Solidrariol Am I Missing Something?

Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Ginger Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

vert001 Ginger Rogers seems to have held to the classical idea that actors are supposed to create distinct characters rather than repeatedly play variations on themselves (or at least on their established acting personas). I think that her changes of hair styles, hair colors, especially her changes of voices, sometimes confuse her audience, who expect these things from character actors (say, Alec Guinness) rather than from Hollywood stars. Janie from TOM, DICK AND HARRY is about as different as it can get. The typical Rogers character had been established as a tough cookie, guarded but caring, quick-witted yet possessing a hidden vulnerability. Janie, on the other hand, is kinda dumb, too self-centered to be particularly caring or vulnerable, and probably a pretty tough kid, though we hardly get a chance to see it. She is most definitely not your typical movie heroine.Actually, Janie is pretty much a proto-Valley Girl, right down to the muddied pronunciation and frequent porpoise-like squeals that Rogers endows her with. We have Janie's younger sister's word for it that Janie is older than she acts ('She gets more adolescent every day'). She seems to have been a telephone operator for some time, and her parents were courting "thirty years ago", so the girl must be somewhere in her twenties. Rogers was 29 at the time. I don't think she was too old for this part, she was merely playing an immature young woman.Janie's immaturity especially comes out in her inability to say no to any marriage proposal. Those three proposals are the whole movie, and happily director Garson Kanin moves things along briskly so that tedium never really sets in. We see Tom (George Murphy) first. His relationship with Janie seems passionless (he tends to show his affection by tapping her on the shoulder rather than kissing her), and Janie seems to realize it. She receives his proposal with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, yet Tom does seem the proverbial 'good catch', being handsome, cheerful, and giving every indication of becoming a good provider. When he finally gives out an off-handed, "I love you", it's enough for her to jump on. Janie's subsequent dream quickly gives her second thoughts.The dream sequences in TOM, DICK AND HARRY were probably more innovative than they now seem. I, at least, don't recall seeing anything like them before TD&H came out, but I have the impression that they were done to death in subsequent television sitcoms. MANY SPOILERS FOLLOW: Anyway, I believe that there's less suspense in Janie's final choice than Kanin intended. Tom, a character usually played by Ralph Bellamy, is out by virtue of being dull. True, George Murphy has a lot more bounce in his step than Ralph ever did, but love absent eroticism was not the movie way even during the heights of the Hays Code.Burgess Meredith gives a charming performance as our proto-hippie Harry (actually, all three suitors are excellent at what they're expected to do). An auto mechanic who wants no part of the rat race of success, many things other than 'the bells' tell us that he's the one for Janie in the end. Their meeting is deftly cute in the finest screwball tradition, they quickly traverse the 'hate/love' path so often traveled by Ginger with Fred ("It's the right dress. I got the wrong fella."), and Harry is even able to bring out the latent intelligence in Janie, who listens to his musings with an open mind and even grasps his statistical arguments better than a large majority of the population would manage. And, dare I say it? Meredith and Rogers make a very nice couple.The courtship with Dick (Alan Marshal) seems the weakest of the three psychologically, though it may be the funniest. He's amused by her, he likely would find her attractive, but the idea that someone like Dick would actually ask Janie to marry him before their first date is over lacks any plausibility whatsoever. Harry, on the other hand, has been established as rather flaky himself, and his conversations with Janie have been positively deep compared to anything shared between Dick and Jane.The movie is funny and in some ways unusual. The acting is good and sometimes inspired (Rogers and Meredith). Two problems keep it from being better remembered. First, Janie is simply too self-centered for us to care very much what happens to her (does she ever have a thought concerning other people's feelings?). Second, who could believe that a marriage between Janie and anybody, even Harry, could last more than a couple of weeks? TOM, DICK AND HARRY isn't likely to give anyone a warm, fuzzy feeling inside, but it is good for quite a few laughs. That's more than most comedies can say.

