JinRoz For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

ThedevilChoose When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Isbel A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

telegrafic If you are watching this movie expecting a great melodrama starring two stars and with an interesting plot then you will most probably be disappointed. It is not a great film with great script and great performances but mainly a skating show with a variety of skating numbers performed by the ice skating stars of the International Ice Follies to compete with Sonja Henie's skating musicals from rival studios. And because of that and despite of, the film contains a poor plot but beautiful and creative skating numbers; among the bests of them is the indian one (containing beautiful ice skating angel figure in its beginning) and the spicy red riding hood one in the technicolor sequence at the end of the film. Sadly, camera angles to take the skating routines are not always the best to film skaters in action, on the contrary to what happened in Henie's films. It is a pity that the studio did not include some skating routines for the three main characters, specially considering that all of them play professional skaters and that James Stewart & Lew Ayres appear in skating suits in a promocional still that can be seen in the movie as a poster in their room. By the way, the cinderella big blue ball gown in the final technicolor sequence must have been the inspiration for recent cinderella movie dress.

MartinHafer In the career of every big star, there often seem to be a few films that in hindsight you wonder why they chose to be in this doomed project. While Jimmy Stewart was NOT an established star in 1939 and can't be blamed for appearing in such an awful film, you wonder how one of MGM's biggest stars could get hooked into this awful mess! Joan Crawford certainly deserved more than this, though I must say that she seemed to try very hard to be a professional--even if the writers were apparently chimps. Even Joan's later super-low budget films like TROG and BERSERK are amazingly competent films compared to THE ICE FOLLIES OF 1939! The biggest problems with the film were the wretched writing and the impossibly dumb casting. Imagine Stewart and Crawford cast as ice follies skaters! Interestingly, you never really see them dance or skate--yet it's THE central theme of the movie. And who would have thought that the public would have wanted THIS sort of a film?! My assumption is that Fox's Sonja Henie movies must have been box office smashes for MGM to try to cash in on this ice skating craze in such a cheap and haphazard fashion.Now if you remove the silly ice follies elements, you still are left with an incredibly terrible film. The movie actually made my entire family cringe at the terrible clichés--especially when the film tried to rip off A STAR IS BORN. How Crawford was "discovered" and became a star was totally ludicrous--and had the worst "discovery scene" in film history. It really looked like every rotten cliché about film-making was thrown into a goulash-like mess of a film--including the (uggh) ending where the studio makes Stewart a producer and director--even though his greatest prior success was directing and skating in an ice follies show! Horrible writing, dumb situations, terribly long and ridiculous Busby Berkeley-style ice skating numbers and an over-abundance of clichés sink this one. I truly feel that the other reviewers were being far too kind to this turkey--perhaps because Stewart and Crawford have a lot of fans out there.As far as the magnitude of this bomb, I'd rank this up among PARNELL (Clark Gable and Myrna Loy) and SWING YOUR LADY (Humphrey Bogart) for 1930s bombs by mega-stars. In Bogart's defense, he was not yet a major star when he made his bomb--what's Crawford's excuse?

Michael Morrison After some exciting ice-skating scenes, the best part of this movie is the charming interplay between and among the characters. Lew Ayres has what seems to be for him a very different type of role, and his and Jimmy Stewart's characters have some dialogue that is often funny. Even Lionel Stander gets to play, for a change, a nice character also with some good lines. Joan Crawford, of the gorgeous legs, was a noted dancer, and it's surprising, at least to me, that she didn't skate -- and, with her legs, it's disappointing, too. I mean, what a wonderful excuse to showcase her in a short costume. Oh well, she got a chance to play a much softer character, and that was refreshing to watch. The story, such as it was, was fairly wimpy, and really just an excuse to present the skating scenes. Good enough. The only real complaint I have is that the color scenes didn't start earlier. The arena skating was actually more exciting than the filmed skating, but the cinema scenes were beautiful. I'd recommend this as a thoroughly enjoyable light entertainment -- heck, almost any movie with Jimmy Stewart is worth watching.

wrk6539 Experts tell us that MGM had high hopes for this strange movie pastiche, but it's hard to believe that from the tired on-screen shenanigans. With Sonia Henie making millions for 20th Century Fox in her kitschy skating musicals, Metro imported (at no small cost) the famed International Ice Follies and paired them with Crawford, one of their top-ranked, but skidding, stars. I still find it hard to fathom WHY Metro executives could ever have thought that this lumbering, tired film could serve any use in reversing Crawford's diminishing box-office drawing power. She, James Stewart, and Lew Ayres, seem to be walking through their roles in a most obvious case of movie-making by the numbers, with a plot that is nothing but insulting to its audience.This is not to say that certain pleasures can't be found in the film, if you want to take the time to look. Joan is as beautiful as ever and the Ice Follies finale (in which Joan does NOT skate) looks great in Technicolor. Happily and ironically, it was this film's total failure that brought Crawford one of her best screen roles, that of Crystal Allen in George Cukor's THE WOMEN. Reckless and with a feeling of nothing to lose, Crawford went after that unsympathetic part with a vengeance, AGAINST the advice of LB Mayer, who said it would finish her (but then again, what did HE know.....he LIKED the idea of this one!!)Not nearly as interesting as either THE BRIDE WORE RED (1937) or THE SHINING HOUR (1938), Crawford's other box-office flops of the period, this one is strictly for Crawford or Stewart completists.