THE NEXT TIME SOMEONE TELLS YOU JOAN CRAWFORD FLIX ARE PASSE....

Sex and the Golden OldieIn between the years Sex and the City lynchpins Michael Patrick King and Darren Star were born, a Joan Crawford movie came out that looks today like a virtual blueprint of the pair’s HBO home run.

Friday, May 30, 2008 at 9:10 AM

By Pam Grady

A few years ago, in a DVD review for another web site of the 1959 romantic melodrama The Best of Everything, I wrote that this nearly half-century old saga of three single gals in New York hunting for careers and husbands reflected such a different era that it seemed to come from some other world. But after seeing the big screen version of Sex and the City, I stand corrected.
I had never before really thought about the obvious parallels between the HBO series and this Hope Lange-Suzy Parker-Diane Baker starring romantic melodrama. But at 148 sometimes punishing minutes, the sloppy, wholly redundant big screen Sex and the City: The Movie offers plenty of moments where the mind simply wanders.

Few TV shows have exited as gracefully as Sex and the City, so this clumsy monstrosity in which writer-director Michael Patrick King takes many of the story elements and even some of the lines from the series and throws it all into a blender is something of a shock. Did anyone really need to hear Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) say to Carrie, post-fight, as Carrie once said to then boyfriend Aidan (John Corbett), "You have to forgive me, you have to forgive me, you have to forgive me!" in the exact same desperate tone? And was it really necessary for Samantha to reiterate, "I love me more," years after she flung the same line at hotel magnate Richard (James Remar.

While it is impossible not to root for the happiness of sweet Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and her wonderful Harry (Evan Handler), or for caustic Miranda to not completely emasculate her affable, overmatched husband Steve (David Eigenberg), it is also hard not to roll one's eyes at Carrie. The most iconic recent female TV character this side of Jennifer Aniston on Friends trips over predictable romantic misadventures, grating shallowness and a shoe fetish that seems more ridiculous than ever.

So, do yourself a favor and gather around the gal pals this weekend to watch The Best of Everything instead. First released on DVD in 2005, the film revolves around a slightly smaller group of best-friend single Manhattan women who all work as secretaries at a publishing company in a pre-feminist 1950’s world. Although this trio is younger – all three women are in their 20’s - they are, given the times, basically in the same place as our SATC girls, looking for the man who will give them love and a safe harbor.

Was the 1961 minted Darren Star partially inspired by the 1959 movie?
There is no real equivalent in The Best of Everything to Miranda, unless one wants to count one of the group's bosses, steely Miss Farrow (a scary Crawford), whose affairs belie her status as a middle-aged spinster. There is a Charlotte in wide-eyed country girl April (Baker), who comes to New York to meet Mr. Right, but finds instead decadent playboy Dexter Key (a gorgeous, pre-Paramount Pictures Robert Evans in a bit of genius typecasting; this would be his final acting role). There is a brittle, more vulnerable version of Samantha in aspiring actress Gregg (Parker), who lets love get in the way of her better judgment when it comes to womanizing Broadway director David Wilder Savage (Louis Jourdan).

And there is a Carrie in Caroline Bender (Lange), though it is not an exact match. For one thing, one cannot quite imagine down-to-earth Caroline going gaga over overpriced, over-hyped Manolo Blahniks. But The Best of Everything basically reflects her point of view as she is left brokenhearted by a fiancé who jilts her for an oil heiress. And like Carrie, Caroline is vulnerable but ever hopeful in her search for love.

She even has a Mr. Big of sorts in editor Mike Rice, a man portrayed in Rona Jaffe's runaway success 1958 source novel as a warm but dissipated drunk - and still an alcoholic here - but one transformed by the ravishingly beautiful Stephen Boyd into an urbane charmer. And while Carrie, at least professionally, eventually morphs from party girl and intrepid (some would say insipid) columnist to author, Caroline is not long for the secretarial pool as she quickly works her way up the corporate ladder to editor, despite the warning that she will end up alone like Miss Farrow.

Here comes the sublimated bride!
A main difference between the two films is that in the pre-feminist world of The Best of Everything, the friends – except for Caroline after her metamorphosis – have jobs, while the post-feminist SATC bunch have careers and, in the case of lawyer Miranda and now-manager Samantha, high-powered ones at that. Oddly, the Sex and the City women seem to have more time on their hands; the ease with which these supposedly busy women socialize together was always a credulity-stretching hallmark of the show, and it has made its way into the film with a designer vengeance.

Perhaps most ironically, the Sex and the City movie pines for a fairytale ending of the sort that was a given back in the waning days of Hollywood's Golden Age. This sentiment, made explicit in the SATC movie when Carrie reads Cinderella to Charlotte's young daughter, inexorably binds these 1959 and 2008 groups of women together.

In a sense, those earlier New Yorkers could be the SATC group's mothers, and as much as the feminist movement and the sexual liberation that exploded with the introduction of the Pill in the 1960's has determined their choice of careers and their decision to delay marriage and motherhood until middle-age, Carrie et al are still their mother's daughters.

Has nothing really changed nearly 50 years after The Best of Everything? On a certain level, women and men both, straight and gay, are indeed still ultimately just looking for love. But what is most depressing about the overly long SATC movie, one that could just as easily have been called The Worst of Everything, is that it matters not a whit that Carrie, a writer who doesn’t seem to own any books, has grown professionally to the point where she now has an assistant (a wasted Jennifer Hudson). All that matters is Big (Chris Noth).

In the wake of the SATC movie, I now clearly see the errors of assumption in my The Best of Everything review. After going through her romantic travails during the course of the movie, Caroline Bender emerges stronger. She will never be the housewife her mother expects her to become, but she will also never be as embittered as Miss Farrow. She will have it all.

And she will never be the wimp at the mercy of a mercurial Cupid that Carrie Bradshaw is. Caroline does not get the traditional happy ending, just a hint at what might be to come, and the certainty that this woman is the mistress of her own fate. In the world of Sex and the City, that, alas, would be a radical notion.