Sylvia (1965)

Wow! Such a good movie.

How sad is this?

There is definitely an excellent idea hidden in the background of the film. Unfortunately, it's difficult to find it.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Sylvia certainly has a great tradition of similar films to fall back on. Chicago Deadline, The Mask Of Dimitrios, and the great Citizen Kane all deal with someone trying to pick up the real story of somebody by interviewing people from the past and getting flashback incidents.Peter Lawford has hired PI George Maharis to trace down the background of Sylvia, the girl he plans to marry. What Carroll Baker in the title role has given him is completely bogus though she's pretty well fixed on her own and doesn't need Lawford's millions. But he's a careful sort and Maharis begins his work.I have to say that it was a clever idea for him to use her writings, she's a poet, for traces of local idiomatic expressions. Maharis has a linguistics professor on call who tells him his starting point should be Pittsburgh.After that Maharis starts on his hunt and meets a variety of characters played by some really fine character actors. It's the best thing Sylvia has going for it. These people really make the film. The most memorable for me are Ann Sothern who works in a penny arcade and is a drunk and Viveca Lindfors as a librarian from Pittsburgh who gives Maharis his first bit of real information.Baker does well as a woman who really graduated summa cum laude from the school of hard knocks. The film was supposed to be a breakout film for George Maharis who left his TV series Route 66 for a career on the big screen. It never quite worked out that way. He does all right in the part of the PI, but I think either Paul Newman or Robert Mitchum would have aced the part of the private eye.Still Sylvia is worth watching for one of the best cast of character players ever assemble this side of John Ford or Frank Capra.

Filmmakers sure tried to make George Maharis into a star during the mid-1960s. "The Satan Bug", with its beautiful photography, great plot, and good cast didn't do it; "Quick, Before It Melts", with its comedy angle and dopey story didn't do it; and "Sylvia" didn't do it, either."Sylvia" starts out as rich guy Frederic Summers (Peter Lawford) hires iconoclastic P.I. Alan Macklin (Maharis) to investigate beautiful, young Sylvia (Carroll Baker). The story takes Macklin from one intriguing situation to another, as he tries to decipher the life of the woman known as Sylvia. Naturally enough, Macklin falls in love with Sylvia at the end of the film. Baker is so beautiful that I probably would have done the same thing.Maharis and Baker look good, but the real strength of "Sylvia" is the veteran supporting cast. Viveca Lindfors, Edmond O'Brien, Joanne Dru, Ann Southern, Lloyd Bochner, Nancy Kovack, and Aldo Ray appear as characters Maharis meets during his investigation. The B&W cinematography is good and captures the mid-1960s quite nicely.You're not going to sing the praises of "Sylvia" to the heavens, but it's certainly worth watching. The strong supporting cast adds lots of substance to the story and helps maintain interest in Macklin's investigation. After this film, movie makers quit trying to make Maharis into a major star, letting him return to TV and character roles. Still, it was a very interesting experiment.

Private eye George Maharis is hired by wealthy Peter Lawford to find out all he can about future wife Carroll Baker (a poetess with a very mystery bio). Maharis finds a slew of lurid details about Baker ranging from rape to prostitution to blackmail. Director Gordon Douglas and scriptwriter Sydney Boehm have Baker climb from a Dante's Inferno of nightmares before achieving respectability. Maharis encounters one loony character after another. There's blowzy Ann Sothern, sassy showgirl Nancy Kovack, sleazy Edmond O'Brien, and ex-prostitute Joanne Dru. Also in the mix is saintly librarian Vivica Lindfors and not so saintly transvestite pimp Paul Gilbert (as Lola Diamond). It's all fairly silly as opposed to compelling with Maharis making a dull leading man. Baker does not have the carriage to be particularly convincing as a poetess! There is a great music score by David Raskin and stellar cinematography by Joseph Ruttenberg. Aldo Ray, Val Avery (as one of Baker's unlucky johns) and Lloyd Bochner (as a very brutal john) are in it too.

Tracking down a copy of SYLVIA was kind of like the Maharis character's attempt to unearth facts about the main character. I finally found a copy and watched it tonight and was mildly impressed overall, very impressed with parts of the film, and unimpressed with other parts. It's an episodic sort of movie, as Maharis's detective goes from Pennsylvania to Mexico to New York to Los Angeles to piece together the background of Carroll Baker's "Sylvia". The supporting cast is terrific, as has been noted by other IMDb contributors. Then there are the flashbacks themselves which are less satisfying. I don't think this is Carroll Baker's fault at all, really. Maybe I am prejudiced since I adore Ms. Baker even when her acting isn't "spot on." Where I think the film flounders is in the way it doesn't avail itself of the kind of subjectivity that a film like CITIZEN KANE investigated. Each of the people Maharis interviews tells a part of Sylvia's life from his/her own perspective. Unfortunately the direction is fairly straight- forward, uninteresting, and doesn't adequately reflect each storyteller's own agenda or personal perspective. That would have made the flashback sequences much more interesting and provocative, and given Baker a bit more "meat" to her role as the enigmatic Sylvia since we would be seeing her -- literally -- through the eyes of the person recounting her life at that point in the film. The flashbacks in SYLVIA are simply that: flashbacks, and nothing more. Because the film is so simplistic, we automatically trust what each character is telling us about Sylvia and the flashbacks themselves are gospel truths. After a while the formula of Maharis meeting a new person from Sylvia's life and the flashback convention starts to get a bit tedious. On the other hand, as the film advances we get some great character performances from Ann Sothern, Viveca Lidfors, and Nancy Kovack (among others). Paul Gilbert as Lola Diamond is a hoot, and Lloyd Bochner and Aldo Ray are sinister adversaries as the men who rape Sylvia. The film feels like it wants to be LAURA but never quite achieves the same spellbinding quality, perhaps because there's no murder mystery which would have given the audience a nice bit of suspense to cope with (just the threat of scandal, which was admittedly more damaging a liability in the 60s than it is today; heck, today an author might thrive on scandal if it sold more copies of her book!). I felt a big "so what" about the unsurprisingly scandalous past of Sylvia. We already know that Sylvia made good on her own, and doesn't really "need" the financial assistance of the Peter Lawford character. There is very little to get worked up about, except perhaps what handsome Mack may do with all his sordid information. And, naturally, it's inevitable he should meet and fall in love with Sylvia. That would seem to me to be a good potential departure point for something exciting, and certainly more interesting than what happens next. What the film doesn't explore very well is how much Sylvia seems to need approval, and how empty she is emotionally (evidently using her reading as a form of escape from reality). As much as Baker tries to fill in the blanks in the script for us with a sympathetic performance, we don't really ever get a deep enough look beneath the surface of Sylvia, or get into her head. All the evidence is hearsay, circumstantial, and very little comes from Sylvia herself. Mack even stops Sylvia from pouring her soul out to him, which is unfortunate because it would have given Baker an incredible monologue to chew on as she dragged up every dark aspect of her past and corroborated what we had seen (would have been a nice recap, as well). I wanted to really like this movie more, even as camp, but found myself only mildly entertained. I think the ending is a real let down. It would have helped if there had been more to the conflict than just the exposure of scandal. The happy ending felt tacked-on and rushed, especially. All this is not to say that I think SYLIVA a bad film or Baker not good in it. Quite the contrary. I think the film has some precious moments indeed, but that as a good vehicle for Baker it is somewhat of a missed opportunity.