Incredibly lame Sinatra vehicle teaming him with Debbie Reynolds in a real oil and water mix. It wants so-hard-it-hurts to be an urbane comedy in the Tracy / Hepburn vein with supposedly extra added glamour centred as it is on the lifestyles of show-people but falls flatter than a trodden-on pancake. Sinatra gets an easy part as the rake the "dames" as he would no doubt call them can't get enough of whose life is spiced up by the arrival of old chum, David Wayne as a disillusioned married man and then Debbie Reynolds as a priggish and to my eyes anyway, boyish looking new girl in town who of course reels her man in by the simple expedient of actually saying "No" to him. All it is, is a dressed up homily to marriage, although personally I'd run a mile from Reynolds' hubby-hunting ingénue. There's no chemistry between the leads at all, Sinatra is unquestionably, as Reynolds herself tells him at one point, much too old for her. Celeste Holm and David Wayne get to mug and swoon in the background to no telling effect plus the production is so stage-bound, you can almost hear the line-prompter from off-stage feeding the actors. Its one redeeming feature is the well-known title song which is inserted into the movie not periodically enough but really on the whole this is sloppy Hollywood film-making of the worst kind, almost embarrassing to watch, particularly in these thankfully more enlightened times.
Review of The Tender Trap
