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FEASTING ON SALT & PEPPER CHIPS Back in 2003, Entertainment Weekly named 1959’s The Best of Everything as one of the Top 50 Cult Films of All Time. On any pop culture list, it’s pretty tasty trash, as consumable as Kettle’s addictive Salt & Pepper Chips. Have the economy size handy. With a bang up cast caught up in one sexist situational low after another: Joan Crawford, Hope Lange, Brian Aherne, Diane Baker, Suzy Parker, Martha Hyer and, Vitalis’d to the max, Stephen Boyd, Louis Jourdan, Brett Halsey. The irredeemably low Robert Evans—who, quipped a critic some years ago, “gives good sleaze”—plots to pick up preggers Baker for a quickie marriage (complete with corsage) and while on the way to the minister in his flashy convertible sports car announces they’re going to a backstreet fix-her-upper instead. Hyer’s role feels sliced because it is; previews indicated audiences didn’t go for her brand of goody twoshoes adultery with nongreaser Donald Harron or her hysteria over Aherne’s boozy pass during an office party. Crawford’s stint abbreviated as well: as a seasoned bitch she brings star power and good laughs, especially her phone conversation with a married lover; we really need more of her—maybe the excised drunk scene? A mix of Grace Kelly and Vera Miles, Lange gives amusing tit for tat to Crawford. The indelibly American Suzy—whose gliding frame was the hanger every international designer would kill for, and whose tongue-in-cheek frolic photographed by Richard Avedon made her justly famous—goes unconvincingly warpy for slimebag Jourdan. Rummaging through his garbage and stuffing used hose into her coat pocket? Providing maid service to Joanie? Not with that face, behind which was a sharp, outspoken mind as the inspiration for Audrey’s Funny Face. (During a relatively short acting career, she sustained multiple injuries and her father killed when their car was struck by a freight train in Florida in June, 1958; though shards of glass filled ears and mouth, her kisser was largely unaffected, thus able to beautify Everything when filming started in May, 1959.) Forerunners to Sex and the City and Mad Men, Rona Jaffe’s novel—read by Don Draper in bed—and this movie were immensely popular among late 50s and early 60s high school and college skirts dreaming of working in the big city, hoping to get entry positions in the glass jungles of book publishing, ad agencies and insurance companies to achieve the then-coveted prize of marriage. In irreproducible style Johnny Mathis sings the Oscar-nominated title song, with Sammy Cahn lyrics like “You found the moon and the sun, yes, he’s the one it seems, but soon it’s done and not the fun it seems.” Directed by Jean Negulesco; Jerry Wald producer.
Text COPYRIGHT © 2001 RALPH BENNER (Revised 12/2025) All Rights Reserved. |
