6/10
Bad Karma for Charlie Sorel
10 October 2013
I'm still wondering why Lauren Bacall who played the title role of Goodbye Charlie on Broadway was not cast in the film. The story concerns a man who was both shot and drowned at sea, one Charlie Sorel who comes back as a woman and starts haunting the people she knew in her former life as a he. Bacall's voice in the lower registers as it were probably added a dimension to the performance on stage that could never be appreciated by the screen audience.

Charlie was a real cad in life and now coming back as a the beautiful Debbie Reynolds is truly some bad karma coming home to roost. The only one who knows the secret is best friend and fellow writer Tony Curtis who flew in from Biarritz to both be executor of an estate in debt and to preside over a sparsely attended memorial service.

In her recent memoir Debbie Reynolds who had worked with Tony Curtis in The Rat Race and had no problems said that Curtis had now taken the side of buddy Eddie Fisher in the breakup of the Fisher/Reynolds wedding. He quoted Eddie and said that she was obviously a lesbian as Fisher's manly charms she eventually found resistible. That set the tone for their relationship off screen.

On the other hand Curtis in his memoirs talked about director Vincente Minnelli whom he found super meticulous in his work. Sad to say that Goodbye Charlie though it has some good moments will never be ranked as one of the great films for Curtis, Reynolds, or Minnelli.
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