Toi pour moi

Tony Brown (Peter Lawford) gets shot in the butt during a hunting trip. Nurse Katie McDermad (Jane Greer) and surgeon Jeff Chadwick (Gig Young) are two of his caretakers. Brown is a big money contributor to the hospital. "Do you know who I am?" Lucille Brown (Rita Corday) is his gold-digging ex-wife.

It's a thin line between love and hate. At least, that's what Hollywood likes to believe. Brown needs to be less hateful and angry at the beginning. He could get easy sympathy by playing up the pain of getting shot in the butt. It's funny and a good excuse to be angry-funny. That's what's missing from that first meet-cute. It needs to be cuter. He does slip in some good sex humor but he's also too mean at times. On the second side of triangle, Dr. Jeff is too arrogant and too straight. He needs to push harder on the humor or be much more arrogant and stiff if he plays the bad side of the triangle. Jane Greer seems to be the only one who hits the bullseye consistently. She's sly. She's sarcastic. She's able to make this work despite the a few bad notes from the other performers although I don't like her with either man. That's where the meet-cute with Brown is so important. This has the potential of a good standard rom-com but the execution is a little off.

You for Me needed much more work to be an attractive feature. The cast has no chemistry together, and you don't care which man Jane Greer ends up with. Its attempts at humor are particularly lame, and it seems to get worse as the movie progresses. Should have been rewritten and recast, but we don't live in the best of worlds, so this is what we got. It isn't so hot. A definite second feature or 'B' film.

This impressively silly film starts off with a bang with playboy Peter Lawford having a hunting accident which results in his getting buckshot in his tail. Bickering doctor Gig Young and nurse Jane Greer when not verbally sparring spend most of their screen time examining Lawford's derriere. Although this viewer is willing to concede that the aforementioned part of Lawford's anatomy may very well comprise that actor's greatest charm, the charm is not so great as to serve for the main focal point of an entire film especially when it is never even glimpsed by the audience. That notably absent and undoubtedly welcome sight alone could begin to atone for enduring nearly 80 minutes of Lawford's usual obnoxious urbanity and the total waste of both Young and Greer who are brought together by the end....Lawford's end, that is.

Slick, fast-paced unfunny romantic comedy as rich Peter Lawford and research doctor Gig Young don't exactly romance Jane Greer, but more accurately bid on her for her affections. Young seems grouchy at being in the picture, Lawford tries to get through his lines as fast as possible and Jane Greer seems to just want to leave the scene.

Glib, engaging romantic comedy with a sitcom-like feel, but a GOOD sitcom, with well-rehearsed actors delivering consistently witty dialogue with impeccable timing and skill. The film has a loose, likeable quality that seems to flow naturally from Jane Greer's down-to-earth, girl-next-door (but not the bland, idealized girl-next door) acting style. Her nurse is nobody's fool but also nobody's girl and therein lies the conflict.

Peter Lawford and Gig Young, typically second leads, are also in good form. Here, the two of them together add up to one more than adequate leading man. It truly is a contest and a mystery which one Greer will choose. They complement each other well; neither is all hero or heel.

What's most remarkable about the picture and most indicative of its quality is how minor characters keep surprising you. Young's Aunt Clara, who in other films would be a daffy but lovable eccentric overflowing with relationship wisdom and sage advice, is here a not completely innocuous free-thinker with radical beliefs. In a scene where Young introduces her to Greer, the two don't bond instantly as one expects; instead Greer squirms at the old woman's peculiar ideas about the medical profession and even challenges them (to little avail). Tommy Farrell's goofy, unthreatening intern, Dr. Rollie Gibb, in what would ordinarily be the thankless THIRD lead, gets kicked in the shin a few times for laughs early on, but emerges by film's end, refreshingly, as not only more of a man than Greer had ever imagined but also a bit of a hero. Scenes like this show that the filmmaker isn't on auto-pilot and is truly interested in fleshing out this fictional world and populating it with people, not types.

I don't do many reviews these days but when I saw how this was being so unjustly maligned I had to mount a defense. You for Me may be a small forgotten film, but most fair-minded viewers who stumble across it will be surprised at how good it really is. 50 years later it holds up remarkably well.