The Rat Race

Plot synopsis:
Wishing to pursue a career as a jazz saxophonist, Pete Hammond Jr. (Curtis) takes a bus from his home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to New York City and optimistically begins looking for work. However, jobs are extremely hard to find.
He crosses paths with Peggy Brown (Reynolds), a model and dancer who has become jaded and cynical after years of struggling to survive in the city. She has just been evicted from an apartment rented to Pete, and because she is penniless and has no home to return to, he offers to let her stay with him. She is forced to rely on his generosity, and as the two of them work at various low-paying jobs, they stay together in the apartment as friends.
Peggy warns him that people can't be trusted, but Pete is encouraged when a band auditions him for a job. When the other musicians send him out for beer, Pete returns to find that they have stolen his instruments and that he is the victim of a scam. Peggy grimly but reluctantly tells him "I told you so."
Pete lands a 30-day job as an "alto man" on a cruise ship but has no instruments. Peggy goes to the abusive taxi dance hall owner she works for, Nelly Miller (Don Rickles), to whom she is already in debt, for another loan to give to Pete and agrees to prostitute herself with his patrons to pay back her debts. Maintaining a cynical front, Peggy convinces the suspicious Pete that she got the money with "no strings attached."
Pete writes Peggy daily while on the cruise. When she stalls at fulfilling her end of their deal, Nelly strips Peggy of her dress and shoes to make his point that he owns her. She runs out on their deal again the night Pete returns, and Nelly threatens to disfigure her. In love with Peggy and afraid for her, Pete gives up all his wages, his wristwatch and his new instruments to pay off Nelly. Later Pete tells Peggy that he loves her and confesses that he "mixed" with three women as part of his cruise job. Peggy agrees to stay with Pete but tells him "no more cruises."

Tags: romantic

Review:
DEBBIE REYNOLDS and TONY CURTIS are excellent as two young people in 60's-era New York City facing adversity with street smart skills developed after abuse from thugs like DON RICKLES (a savage performance), and other so-called big shots.Curtis takes pity on Reynolds and invites her to share his flat--but his luck fades when his musical instrument is stolen.
True love blossoms as Reynolds tries to help him with lots of obstacles thrown in their way by assorted no-gooders.Garson Kanin directed from his play and he keeps the action moving and the stylish backgrounds show New York City scenes that would make any New Yorker nostalgic for "the way it was".A downbeat, sometimes bitter dose of comedy/drama that has so much energy and such appealing performances from Reynolds and Curtis, that you'll be drawn into it from the start.
In watching The Rat Race today, I was struck by the fact that this film did not lead to any more parts like the one she played here for Debbie Reynolds.
She was quite a revelation as the girl who's been around the block a few times and just struggling to stay alive in that meat grinder called New York.By the time The Rat Race came out, Tony Curtis was already being taken quite seriously as an actor with The Sweet Smell Of Success and The Defiant Ones behind him.
She played good girl roles almost exclusively, but here she takes on a part that you would have more readily cast Elizabeth Taylor.Curtis is from the Midwest and an aspiring jazz musician who comes to New York, but gets quickly victimized by a cruel city.
It's strictly economic at first, but you know these two people living one step from the gutter would fall for each other.The film was based on a play that Garson Kanin wrote and ran 84 performances in the 1949-50 season on Broadway.
It starred Betty Field and Barry Nelson on stage and repeating his role from the original cast as a musician con man is jazz great Joe Bushkin.
Jack Oakie has one of his last roles as a philosophical bartender, serving drinks in the downstairs of Kay Medford's boarding house.I have a sneaking suspicion that Debbie Reynolds might have taken this part to prove she had every bit the acting chops Elizabeth Taylor did.
Watching the movie, one could not help but feel so badly for them (Tony Curtis' character for being trusting and having his musical instruments stolen, and Debbie Reynold's "hard" character (with a heart) for sacrificing to help Tony's character out and being abused by Don Rickles' character and his henchman.Norman Fell and Don Rickles were very effective as the "heavies".
