JayJeffersonCooke

An aging Rita Hayworth appears in a role beneath her talents.

A beautiful Kim Novak (who has little acting skill) looks frighteningly out of place dancing and singing -- not to mention acting.

Barbara Nichols (who had great acting skill) was woefully underutilized.

Sinatra never was handsome enough to play such a character as Joey Evans. And yes, I am one of the people who is NOT charmed by his singing.

A disaster yesterday and hopelessly dated today, Pal Joey is what many people eat on the cob.

Poor performances by Sinatra, Martin and Hyer. Grossly underdeveloped supporting characters. Annoying talky with no real plot. Ending leaves you flatter than a pancake, with more loose ends than you could tie up in four sequels (that is, if you even cared about these wooden characters). MacLaine is the only real asset. That penultimate sequence in which the "Chicago hood" searches for the Sinatra character is laughable. The music in that sequence also is poor. And in the final scene when Martin's character removes his hat for the woman he called a "pig," almost made me go outside and find a stone to throw through my television screen.

This film is a bit of a mess. It attempts to be clever by having the black person in the interracial relationship having all the doubts because of society's pressures. Big deal. It's poorly written, poorly constructed and poorly photographed. And when I say amateur hour -- I mean just a little more than an hour. Note the short running time and the use of still photographs to take up screen time. It's a real shame that a film trying to tackle an important topic was mishandled so badly. It may have made a decent ABC Afterschool Special in the 1970s -- if you made the characters high-school kids.