One of those film projects that feel as if it were slowly demoted in development before production got started. Too bad, too, since there’s a pretty good angle for a back-stabbing corporate executive-suite meller in here: Fast-Rising Public Relations/Ad Man Dana Andrews doesn’t know he’s been set up for a fall when he starts to get too close to taking over a key company account. Seeking revenge, he uses gal pal reporter Jeanne Crain & a struggling little advertising outfit, run by Eleanor Parker, to pump up the rep of a modest dairy biz run by happy imbecile Eddie Albert.* He’ll turn their fortunes around with his one-hand-washes-the-other gambits, and do an end run back over the guys that done him wrong. And if he loses both women and his soul in the process . . . ? Ay, there’s the rub. But, as you can tell by the date (1961) and the cast list, we’re no longer dealing with first-stringers. Dana Andrews wasn’t a fast-rising anything in ‘61. (Though, to his credit, he’s cleared up his slurry diction. On the wagon?) Same-o for tuckered out journeyman hack director H. Bruce Humberstone (in his last feature credit), and for once prestigious scripter Norman Corwin, whose style of writing still recalls his days making ‘important’ radio info-dramas for the war effort or on the duties of citizenship. Visually & dramatically, this one could have used some fresh meat and restocking.
DOUBLE-BILL/ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Albert’s character switches from imbecile to plain-spoken-man-of-the-people in a poorly thought out characterization. (Not really his fault.) Was the film toying with political parable? Something along the lines of A FACE IN THE CROWD/’57, but then let the idea drop as the scale of the pic reduced?
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