I'm a Rickles fan, but can't make myself like him (smile).Also love the NYC scenes, and film is almost nostalgic (NYC, the way it was in 1960).Definitely a "must see".
if you're thinking of Tony Curtis and Debbie Reynolds with their Hollywood glamor - you're in for quite a surprise - this is grittier stuff than they usually did - altho - not guttery or depressing - as it would be in todays milieutry to overlook the residue of Tonys Bronx accent - and enjoy his eager Midwestern saxophonist arriving in the jazz musicians mecca - Noo Yook Cityexcept he's not in a typical Hollywood success story - here the emphasis is on disillusionment - and its actually risqué for its time - with Tony and struggling dancer Debbie Reynolds sharing an apartment - both actors are very good - Debbie could have used more such rolesthe script is too talky perhaps - too much like a stage play - the most memorable thing for me beside the stars is the music - especially the throbbing theme song played over the opening scenes of Tony's cross country bus ride - from the plains of the Midwest - to smog shrouded NYCand i can still hear in my mind the driving version of THAT OLD BLACK MAGIC played with real life saxophonists Sam Butera and Jerry Mulligan - and Joe Buskin at the keys - that scene demonstrates how convincing Curtis was at faking playing a saxophone - notice his red face while playing the large baritone sax - when i was in the school band - i could barely get a sound out of one of them.
Midwestern saxophonist Tony Curtis (as Pete Hammond Jr.) arrives in New York City, seeking fame and fortune.
Mr. Curtis quickly meets disillusioned Debbie Reynolds (as Peggy Brown).
Curtis and Reynolds (and the film, generally) look way too sharp to be Mr. Kanin's desolation row denizens, clawing their way to the top.
***** The Rat Race (7/10/60) Robert Mulligan ~ Tony Curtis, Debbie Reynolds, Don Rickles.
Tony Curtis, (Pete Hammond Jr.) plays the role as a musician who plays a saxophone, clarinet and flute and he leaves Milwaukee, Wisconsin and heads to New York City to start out on his career.
Pete has a hard time trying to find a cheap place to live and winds up sharing an apartment with a girl named Peggy Brown, (Debbie Reynolds) who is a dancer and singer and has lived in New York for a few years and is having a hard time trying to find a job doing what she likes.
This is a great film because Tony Curtis, Debbie Reynolds and Don Rickles played very dramatic roles and they all gave outstanding performances.
Veteran actor Jack Oakie, (Mac, Owner of Macs Bar) gave a great supporting role and also some comedy.
The Rat Race (1960)Maybe this will help: Tony Curtis is himself, really strong, and if you like him, you'll like him.
Though painted as a story of boy meets girl and the improbable follows the unlikely, the basic premise is heartwarming and true to a lot of our dreams of making it, and making it with the right person (both).I liked this movie a lot.
In that sense it's really a 1960 era movie, when artifice had reached a truly plastic kind of height (sometimes with wonderful results, but even classics like, say, "West Side Story" have a style from the times that is neither classic 1940s Hollywood in its believability nor totally creative invention as with those rare movies here and there all through the decades).
Or "Breakfast at Tiffany's," or the black and white counterpart in a different sense, "The Apartment." I think this Curtis/Reynolds romantic comedy is totally overlooked, and deserves a close look.
The fact that Peggy (Reynolds) and Pete (Curtis) finally get together is not because of the City, as we might expect, but in spite of it.
While Tony Curtis is never going to win any awards for his musicianship, the little "group" that he tries to join contains some pretty impressive "ringers", especially for a movie that isn't all that much about the musical side of things.Any group that contains the likes of Gerry Mulligan AND Sam Butera is going to raise more than a few musical eyebrows.
Exceptionally thin drama, written by Garson Kanin from his own play, about a horn player from Milwaukee arriving in New York City by bus, taking over the boarding room usually held by a down-on-her-luck taxi-dancer; they meet and, seeing there are two beds in the place, he proposes they share the room and help each other out.
As the naive musician, Tony Curtis is convincing fumbling about nervously with his horn cases, but the moment where he realizes his roommate is really a cute little number never quite arrives.
Curtis and co-star Debbie Reynolds do a little bickering, a little soul-sharing, and the next we know he's writing her love letters.
Reynolds has a good girl's version of 'tough' down pat, though when boss Don Rickles calls her a "Goldilocks" he's not far off; this is strictly a one dime-a-dance girl who would never sacrifice virtue for rent money.
