rdoyle29
Shirley MacLaine stars as the wife of brassiere magnate Richard Attenborough. Happily married if somewhat lonely, she ends up sleeping with James Booth, a fellow who works for her husband who swings by to help her fix the sewing machine. Now he won't leave. He moves into the attic, and she has to juggle a husband and a lover under one roof. A bit of a relic of it's era with lots of whacky swinging sixties visuals. It's an amusing film that largely loses it's way during it's repetitive final act. Freddie Jones dominates the film in his handful of appearances as a very eccentric cop investigating Booth's disappearance. John Cleese and Barry Humphries appear in very small roles.
mark.waltz
You could make millions in an auction of the costumes and props for this oh so silly British farce that is overloaded with everything but plot and substance. It's one of those 1960's acid stained comedies where bored brazier manufacturer's wife Shirley MacLaine takes a lover, hides him in her attic(above the marital bed it seems) and has all sorts of strange surrealistic fantasies to comment on her strange situation. When husband Richard Attenborough has a sudden health crisis, her fantasies change to seeing him get better, thus neglecting her hidden stud (James Booth).Made around the time that various popular actresses such as Bette Davis, Elizabeth Taylor and Rosalind Russell took on roles that made them seem like drag queens, MacLaine took on several of them. From 1964's "What a Way to Go!" through this four years later, she really had only one hit ("Gambit") with the remainder getting more and more outrageous. There's no real sense of direction except just to keep getting sillier with each fantasy and costume change, basically turning Shirley into Liberace without a piano. Top that off with balloon like dummy dolls modeling braziers pulling people up for a mad, mad, mad world type final, and you've got Shirley MacLaine's real boobie prize. If this is what an acid trip looks like, keep me sober!
withnail-4
This movie is about color, rhythm, blossoms, visual wit, vibrant states of mind love, and being in love all over the place. And wonderfulness. No one since Charles Laughton has made faces as amazingly as the great Freddie Jones does here as the inspector. The level of film-making is the absolute top. In its own very different way, it is as well scored, composed, and photographed as a David Lean film, or something archly impressive like that. Quintessence of film art, really. But this movie couldn't be more unlike those movies. A visual equivalent of a great 60s pop music love song. The Beatles movies are less like Beatles songs than this tripped out valentine. An Overwhelmingly warm charming and dreamy psychedelic love trip. This movie hugs you and takes you to a place called nice.Cinematography by Geoffrey Unsworth (2001) and a great score by Riz Ortolani, and New Vaudeville Band (those guys who did "Winchester Cathedral") were used perfectly in the soundtrack.Patricia "Hyacinth" Routledge and John Cleese add to the fun.
psully99
I only saw this movie once, around 1982. Sorry to admit, I was still doing some of the 60s things at the time, like smoking pot, and so my recollections are not so vivid of the movie (except for laughing too much, and a giant bra), but it is remarkable that even now when I see Shirley McLaine movies I always wonder why Ihave never seen Mrs. Blossom again. I looked it up on Internet just now and came here, because "What a Way to Go!" came on, and it is another even older (1964) Shirley McLaine movie. She's So CUTE! Hmm, now that I recall, I was also in a love triangle at the time. Maybe that's why it seems so poignant.
AD
