It Should Happen to You

This is a clever, unassuming script with many funny scenarios. It's filled with the kind of comic bits for which Doris Day would become known. Jack Lemmon makes his first appearance here in his usual impish way, although slightly toned down. But the real deal here is Judy Holliday. She's just a brilliant comedienne. There's no way around it. If people thought Born Yesterday was a fluke, this movie and The Solid Gold Cadillac certainly prove that she's a superb actress with perfect comic instincts and timing. She's just amazing here and completely lovable.

Olivia (1951)

Olivia is a recently rediscovered (not really but sort of) lesbian melodrama from 1950s France and released in the U.S. in 1954. 

It's... well the whole thing is sort of hysterical, and I found it difficult to get interested in it. I think, maybe, too, it was the fact the film never gets there. We dance and dance around desire, but nothing ever arrives. I find the kind of teasing that Miss Julie, Olivia's object of affection, wields to be tiresome. 

The texts of Racine stud the film throughout, so Jacqueline Audry is clearly playing with unrealized desire as such on the thematic level (think of the unresolved, unrequited, and unconsummated loves of Bérénice and Phèdre), but I think this film was just not for me, Racine or no.

The Glenn Miller Story (1954)

The Glenn Miller Story is intensely, insanely boring. It is so boring it's actually perverse. This film was somehow wildly popular in its own day. I have no explanation for that other than to say I do not understand the 1950s at all.