Kanin's script spends a lot of time on extraneous circumstances, particularly when Rickles makes Debbie strip in his office (nothing comes of this, not even a tart exit line).
Curtis and Reynolds are seen as a couple of struggling nice kids--not above stepping into the gutter, but not without total remorse.
If Garson Kanin's stage version were successful enough to earn a movie treatment by producers Perlberg and Seaton, whose adaptation of Clifford Odets's "The Country Girl" is famously exquisite, one can only assume that the play was more honest and less preposterously disingenuous than this laughable adaptation.Written by Kanin himself, who must have swallowed a fair amount of bile at the bowdlerizing mandated by the Hollywood Production Code, the film addresses its central question, which appears to be whether "dance hall girl" Debbie Reynolds (!) is or isn't a prostitute, with pages and pages of jaw-droppingly elliptical dialogue that bears no resemblance to human speech -- lines on the order of, "I'd never think you'd...you know..." and "How could you think I'm the kind of girl you think I am?" Those are not necessarily exact quotes, but you get the idea.The film is sunk by other equally bizarre choices at every turn, including not only the female lead's spectacular miscasting but her co-star's as well.
Presenting Tony Curtis as a Midwestern naif being conned by heartless Manhattanites produces such howlingly funny utterances as "And on my foist day in New Yawk!" '30s Paramount comedy star Jack Oakie and Kay Medford, Dick Van Dyke's mother in the stage version of "Bye, Bye, Birdie," comprise a kind of greasy-spoon Greek chorus, a bartender and his only barfly, Reynolds's landlady, whom we first meet sitting at the bar drinking orange soda!
In this Times Square saloon which, like many other sets in the film, reveals the art director's painful fascination with red walls, there is more mugging going on than in Central Park.But all of this is topped by the grotesquely overwrought, bug-eyed and nostril-flaring performance of Don Rickles, who quickly demonstrates why he found his true calling in standup rather than film acting.
Tony Curtis and Debbie Reynolds were my main reasons for seeing 'The Rat Race'.
The idea of the story also intrigued me, as did seeing Jack Oakie in a late role, Don Rickles in an early one and having the great Elmer Bernstein being the composer.
There was the worry though as to how Curtis would fare in the setting, and whether Reynolds would be too glamorous within a story that does have some grit.Luckily, what 'The Rat Race' had going for it works very well in its favour, nothing is squandered.
Quite a breath of fresh air compared to some things seen recently, of my recent viewings of Curtis' works it's among his better ones, and worthy of a little more credit than it gets.Maybe at times 'The Rat Race' is a little too talky.From personal opinion, as nit-picky as this sounds, Curtis and Reynolds are slightly too pretty amidst a purposefully drab setting and a story that has its grit.Apart from those, there is very little to dislike.
Why the producers decided to cast New Yorker Tony Curtis in the film, I just can't understand.
Why would they cast him of all people considering he is supposed to be playing a guy from Milwaukee who gets lost in the big bad city of New York?
In fact, Tony Curtis and Debbie Reynolds were excellent in the film--with acting and dialog that seemed pretty realistic.
They both play "starving artists" who come to New York but find success is somehow always out of sight.
And, if you think about it, this is a great lesson for everyone.A nice, romantic, funny but occasionally sad and cynical little film about life and little people.By the way, look for Don Rickles in one of his earliest roles.
Not quite innocent,but not really guilty either;that's Miss Debbie Reynolds in "The Rat Race".Many men are susceptible to a woman with a slightly bruised aspect to her and Mr Tony Curtis is no exception.
It's a movie where "10 cents a dance" meets "Scrapple from The Apple" as cool jazz man Curtis shares an apartment with broke and weary taxi dancer Reynolds who has unwisely accepted a large loan from her boss Mr Don Rickles who is keen on her repaying him in the traditional showbiz manner.
Daring for its time in its acceptance of the ambivalence of the character played brilliantly by Miss Reynolds,the movie gives a fairly bleak view of New York nearly fifty years ago,an era we are frequently led to believe nowadays was a golden one indeed.Clearly not if you were struggling in the lower stratum of the entertainment profession.
Garson Kanin's play was 20 years ahead of its time.Less bleak than its contemporary "The Connection",but quite shocking for mainstream audiences with its portrayal of the bottom feeders of show business,the bullies,the pimps,gangsters and the compromises decent young people were forced to make to follow their chosen paths.Not to mention an unmarried couple living together.
