Promise Her Anything

As you might guess, Promise Her Anything condones lying to women in order to get them into bed. It's not my favorite film, and I would imagine the only women who would like it are those who are completely in love with Warren Beatty. He's very handsome, but I'd rather sit through Splendor in the Grass instead, where he does some acting and doesn't have quite such a despicable character. But if you like to see off-screen couples fall in love on screen, you can rent it.

Leslie Caron is a young and beautiful widow with a little boy. She lives in the building with Warren (her boyfriend in real life at the time), but since she knows he's a playboy and a director of adult movies, she doesn't consider his dating material. Good job, Leslie! She's anxious to hook her boss, Bob Cummings, into being her next husband, since he wrote a best-selling child-rearing book. But the twist is it's all a façade: he hates children. So, who is really the bad influence?

You can correctly assume how I feel about this movie. It would be nice if there were a third option for Leslie: an actually good influence. If her choices are really a pornographic director or a man who hates kids, shouldn't she just stay a single mother?

Kids s2ck. In real life. But especially in movies.

They are not cute. They're not funny. They are not entertaining. They've obnoxious brats.

This movie is no more entertaining than going over to your friends' house on a Saturday evening and having them trot out their stupid brats to sing a song, play the piano, or mimic something they saw in a cartoon movie.

I was embarassed for Warren Beatty having to do physical shtick. And to a certain extent Bob Cummings, being a 50-something pretending to be young enough to still be a bachelor living at home with his super-annuated rich mom.

I enjoyed looking at Leslie Caron, as any healthy man would.

But this movie is terrible. No wonder it only pops up once ever 10 years on TCM.

This is a prime example of this show biz dictum. Beatty and Caron both act as if they are embarrassed to be in this cheap, poorly written, smutty comedy, and well they should. Apparently they were having an affair at the time and would rather be off alone. So would you if you were in this movie. Give it a miss unless you're a fan.

Promise Her Anything feels a bit like what you'd get if you took a Billy Wilder comedy and removed all the funny jokes. It's a strange, baffling mess of a film, only sporadically entertaining because of the occasionally strange things that happen. Examples: the opening credits reveal this was partly written by the author of The Exorcist (somehow), Donald Sutherland (RIP) shows up in an uncredited bit part, and Warren Beatty gets a baby drunk. The randomness and lack of coherency enables you to play a game of "what the hell is going to happen next," but it's otherwise not much fun.

I will forget about it almost straight away and that's okay. It's a bit of a waste of Beatty and Leslie Caron, with the former looking a bit embarrassed to be here in some scenes. At least Bonnie and Clyde was on the horizon for him by this point.

This would seem to be a silly, throwaway comedy except for . . . a very cute baby, a very cute girl (Leslie Caron) and a very cute character actor (Lionel Stander).

Beatty, playing a cheapo soft porn director, uses his apartment as his studio. Caron, not knowing his profession, begs him to babysit her toddler son. Beatty agrees, only the kid keeps wandering into the shots.

Light-hearted and fun.