bkoganbing 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.

theowinthrop I am going to give this lousy movie a "6", mostly due to the acting of Debbie Reynolds, Tony Curtis, and (best of all) Walter Matthau in trying to lift the idiotic plot. Also it's a nod to Vincent Minelli, a director who when good is indeed good - but not here.I have nothing against sex in comedy: they go hand in hand ever since Aristophanes wrote LYSISTRATA. George Axelrod was no Aristophanes (he would barely touch that master's knees). However, he could construct plays of interest (THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH) and he had a hand in the screenplays of a number of first rate film (Wilder's version of THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH, BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962 version)). But this film is crap. The story should be more promising: Charlie is the friend of fellow writer George (Tony Curtis), and both are ladies men. While on the yacht of Hollywood producer Sir Leopold Sartori (Matthau) he makes a play for Lady Rusty Sartori (Laura Devon), and is caught by the husband. What follows may be based on the popular idea of the fate of film producer Thomas Ince in 1924 on William Randolph Hearst's yacht. Charlie is shot dead jumping overboard. His body is not recovered. Friend George is supposed to handle the funeral. Only a few people show up - Charlie's sex escapades and his debts left him with few friends. George finds he has been left executor of a bankrupt and debt encrusted estate, and he can't do anything to fix it.Shortly after all the mourners leave, and after George falls asleep, his doorbell is knocked on. He finds a young man named Bruce Minton III (Pat Boone) with a woman who seems to be in shock. The woman is Debbie Reynolds, whom Minton found wondering around the highway naked and dazed. Minton does put her into his coat, but deposits her (out of necessity - for want of any sensible explanation) with an outraged George. George allows her to spend the night, but the next day she suddenly reveals that she is the dead Charlie, cruelly reincarnated as a woman (albeit an attractive woman). When George finally realizes this he tries to help Charlie get back to normal. But Charlie has other ideas. Like blackmailing old girlfriends and romancing every man in Hollywood - starting with Sir Leopold, whom he/she owes a "favor" to.That is the foundation of this story. There have been attempts to do justice to reincarnation stories, but this is hardly the best attempt. Axelrod basically gets his best jabs when the female Charlie keeps acting too masculine (he/she slaps the rear of a female employee of the beauty parlor he/she is attending). That Charlie and George inevitably start falling for each other (despite their mutual realization of how sick the situation is) is inevitable, but it too is not funny.Still, as I said, the leads and some of the supporting actors (including an up-and-coming Ellen Burstyn) give a good try for it. Best is Matthau, who (despite a poor Hungarian accent) does well as Sir Leopold (a film clone of the real English movie producer/mogul, Sir Alexander Korda, who was married to the gorgeous Merle Oberon for many years). He is childish, monstrous, and inept in trying to be smooth at the same time. But this material is lousy, and it is a monument to Matthau's ability that he pushes it as far as he can. Reynolds is too shrill at times at the transformation she has suffered, and is best as the poisonous blackmailer/user. Curtis is fine, but has few moments to rise in the material given him. Boone does well, but he has little to do but look like a love-sick puppy dog towards Reynolds.See it once for the cast and Minelli, and then never watch it again if you can avoid it.

sol **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.

marcslope 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.