director Vincente Minnelli whom he found super meticulous in his work. Sad to say that Goodbye Charlie though it has some good moments will never be ranked as one of the great films for Curtis, Reynolds, or Minnelli.

**SPOILERS** 1960's screwball comedy involving a philandering heel who's luck runs out when he's caught with both his pants down and the wife of a big Hollywood producer ending up shot and deep sixth-ed at the very beginning of the movie.Having a memorial service for the departed screenwriter Charlie Sorel, Harry Madden,instead of the almost 100 friends and associates that were expected to attend only four show up with a very uncomfortable George Wellingtion Tracy, Tony Curtis, Charlie's best and only friend being forced to give the sermon. Tracy being the executor of Charlie's estate finds out, among all the other exploits in Charlie's life, that he was stuck with a $75,000.00 bill on Charlies part to the IRS.Tracy being visited that evening by this rich mama's boy Bruce Minton III, Pat Boone, who happened to notice this young nude woman, Debbie Reynolds, walking aimlessly on the beach. Bruce did what a gentleman would do by wrapping her in his overcoat and driving her, with the woman giving Bruce directions, to Charlie's place to spend the evening.The next morning the woman wakes up screaming and in a cold sweat. Everything came back to her and with her amnesia now gone she remembers who she is! she's Charlie Sorel! a Man in a Woman's body. At first Tracy feels that that all this is just one of his, the late Charlie Sorel's, many girlfriends who's trying to freak him out for one reason or another, just take your pick, that had to do with his friend Charlie shabby and trashy treatment of her. It doesn't take long for Tracy to realize that Charlie is really Charlie with information that Charlie tells him about himself and the late Charlie Sorel that only Charlie, and Tracy, would know!Charlie at first is repulsed at the fact that he's a woman who to Charlie, when he was a man, was nothing but a toy to play with and throw away when he got tired of it. Charlie later starts to like his/her new body and uses it to blackmail his former bedmates by telling them that he, or she's, the late Charlie Sorel's widow Charleen and knows all about his affair from a diary that he kept that she's, unless paid off, going to have published.Tracy who's now up to his neck in his friends Charlie/Charleen new life sees the wall's closing in on him with the police and IRS wanting to know what were the circumstances of Charlie's demise. It turns out that Tracy, Charlies best friend and executor of his will, has gotten very friendly with Charlie's killer Hollywood producer Sir Leopold Sartori, Walter Matthau, who's been found innocent in Charlie's killing by reason of justifiable homicide. Tracy has also gotten very close with Sartori's busty young wife Rusty,Laura Devon, who Sir Leopold caught together in bed with Charlie just before he blasted him! Could it be that instead of justifiable homicide it was really premeditated murder on both Sir Leopold and Tracy's part?Trying to get Charlie out of the country Tracy goes to Sir Leopold begging him to, with his extensive political connections, get Charlie a false passport which Sir Leopold agrees to do. Still the crafty old fox has other plans in mind. Sir Leopold plans to trick the desperate Tracy into leave Charlie alone in his, or the late Charlie Sorel's, house so he can make a play for him, or her, himself. In a strange quark of fate, or reincarnation, Sir Leopold Charlie's obsessed killer has become Charleen's obsessed lover and the object of Charlie's uncountable lust, for Rusty, that caused Sir Leopold to do in Charlie in the first place. Rusty ends up being the person who does in Charleen for being the reason for her old man Sir Leopold fooling around with another woman! The woman who's the person that she was fooling around when Charleen was a man Charlie Sorel! How's That For a Mouthfull!Somewhat hard to follow at times with Debbie Reynolds trying to be both Charlie and Charleen, in her voice and actions, but still worth watching. There's also Pat Boone's Bruce Minter III falling under the spell of Charleen/Charlie and with his mother away on business, and having the massive Minter Estate all for himself, lets it all hang out by letting his hair down and confessing his love for her. Bruce does that with what looks like the biggest diamond ring in existence! Only to later pass out from drinking too much wine and champaign thinking, in his babyish mind, that it's only lemonade. Charlie does comes back again at the end of the movie "Goodbye Charlie" in a new body but can't communicate and it looks as if his good friend Tracy also is unable to recognize him. Since he, Charlie, has a speaking problem that gives those of us watching the film something to howl about.

It's labored and '60s-smutty from the get-go -- a smirking sex farce with no good lines and most of the major roles miscast. But if you sit through it, you'll get Walter Matthau doing an outrageous put-on as a libidinous movie mogul, sort of a Hungarian Dino di Laurentiis. His accent's all wrong, he's not remotely convincing as a Lothario, and yet it's such an all-out, audacious vaudevillian turn, you can't help but smile at him. You won't at anything else.