Designing Woman (1957)

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1h 58m | Comedy, Romance

Vincente Minnelli directed this sophisticated comedy, which owes a debt to Spencer Tracy/Katherine Hepburn vehicles. Sportswriter Mike Hagen (Gregory Peck) and fashion designer Marilla (Lauren Bacall) are New Yorkers who meet while both are vacationing in California. It's love at first sight, and the two decide on the spur of the moment to get married.

However, once they return to the Big Apple, it starts to occur to them just how different they are after Mike moves out of his sloppy bachelor lair in the Village and joins Marilla in her luxury flat on the Upper East Side.

While they try to sort out their differences, Mike encounters his former girlfriend Lori (Dolores Gray), while Marilla runs into her onetime beau Zachary (Tom Helmore); given the haste with which they married, neither of their exes had yet heard that Mike and Marilla were hitched, and the notion that they could still be lured away hangs in the air.

Meanwhile, Mike has written a series of articles exposing corruption in boxing, which earns him no friends among some ill-mannered Gotham mobsters.

Bacall's sparkling comic performance was a remarkable display of personal strength; as the movie was being filmed, her husband Humphrey Bogart was suffering from the last stages of the cancer that would soon claim his life.