It was a serious sucker punch to all film fans when we lost Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds within a day of each other. There have been many tributes to Carrie Fisher and rightfully so. I have not seen that many for Debbie Reynolds so I would like to pay her tribute by reviewing one of her lost gems of a movie, GOODBYE CHARLIE from 1964, based on a play by George Axelrod and directed by Vincent Minnelli.
I can recall seeing this on a network movie night in the late 60s or early 70s, I remember liking it but seeing it again after this many years I was astonished at how funny it really is, and how touching.
The setup is simple, Charlie Sorrell is a writer, sometime screen writer and notorious womanizer. At a Hollywood party on a yacht he is shot by a jealous husband (Walter Matthau in an early role and in rare form indeed!) Charlie, by whatever means, immediately comes back as a beautiful young woman, Debbie Reynolds. This causes all sorts of consternation for Charlie’s best friend, George Tracy (Tony Curtis) who has come back to California from his home in Paris to deliver Charlie’s eulogy at his sparsely attended wake. George is also a writer and the story makes it plain these two have done a lot of carousing around and womanizing, together and on their own.
GOODBYE CHARLIE shows its origin as a stage play through most of its running time, a lot of the movie takes place on one set, Charlie’s beach house high above the ocean.
I had not seen Goodbye Charlie in many years and was astonished at how funny it really is. I laughed out loud for most of its running time. It is a great showcase for the versatile talents of Debbie Reynolds, she is hysterical and totally believable as a man stuck in a woman’s body. Her male mannerisms are spot on. We never, ever lose track of the concept that all her dialog is being spoken by a man and Charlie’s learning how to be, and enjoying becoming a woman is precious. She is more than matched by Tony Curtis, who knew a bit about gender bending himself having just been in Billy Wilder’s landmark transvestite comedy Some Like It Hot. His reactions, especially when he is finally convinced that the beautiful young woman who ended up at Charlie Sorrell’s house, is in fact Charlie him/her self is priceless.
Priceless too is the moment when Charlie asks George to “come here and look at this!” and (off camera, in the bathroom) shows George some of her/his “female attributes.” The fact that this is DEBBIE REYNOLDS, second only to Doris Day in being a wholesome, girl next door kind of actress, inviting Tony Curtis to “come here and look at these!” Wonderful! Charlie comes out of the bathroom, buttoning up “her” blouse, takes a long look at herself in the mirror and states “now I don’t have to go to see Bridget Bardot movies anymore, I can just draw the blinds and take a look in the mirror!”
And it gets funnier from there, Charlie comes to actually enjoy being a woman but finds out very quickly the kind of bullshit women have to put up with. I would say GOODBYE CHARLIE was ahead of the curve on being a feminist movie but Charlie herself has a lot of misogynist comments to make before it’s all over.
You expect good work from both Debbie Reynolds and Tony Curtis but Pat Boone, (of all people!) is also hysterical. He steals every scene he’s in as a rich, spoiled Mama’s boy who immediately has a crush on Charlie. And the movie does more than hint that his character is probably gay, that he is responding more to the man inside Charlie than the woman outside.
We all start out female, in the womb every fetus starts as female and in the third trimester the change will occur that creates a male. Sometimes that process is not finished and thus many people are transgendered. So inside every man, no matter how manly or macho, is a girl trying to get out. Seriously, I’m man enough to admit to my inner girl, her name is Melissa, she likes to jump rope, have tea with her dollies and brush the cat and dog. But if you cross her she’ll burn down your house, more than a bit of Rhoda Penmark (The Bad Seed) in there too! So there are many men who feel their woman trapped inside. Rarely do women feel they have a man trapped inside. And that is the beauty and humor of GOODBYE CHARLIE .
It is a hoot to see Charlie, (again this is Debbie Reynolds!) going to a spa to have her hair and nails done and eyeballing every woman in the place. Pat Boone offers to marry Charlie and presents her with a ring with a diamond the size of the Waldorf. Her reaction is hysterical, touching and sad all at once.
And the ending comes perilously close to very bad taste. The jealous husband (Walter Matthau) who shot Charlie in the first place now has his own crush on Charlie, gets her alone and forces his intentions on her in what can only be described as date rape. Charlie even screams, “This can’t be happening to ME!”
The movie then boxes itself into a corner, but finds a way to bring back both Charlie and Debbie Reynolds, just not in the same body. As a tribute to Debbie Reynolds, and a memorial, you can’t get much better than Goodbye Charlie.
The dvd is a burn on demand dvd-r so there are no extra features, the movie is not even letterboxed but pan and scanned. It is still worth seeing. And this was a rare case of a remake being as good, maybe better, than the original. Blake Edwards Switch from 1991 with Ellen Barkin pushes the envelope much further than Goodbye Charlie ever could. Ellen Barkin (as Roger Ebert pointed out in his review) has always had a mannish look and is one hell of a strong actress. Her man trapped in a woman’s body is even more believable and gets to do things Debbie Reynolds probably wouldn’t dream of. But that is another story.
Debbie Reynolds was a class act. In a career spanning interview she gave to Scarlet Street magazine a few years ago she bore no ill will towards a Hollywood film business that kicked her to the curb when she passed a certain age. She simply reinvented herself as a Las Vegas entertainer and never had a bad word to say about anybody. She was rightfully proud of her entire resume, still astonished that she was picked to star with Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor in the landmark musical Singing In The Rain. She was proud of her work in What’s The Matter With Helen a movie some actors would dismiss as a cheap horror movie. And she spent a lot of her own money and time buying props and costumes from Hollywood movies that would have otherwise ended up in the trash. She had a collection of mainstream movie memorabilia to equal the fantasy collections of Bob Burns or Forrest Ackerman. She was a class act, she and her daughter Carrie Fisher will be missed, any of her movies are worth watching, but GOODBYE CHARLIE is something special.