SimonJack "Tom Dick and Harry" is one of the few films I've watched on DVD that I turned off about two-thirds of the way through. I went about doing something else and only returned to the film the next night to finish it. It truly was that boring. I've read the reviews of others. They seem split on liking and disliking this film. Some who enjoyed it saw it as screwball, but it doesn't come close – at least to the definition of screwball. The biggest thing it's missing is the laughter.Some people may have found some warm humor in it because of Ginger Rogers's character, Janie. But where are the funny, witty lines? The script seems devoid of any clever dialog. The plot is simple and had possibilities. But, instead of clever dialog with some snappy and funny lines and situations, it has a plot that simply plods along. The character of Janie seems to be in a trance through most of the film – with considerable alcohol added toward the end.The movie came out in June 1941. Europe was at war but the U.S. hadn't entered it yet. The economy had begun substantial recovery the year before, somewhat due to the war overseas. And, America was just coming out of a long depression and recovering from the Dust Bowl in the Plains States and Southwest. So, some audiences may have liked dreamy, fluffy stuff like this. Perhaps girls and young women enjoyed it most. If so, I doubt that that rapture lasted very long.The only reason I give it four stars is for the cast and the credible performances of all. Rogers was OK in her near constant dreamy state, with few lines of any significance or humor. But this film has to rank toward the bottom of her movie repertoire. Burgess Meredith was good in his role as Harry. George Murphy was very good as Tom, and Alan Marshal was good as Dick. I don't mind movies that are mostly fluff – if they have some entertainment value in music, song, dance or comedy. Unfortunately, "Tom Dick and Harry" has none of these. It's an easy movie to forget.

mmallon4 I was left in a state of despair after watching Tom, Dick and Harry. The fact that a Ginger Rogers film could be this shockingly below par. It's not just a forgettable, run of the mill film. Heck, I wish I could call it mediocre. Tom, Dick and Harry is horrifyingly bad.Although the opening title is creative, it all goes downhill from there. For starters there is a "joke" early during the film, in which Phil Silvers asks Rogers if she wants some ice cream, he mentions a variety of flavours, Rogers mentions he forgot one, Silver's denies it. Once he leaves, Rogers say to her date that he forgot to say pistachio. Several minutes later Silvers returns just to mention he forgot Pistachio. I don't get it, what's the punch line!? Rest assured my laugh count by the end of the film was a total of 0.Let's move onto the most awful thing about Tom, Dick and Harry. I am talking about the film's dream sequences. They sound like an interesting idea on paper but good lord, are they terrifying! I rarely find any movie scary, weather classified as horror or not but never have I been so close to wanting the literally hide behind the couch. The most terrifying thing about these sequences are the adults dressed as babies, miniaturised and superimposed in the scenes. The Exorcist? Rosemary's Baby? Phhh , please. Those adults dressed as babies is where it's at when it comes to the stuff nightmares are made of. Was David Lynch inspired by this film? It's like something straight out of Eraserhead. Every time one of these dream sequences was about to start I was pleading with the movie, "please not another one!". This was the last thing I was expecting from a 1940's movie with such an innocent, carefree title.I can assure you that I'm not exaggerating when I call Tom, Dick and Harry one of the absolute worst films I've seen from Hollywood's golden age. After finishing the film I had to watch something else in order to help get it of my mind, not only because it's a terrible film starring my beloved Ginger Rogers but because those dream sequences will give me my own horrible nightmares (Just for the record the film I watched was Lonely are the Brave starring Kirk Douglas, which did the trick). I'd imagine after winning an Oscar for Kitty Foyle, Ginger Rogers would have had all sorts of film offers going her way. Heck, she turned down Ball of Fire and instead appeared in this. I don't even like thinking about it. Thankfully the following year she stared in The Major and the Minor, so all is forgiven.

Richard Burin Tom, Dick and Harry (Garson Kanin, 1941) is an incisive examination of the American Dream, masquerading as a fun romantic comedy. Ginger Rogers could really screw up a up a comic romp if she was given free rein (see Howard Hawks' Monkey Business, or probably don't bother), but working in tandem with director Garson Kanin - a famed screenwriter - she gives a nuanced, likable, often very funny performance. Rogers plays a scatty, indecisive young woman who becomes engaged to three very different men: go-get-'em salesman George Murphy, brooding ambition-vacuum Burgess Meredith (one of my favourite actors) and charming, slightly aloof moustachioed millionaire Alan Marshal. Murphy epitomises the American Dream and Marshal the Hollywood ideal, but it's the cynical, down-to-earth Meredith who has the purest ideas about love, and sets Ginger's bell a-ringing. The story keeps you guessing, while Kanin includes three bizarre, subversive dream sequences showing the pitfalls of married life with these three vividly-etched archetypes. Phil Silvers also has a funny bit as an intrusive ice-cream salesman who's "a little obnoxious". From the jumbly credits to the neat surprise ending, this is a wildly entertaining comedy with a latent satirical bite.