The question to ask when you are watching this musical is how well the humor holds up, since more time is spent on getting laughs than singing songs. Judy Holliday's vulnerable/meddling character and Dean Martin's debonair/immature counterpart seem like an unlikely romantic combination. In this translation of a long-running Broadway show to film, Holiday stars as a Brooklyn telephone answering service operator who falls for a client. This gets complicated---and contrived---but creates many opportunities for Holliday and Martin to sing great songs by Jule Styne, with lyrics by the incomparable Betty Comden and Adolph Green, including the 20th century classics "Just In Time" and "The Party's Over." Production numbers like the one in which Eddie Foy Jr. explains how an undercover racetrack betting system will work, "It's a Simple Little System," actually are more watchable than the ongoing intrigue over the lead characters' love lives. This film does not adequately convey Judy Holliday's enormous appeal as a stage performer, but, if nothing else, it is a marvelous record of what telephones meant in people's lives before they were wireless. ---from Musicals on the Silver Screen, American Library Associaton, 2013
Review of Bells Are Ringing
