Two for the Seesaw
Two for the Seesaw
NR | 21 November 1962 (USA)
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After leaving his wife, lawyer Jerry Ryan moves from Omaha, Nebraska to New York City to start a new life. While studying for the New York Bar Examination and working to finalize his divorce, Ryan meets dancer Gittel Mosca, and the two begin a cautious courtship. However, Ryan feels that he must come to terms with his failed marriage and overcome his lingering attachment to his ex-wife before he can redefine himself and embrace his budding romance.

Reviews
Maidexpl

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

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Lollivan

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

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Janae Milner

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

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Nayan Gough

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

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zetes

Quite bad. Based on a William Gibson play (his The Miracle Worker was also made into a film in 1962), it stars Robert Mitchum and Shirley MacLaine as a square and a beatnik (guess which one's which) who hook up. The film's tagline is hilarious: "A square from Nebraska? an off-beatnik from Greenwich Village? It just didn't figure... that they would... that they could... that they did!" Yet it does figure, right, because this is a play. The issue shouldn't really be their differences in culture, but the fact that Mitchum is like 20 years older than MacLaine. Why would MacLaine give this dude the time of day? I don't know, she's pretty freaking annoying, too. Cute, though. I could see why he'd go for her. The cinematography is beautiful (and Oscar nominated), but, again, I love '60s black and white. There's something especially beautiful about it. This was Robert Wise's follow-up to West Side Story, which has its stagebound elements, too, but, dammit, he (and Jerome Robbins, of course) made it work, dag nabbit! Wise doesn't here. These two bores chatter on incessantly with really banal dialogue. I could not care less what happened.

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kenjha

A divorcing man from Nebraska comes to NYC and falls in love with a Jewish woman named Gittel. This drama is based on a two-character play that was a big hit on Broadway, which is surprising because this has to be one of the most dreary plays ever written. Wise, in this follow-up to the energetic "West Side Story," does nothing to enliven the proceedings here. The film is little more than a filmed stage play where the two characters talk and talk and talk non-stop. And very rarely do they say anything profound or witty. Given the vintage of the film, it's surprisingly frank in terms of sexual mores. Mitchum and MacLaine do the best they can with the boring dialog.

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e_tucker

In spite of Ted McCord's beautiful deep focus b&w photography there is very little in this film that is interesting to look at. As a stage play brought to film, it never manages to get off the stage and with all of NYC as a potential set, a little more time devoted to exterior shots could have opened this up and made it into a 'real' film. A few brief glimpses of lower Manhattan, Mitchum pacing the streets in the opening sequence or stalking MacLaine from the shadows outside her apartment gives a taste of what this film could have been if Wise hadn't allowed himself to become hidebound by a talky script.Mitchum is clearly miscast - it almost feels like the overabundant dialog is being dragged out of him. But since it is Mitchum, and he's such a force of nature on screen, it's hard to mind too much - but also hard not to consider that Fonda would have been a much more appropriate choice. As it is, MacLaine has a lot of work to do to convince us that Mitch is the guy for her. She almost succeeds (no doubt the off screen chemistry between the two stars helped her a bit with this), but most of the pleasure in her performance derives from that lovable slob thing that she could do falling out of bed, as she proved so ably in Some Came Running. Problem is, she is a comedienne and Mitch most definitely was not. She could snap out those one-liners, "That must have been some bridge!", and get a laugh. If Mitch said anything funny, I must have missed it.Unfortunately most of the film is shot in two tiny, claustrophobic apartments with very few changes in camera angle which made me think that Wise could take a tip or two from Ozu on how to make a repeatedly shot interior more interesting. When we aren't gazing listlessly at one or the other of these stupefying spaces, we are treated to a stale looking split screen shot of both a la Pillow Talk. Except that this doesn't really remind me so much of Pillow Talk, and not that I ever wanted to be reminded of it, as make me wonder if the original stage set had been carted in.Some relief is provided by Elizabeth Fraser as MacLaine's friend Sophie and Billy Gray as the cranky landlord. At least they get us out of the house before we go stir crazy to visit a few post beat generation Bohemian style parties and MacLaine's dance studio loft space. Early on we do get to go out to for Chinese once with a real live waiter (yay!), but that is soon buried under endless home cooked meals, warm milk and the perennial opening and closing of fridge doors. It's oddly underpopulated for a Manhattan film - think the World the Flesh and the Devil - without cityscapes...Previn's score, loved by many but sorry, I've never been a fan of that overly loud 60s jazz style. Beyond that, it threatens to over power the film by setting a jazzy New York tone that the proceedings simply can't live up to. No matter how hard the music tries, what we see is never in sync with what we hear.Worth a watch for MacLaine's perf and McCord's lensing, but not one of Wise's better efforts.

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kyle_furr

It was OK to watch one and then forget about it. It's basically about a romance between Robert Mitchum, who is getting divorced and Shirley Maclaine. That's all there is and this movie was taken from a stage play so all they ever do is sit around and talk. Mitchum and Maclaine are good and is the black and white photography is excellent.

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