IMDb plot summary: Joey Evans' a charming, handsome, funny, talented a-1st class, A-N°.1 - heel. When Joey meets the former chorus girl and now is the rich widow, Vera Simpson, the pair of lecherous souls seem made for each other.
Directed by George Sidney. Starring Rita Hayworth, Frank Sinatra, Kim Novak, and Barbara Nichols.
I've been enjoying a lot of classic musical movies recently -- Kismet, Call Me Madam, Bells Are Ringing -- but this one doesn't work for me much at all. I attribute that partly to how uninteresting the story is overall -- Joey's an unpleasant character and I don't particularly care who he ends up with -- but this movie also features primarily diegetic numbers sung by the characters at the nightclub where they work. This nearly always severs the emotional connection for me between the music and the story, though you can get away with it if the story is rich enough, like in Cabaret or Once. Pal Joey's story is not rich enough to stand up to that. So even though there are some good individual musical moments, none of them strengthen or are strengthened by the narrative, and it ends up falling a little flat.
How it entered my Flickchart:
Pal Joey < The Beach
Pal Joey > Big Business
Pal Joey < The Hurt Locker
Pal Joey > Pride and Prejudice (1940)
Pal Joey > Paint Your Wagon
Pal Joey > Happy Christmas
Pal Joey > Stephen King's The Stand
Pal Joey < Captain Fantastic
Pal Joey < Another Thin Man
Pal Joey < The Rescuers Down Under
Pal Joey < Gypsy (1962)
Pal Joey < Rigoletto
Final spot: #2107 out of 3330, or 37%.
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