Word: barbara
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...Barbara Mutton got things straightened out with London's gossipy Tatler, which had reported her married to Australian Playboy Freddie McEvoy and sharing the "super-suite at the Carlton." The correction: Miss Hutton was not married to McEvoy and was not at the Carlton; she "treated the matter most generously by accepting this apology, coupled with a substantial payment to the Maternity Ward of the Royal Northern Hospital by The Tatler...
TIME (May 27) says Barbara Button's shorts would shock the President of France. LIFE the same day says it was the King of Cambodia...
Like "Double Indemnity" (also based on a Cain yarn), "Postman" involves the extra-curricular love affair of a married woman, the murder of the husband by wife and lover, and the net of justice that ensnares them. But where Barbara Stanwyck clearly was a woman powerless in the grip of passion, Lana Turner plays a peculiarly ill-defined character, driven in conflicting directions by muddled motives. Nor is Garfield, while more suitably cast, given a better organized role. The smaller parts are much neater; Cecil Kellaway as the husband and Hume Cronyn, as a lawyer who gets Miss Turner...
...Barbara is crazy over horses; Robert likes antiques. Almost against his will, Robert keeps kissing a pretty girl (Diana Lynn) and Barbara is not amused. By reaching greedily for both realism and farce, the picture loses at both ends and rapidly falls apart in all directions. The solemn scenes emerge as tiresomely trivial. The comedy scenes, by contrast, are disquieting: they manage to characterize the hero and heroine as fairly unpleasant young people with oddly frivolous notions about earning a living, adultery, practical joking, simple decency and the training of young children...
Other than script and direction trouble, the picture's chief drawback is its disastrous miscasting of Barbara Stanwyck as a featherweight. Her no-nonsense personality jars a skittery light comedy right off its fragile moorings. When Barbara slips into a filmy negligee and begins to thresh about a hotel bedroom with her leading man, it is impossible to remember that she is supposed to be just kidding around...