There is some fairly belicose Elmer Bernstein music diffused by an extract of typical late 1950s West Coast cool and Mr Curtis is very convincing as the aspirant jazzer with integrity (i.e.no money) Sedate by today's standards,"The Rat Race" marked a transition from 1950s movies to 1960s movies in content and tone.Not until "New York,New York" was there a more impressive portrayal of an average saxophone player and his showbiz lady,and my goodness how the movies - and the world - had changed by then..
The movie opens with Tony Curtis as Pete Hammond Jr. boarding a bus in Milwaukee, headed for New York with his musical instruments, flutes and saxophones.
The bus ride is interesting, it shows it entering Cleveland, Philadelphia, and finally New York, pulling into the Port Authority terminal just a good walk from Times Square, places I was familiar with in the 1980s.
It was nice seeing them in an earlier time.Once in New York we see Pete is definitely a fish out of water, too trusting and several times getting taken by scams.
In fact that is the genesis of the title, "Rat Race", people go to New York and seem to turn into "rats", doing what they need to do to survive.But Pete meets Debbie Reynolds as struggling model Peggy Brown, working at a club where travelers, usually service men and traveling business men, want some place to go to dance with a pretty girl.
Feeling compassion for her, he suggests that she just share his room, which has two beds and a curtain for privacy, for a few days until Peggy finds a place to go.I like this movie for several reasons, the 1960s was my time, I was growing up, graduating from high school, going to college, and starting my own career and family.
I like both Tony Curtis and Debbie Reynolds and it was fun to see them together.
New York is one of my favorite cities to visit, it was nice to see it back before it developed into what we know it as today.
The movie doesn't get into what might have happened down the road, it just shows us how Pete eventually gets work as a musician, and he and Peggy, after becoming friends sharing a room, fall in love with each other.
Debbie Reynolds is maybe more known for her comedic roles, but here her Peggy Brown is completely serious, and she shows what a fine actress she is.
Tony Curtis is an ambitious young saxophonist who shows up in New York looking for a job.
God, I loved New York City in 1960.
And underneath THAT, she's a real MEAN barracuda.She finds a shabby room for Curtis by the simple expedient of throwing Debby Reynolds out because she's in arrears.
But Curtis, a gentleman of the Midwest, offers to share the room because Reynolds has no other place to go and is one step away from becoming a working girl.
It began as a play and maybe that accounts for the extended talk fests involving Curtis and Reynolds.
Take Don Rickles, as Reynolds' boss at the dance hall.
I don't remember what she looked like but who could forget that name -- "Rose" "Brown." Anyway, Reynolds doesn't make much money dancing with the drunks and the goaty customers, and she's in debt to Don Rickles, who is constantly urging her to "have drinks and a dinner" with a nice rich customer.
In a completely unnecessary scene, Rickles forces her to remove most of her clothing.Best scene in the entire film: Tony Curtis gets a chance to audition for a famous combo called The Red Peppers.
Later on, Gerry Mulligan makes a brief appearance.Both Curtis and Reynolds are professional performers and it shows.
And Debby Reynolds is sexy in a dramatic role but she's too girlish.
And then I find her playing a down-and-almost-out character in New York City who is on the verge of plying the oldest trade in the world to make pretty skimpy ends meet.
And then, after she falls in love with Tony Curtis, she agrees to in order to get him money to buy instruments.No, this is no comedy.
Tony Curtis as the small town sax player who hopes to strike it big in New York City.
Reynolds as the hope-to-be model who is struggling in New York City.
One of the better Debbie Reynolds vehicles of the 60s, but still not particularly good.
Reynolds plays a NYC dance hall girl living on the skids in Kay Medford's seedy apartment house.
Through a depressing series of misfortunes, she ends up with struggling musician Tony Curtis as a roommate.
Despite the presence of comics Medford and Jack Oakie (who together act as a sort of skid row Greek chorus), THE RAT RACE is pretty bleak.
Director Robert Mulligan makes a point of avoiding any humor (except for the many verbal jabs Reynolds lobs at nice guy Curtis) and the lack of levity leaves the film dead.
In a very rare straight role, Don Rickles plays Reynold's sleazy boss.