Cynthia

ELIZABETH TAYLOR's fans are really the only ones who will find any reason to watch CYNTHIA, a sugar-coated confection about a sickly girl churned out by MGM for the fast developing teen who was turning into a woman almost overnight.

Here, at fifteen, she's still got a lot of her girlish charm, exhibits a modest singing voice (is that her???), and portrays a girl who's so fragile that her parents hold her back from doing anything more strenuous than going to the corner store.

Ironically, it foretells Liz's own lifelong struggle with illness. GEORGE MURPHY and MARY ASTOR are her rather stern but loving parents and JIMMY LYDON is the boyfriend who gives Taylor her first screen kiss. S.Z. SAKALL is her encouraging music teacher.

It's all very downbeat without a sense of humor, too straightforward in the telling for its own good. Unimaginative and more of a B-film than anything else.

Elizabeth Taylor still a sweet young thing stars in the title role of Cynthia, a teen thought of as sickly by her over doting parents George Murphy and Mary Astor. I have to say that Liz looked pretty healthy to me.

A short prologue tells some of the answer. Mary Astor marries big man on campus George Murphy and both as it turns out are planning to study in Vienna, him medicine, her music. But the Great Depression happens and both return to the USA with a baby daughter and worried most of all about security.

I'm sure that the baby in its early years gets doted on and may have had more than her share of illnesses. But the parents develop an overprotective attitude and a hypochondria about her. Which is making Dr. Gene Lockhart who is married to Spring Byington, Astor's sister practically a practice of his own.

Kids do grow out of these things. One of my nieces was very sickly as a child, but she's 32 now and quite healthy. My brother and his wife never developed the attitude that Murphy and Astor have. She was not the hot house geranium that Murphy and Astor have raised.

Lockhart and Byington have a daughter Carol Brannan and Brannan as Liz's cousin thinks of nothing but boys 24/7. There's one special boy in Jimmy Lydon who lied about his age and went to war. Now he's back in high school and seen as the catch of the year.

Lydon never really rings true as a character. He surely doesn't show any of the maturity that one would have after war service. I can't see how he would fit into high school. Just get a GED and go claim your GI benefits would be more realistic. Lydon doesn't seem that much more mature than Scotty Beckett who is Brannan's ever reliable boyfriend and playing awkward as he always did as a teen. Lydon's character is a weakness that the movie Cynthia has.

It's biggest strength is Taylor of course. It's really heart warming to see her emerge from the hot house. Also S.Z. Sakall as a sympathetic music teacher who remembers old Vienna steals every scene he's in as he always does.

Cynthia is a film as old as I am. It's also holding up in far better shape than this author. Elizabeth Taylor's legion of fans will still love it.

Elizabeth Taylor seemed to go almost overnight in films from child to voluptuous young woman. But in this nice low-budget (for MGM) movie, made when she was 15 at most, there is something of the sweetly awkward colt about her, in the title role. There are scenes in which she sort of oscillates between childhood and adulthood--the visual equivalent of an adolescent's voice cracking--and it was in this movie that she got her first screen kiss (from an engaging James Lydon).

It's a bittersweet movie, about the deferrals and compromises that one has to make in life--the parents who don't continue their higher education, the soldier who resumes his, the refugee professor. As Cynthia's mother, Mary Astor brings her usual warmth and common sense, and there are vague echoes of her questing, yearning character in "Dodsworth." Cynthia's illness is used as something of a metaphor for domestic discontent, and in view of Taylor's chronic health problems is a little unsettling in retrospect.

All of the reviews seem to be about Elizabeth Taylor, but very little mention about George Murphy and Mary Astor. Murphy almost sleepwalks his way through the film. Sixteen years as a clerk in a hardware store without a raise? Really? Where's the gumption, the backbone in the character. Is Napoleon so small a town that he can't find a better job somewhere else? A better actor would have shown some bitterness as being denied the opportunity to become a doctor. Mary Astor was going to be a concert pianist. Surely these failures of ambition can't simply be blamed on the sickly child that was born to them.

At first it turned me off, some, because it is so innocent and golly-gee-willickers. Father is manager at Dingle's hardware store. As it turns out it's so sweet and cute it's irresistible. Boasts a refreshing sense of humor, family sensitivity, excellent characters and acting. The contrast in attitudes between mother and father works really well. What a marvelous mother-daughter relationship. The acting is tops: Taylor, of course, parents, the schoolboys and Elizabeth's cousin; and my favorite, the music teacher. This movie will make you feel.