A House is Not a Home * (1964, Shelley Winters, Robert Taylor, Cesar Romero, Ralph Taeger, Broderick Crawford, Kaye Ballard, Mickey Shaughnessy) – Classic Movie Review 4702

Shelley Winters (Shirley Schrift), so great in A Place in the Sun (1951), The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) and Lolita (1962), has a bad time as legendary Roaring Twenties New York City bordello madam Polly Adler in co-writer/ director Russell Rouse’s poor, sanitised 1964 real-life drama film.

Winters and the rest of the good cast are largely wasted, though they all work hard. It also stars a career-in-decline Robert Taylor as gangster Frank Costigan, one of the whorehouse’s backers, Cesar Romero as mob boss Lucky Luciano, Ralph Taeger as musician Casey Booth, Broderick Crawford, Kaye Ballard and Mickey Shaughnessy. It is a shame that Winters, Taylor, Romero and Crawford are all just too old for their roles, but otherwise they are well cast and do well.

It is a flaccid take on the heroine’s best-selling 1953 autobiography, cleaned up for the screen when instead it should just have been swept away. This is the problem. The US censorship Production Code knobbles the film and we get a less than honest movie.

Winters is especially well cast, since the heroine’s rise is mirrored in her own life, born of humble beginnings to Austrian Jewish immigrant parents, starting out as Woolworth’s store assistant, model, vaudevillian and nightclub chorus girl, on her way to her acting classes and stardom. It’s the American dream!

Her character of Adler, on the other hand, rises from a humble Polish immigrant worker to an entirely kind of fame and fortune, through becoming friends with mobsters, politicians, businessmen, playboys, writers and artists, on her way to infamy as a bordello madam. It’s the American way!

Talking fame, the film is forgotten, and so is Polly Adler, but happily not so Shelley Winters. However, after this, Winters’ discontent became glorious summer again with The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), Alfie (1966) and her second Oscar for A Patch of Blue.

Raquel Welch is one of the sex worker ladies in her first role, after an unbilled walk-on as a college girl dancer in Elvis Presley’s Roustabout. Also in the cast are Lisa Seagram, Meri Welles, Jesse White, Connie Gilchrist, Constance Dane, Allyson Ames, Lewis Charles, Steve Peck, Michael Forest, Stanley Adams, Dick Reeves, Roger C Carmel, J Pat O’Malley, Alice Reinheart, Ben Astar, Hayden Rorke, Tom D’Andrea and Alex Gerry.

Edith Head was Oscar nominated for Best Costume Design, Black-and-White.

Produced by Embassy, it is technically an independent film, but it had big studio distribution from Paramount.

The classiest thing about the film is the evergreen title song A House Is Not a Home written by Hal David and Burt Bacharach and sung by Brook Benton, now a pop standard. The film’s original poster is quite stylish, too.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 4702

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