April 8 movie: The Gazebo. Zany comedy starring Glenn Ford as a TV writer who kills a man and buries him under the gazebo. The murder victim is blackmailing Ford with nudie photos of Ford's wife, Broadway star Debbie Reynolds.
Put like that it sounds kind of horrible, but they made it work. It's a funny movie! The best part is Debbie Reynolds. I'm used to thinking of her as the innocent young girl of Singing In The Rain and The Tender Trap. I've heard she was a much more sexually confident person than those characters, and she gets to play that in this movie. [spoiler alert] When confronted with the nudie photos, she laughs in the blackmailer's face! She says the publicity would be good for her Broadway show. She apologizes to Glenn Ford for not telling him, but doesn't apologize for the photos. This is 1959 we're talking about here. It made me think about how rapidly social change must have been happening at that time. I can't imagine seeing a movie with this plot just five years earlier. Five years later it's almost the swinging 60s.
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We always loved that movie in my family, having caught it one time. As always, we came in late. Next time it was on, we saw the whole thing. I managed to catch it on tape some time in the 80s and still have it.
The thing we laughed hardest at was John McGiver, calling it "the gaze-bo."
I had no idea Glenn Ford was so funny. I had only seen him in dramas and Westerns before.
That guy John McGiver is terrific. He's a bright spot in every movie I've seen him in. I've mostly seen him in comedies like this and Breakfast at Tiffany's, but wasn't he also the good senator in The Manchurian Candidate?