Director: George Cukor
Year Released: 1954
Rating: 3.0
Judy Holliday, seeking to make a name for herself in the Big Apple, puts her name on a billboard ... which proves to be effective self-advertising: in doing so, she gets into a bidding war with Big Business (and gets entangled with soap tycoon and smooth operator Peter Lawford) for the rights to the sign. Works as a simple romantic comedy for the most part (it's generally hard to say no to Jack Lemmon as any kind of quirky character - here, he's a documentary filmmaker!), but I'm a little unsure about the third act message about being "one of the masses" - Holliday's right in her assertion that people should be famous for something other than self-advertising, but is it so wrong to try to succeed in life (since Success is the game we're all playing) as long as no one gets hurt? I don't think either Cukor or screenwriter Garson Kanin could have predicted that over fifty years later there would be a considerable rise in people being famous for being famous, but there you go....
