The Rat Race (1960)

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The first must-see film of the year.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Tony Curtis is an ambitious young saxophonist who shows up in New York looking for a job. He's from Milwaukee. (!) He hasn't brought much money, only his instruments, and he's stumped when the Dixie Hotel (!) demands seven dollars a night for a room. (!) LOL. God, I loved New York City in 1960. As a young feller I was on a first-name basis with every one of its park benches in Washington Square.Curtis manages to find a room for a few dollars a night in a boarding house run by a tough old broad. Oh, she's crust on the outside. But underneath that, she's a real softy. And underneath THAT, she's a real MEAN barracuda.She finds a shabby room for Curtis by the simple expedient of throwing Debby Reynolds out because she's in arrears. But Curtis, a gentleman of the Midwest, offers to share the room because Reynolds has no other place to go and is one step away from becoming a working girl. Do they fight, you ask? Do they argue? Do they trade favors? Do they fall in love? You're kidding.It was written by Garsin Kanin who knows the tough underbelly of the city. It began as a play and maybe that accounts for the extended talk fests involving Curtis and Reynolds. The viewer already knows what's going to happen the moment they meet. Neither is going to wind up in the booby hatch. This is not Tennessee Williams.The writing is uneven. If Jack Oakie, as Mac the bartender, was any more avuncular it would have launched me into a series of clonic spasms. But when Kanin gets the right actors in the right scene, he wins every time. Take Don Rickles, as Reynolds' boss at the dance hall. Kids, a dance hall is a place where you can pay to enter and where lonesome men go to buy tickets to dance with the ladies. The most famous of them was, and maybe still is, Roseland, where I took an attractive young lady named Rose Brown. I don't remember what she looked like but who could forget that name -- "Rose" "Brown." Anyway, Reynolds doesn't make much money dancing with the drunks and the goaty customers, and she's in debt to Don Rickles, who is constantly urging her to "have drinks and a dinner" with a nice rich customer. Just be accommodating. In a completely unnecessary scene, Rickles forces her to remove most of her clothing.Best scene in the entire film: Tony Curtis gets a chance to audition for a famous combo called The Red Peppers. He shows up, bringing all his four reed instruments, eager for a job. The group is a phony. After a bit of practice, they send Curtis out for beer and pretzels, steal all his instruments and his seersucker jacket, and exit through the window. It's heartbreaking but it's hilarious. The dialog is exquisite. The cynical leader of the group is played by Ed Bushkin, a well-known pianist and composer ("Just Look At Me Now"). And when the saxophonists toot, they really toot, making Curtis look like the tyro he is. Elmer Bernstein, who wrote the musical score, is a group member. Later on, Gerry Mulligan makes a brief appearance.Both Curtis and Reynolds are professional performers and it shows. But they're miscast. Tony Curtis, born Bernie Schwartz in the Bronx, is a naive youth from Milwaukee? And Debby Reynolds is sexy in a dramatic role but she's too girlish. She has a piping high voice. She's just not convincing as a tough New Yorker, not here and not in "The Catered Affair." Somebody attractive but deeper could have handled it better, maybe someone like Patricia O'Neal.It's not badly done, not insulting in any way, although it would have been nice to have more than just a few second-unit shots of Jack Dempsey's and the Port Authority Bus Terminal. The comic interludes alone make it worth catching.

The Rat Race (1960)Maybe this will help: Tony Curtis is himself, really strong, and if you like him, you'll like him. Debbie Reynolds is kind of at her best, for me, less trivial than she is sometimes portrayed. She doesn't dance or sing, but is just a girl trying to make it in New York. Throw in Don Rickles at an exaggerated but believable role, with less humor and more grotesqueness. Finally, though big sax man Gerry Mulligan gets big letters in the credits, he appears, as himself, only briefly (though we do get to hear him play for a few seconds).But let's turn this around and talk plot. In a very broad way, this is a kind of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" a year earlier. Nice guy lands in New York without a clue and local woman is braving it on her own and having to compromise her principles in the process. Even the music, by Elmer Bernstein, is in a Henry Mancini style (only rarely dipping into any real jazz, for those looking for that). Though painted as a story of boy meets girl and the improbable follows the unlikely, the basic premise is heartwarming and true to a lot of our dreams of making it, and making it with the right person (both).I liked this movie a lot. It's even photographed by Alfred Hitchcock's cinematographer, Robert Burks, and so it looks good, too, in mildly widescreen Technicolor. It's a situation drama/comedy--there is no sensing that this is actually real. In that sense it's really a 1960 era movie, when artifice had reached a truly plastic kind of height (sometimes with wonderful results, but even classics like, say, "West Side Story" have a style from the times that is neither classic 1940s Hollywood in its believability nor totally creative invention as with those rare movies here and there all through the decades). The point is, you have to like this kind of set-up style to start with. You probably know whether movies like some of the Doris Day classics or even Marilyn Monroe movies are up your alley. Or "Breakfast at Tiffany's," or the black and white counterpart in a different sense, "The Apartment." I think this Curtis/Reynolds romantic comedy is totally overlooked, and deserves a close look. There are ever some fabulous if fleeting shots of busy New York City. And if you've never heard of the director, Robert Mulligan (no relation to Gerry), don't worry. He did pull off one all time classic handled with similar panache--"To Kill a Mockingbird." Yeah, don't underestimate this one.

I am surprised at the reviews thus far posted, as they miss one of the major novelties of this movie. While Tony Curtis is never going to win any awards for his musicianship, the little "group" that he tries to join contains some pretty impressive "ringers", especially for a movie that isn't all that much about the musical side of things.Any group that contains the likes of Gerry Mulligan AND Sam Butera is going to raise more than a few musical eyebrows. As mentioned above, the music used in the film is nothing to get too worked up about, but these two icons (plus the other sidemen that surround them) are reason enough to consider this one "special".A musical note or two about Curtis is in order here as well. He also played a tenor saxophone player in the iconic Some Like It Hot. While his autobiography is silent as to his actual saxophone playing skills, some of the fingerings that he used in that film were right for the music being played (although out of sync with the actual film sound track). It is mentioned that he has some flute playing skills in the biography, so his being a sax player is not out of the realm of possibility.The horns that he is seen playing in this movie all appear to be Selmer instruments. When his horns get "lifted" by the boys in the band, Debbie Reynolds goes to bat for him and buys him a set of horns "to get by" on his cruise ship gig. However, the instruments purchased are Leblanc horns, recognizable by the distinctive tweed covered cases in which they came. But, when he is seen performing on the ship, he is again playing Selmer instruments. Since this was well before product placement in movies became common, it may be that he was playing his own horns and the Leblanc cases were used for their visual appeal.

I was 9 years old when I first saw this movie, which was probably too young. I think it was the "B" movie accompanying "Bells Are Ringing" with Judy Holliday. To me (at that age), the movie was very grim, but mesmerizing. Main characters were extremely likable. You could not help but feel badly for Pete Hammond and Peggy Brown who were good folks but had to deal with such adversity. Watching the movie, one could not help but feel so badly for them (Tony Curtis' character for being trusting and having his musical instruments stolen, and Debbie Reynold's "hard" character (with a heart) for sacrificing to help Tony's character out and being abused by Don Rickles' character and his henchman.Norman Fell and Don Rickles were very effective as the "heavies". To this day, I think of Don Rickles as "Nellie" in this film. I'm a Rickles fan, but can't make myself like him (smile).Also love the NYC scenes, and film is almost nostalgic (NYC, the way it was in 1960).Definitely a "must see". Great actors in their environment and in a past era. I have a VHS tape, but will order a DVD as soon as I log off :-) Tim