1950's Watch: Designing Woman (1957)

Watched:  06/10/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  Vincente Minnelli

I was a bit wary of this film as I watched the trailer, but you never know.  

For example, I'd quite liked Woman of the Year, and I thought that was not going to land with me.  But I've been taking a mini-journey through the very limited media lifespan of Dolores Gray, who was mostly a Broadway and West End performer (she's American - she played Annie Oakley in London's Annie Get Your Gun).  She only has, like, five or six movies, total, and Designing Woman (1957) is one of them.  

The story is about a sports reporter (Gregory Peck) who meets a high-end fashion designer (Lauren Bacall) while in California, but it turns out they both live in New York.  After a whirlwind week and marriage, they return to the city and what was going on in their prior lives.  

Turns out a hard-drinking sports writer and a wealthy woman used to more of a salon sort of atmosphere with her pals are somewhat at odds.  It's a deeply heightened "men be like this", "women be like this" clashing of worlds.  

It also seems that our Man was previously dating Dolores Gray - a Broadway performer/ star.  She isn't thrilled he picked some random woman on a trip to marry, but she isn't vindictive.  However, Bacall is recruited to dress the new show she's in - and both Gray and Peck pretend not to know each other.  Bacall sorting it out and being jealous that her 40-year-old husband had a prior life is, of course, a problem.

MEANWHILE...  Peck has been writing articles about a corrupt boxing promoter/ racketeer, who decides to take a poke at Peck.

It's just very dated, from meeting and marrying someone in a week - as happened in Hollywood movies all the time, but I am not sure had any basis in reality, to the romantic and sexual politics that spill out after - despite it being clear Bacall is a career-gal.

Dolores Gray is as lovely as the sunrise, but the plot point about Bacall feeling inadequate next to her feels... misguided.  What the movie does do, not so subtly, is keep Gray only partially clothed through chunks of the movie to get across who Bacall is not (although this same movie introduces her in swimwear).

There's also a fascinating scene with some not-subtly-coded joking about a show director being gay, until it turns out he's not - which is the punchline.  And I imagine in '57 this felt very sophisticated.  But it is interesting to see how they managed to get all of this across without a single line that would draw the ire of the Hayes Office.

The movie was kind of not my thing, which is more a reflection on me and what I chuckle at than anything to do with the performances.

Anyway, I think I laughed twice during a whole comedy, and one of those was Dolores Gray doing a bit of physical comedy with a plate of pasta, and her reaction after.

this photo and pose by Dolores Gray are a key plot point

Gray would only do 4 movies in 3 years as the studio pushed her as a new attraction.  Name on the marquee stuff.  But it didn't take.  

It's weird.  She was basically shoved front and center immediately in 1955, given a key supporting role in It's Always Fair Weather - where I first noticed her, and then was thrown into co-starring with Howard Keel in Kismet.  This was followed by The Opposite Sex - The Women remake with a very mid-50's all-star cast.  And then a major second-banana role in this movie.  

Someone had a great deal of faith in her, and I think she's put in the right movies.  She's very funny in It's Always Fair Weather.  But it feels like she was basically supposed to be "sexy woman in musicals", as the Monroe and Russell thing was blossoming, but her arrival coincided with musicals fading a bit by the end of the 1950's.   And, it's possible, that her stage presence just couldn't translate to the screen unless she was singing and dancing.

She would return to the stage, and be a standard guest on Ed Sullivan and other shows, doing elaborate performances (which have recently been dumped to YouTube).  But mostly wound up being a grand dame of the theater.

We do rec her album, Warm Brandy.