Marjorie Morningstar

United States

1958

128 Min

Color

English

Currently 3.6/5 Stars.
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SCR Everett Freeman, Herman Wouk

CAST Gene Kelly, Natalie Wood, Claire Trevor, Everett Sloane, Martin Milner, Carolyn Jones, George Tobias, Martin Balsam, Jesse White, Edd Byrnes, Paul Picerni, Alan Reed, Ruta Lee, Ed Wynn

While working as a counselor at a summer camp, college-student Marjorie Morgenstern falls for 32-year-old Noel Airman, a would-be dramatist working at a nearby summer theater. Like Marjorie, he is an upper-middle-class New York Jew (born ‘Ehrman’), but has fallen away from his roots, and Marjorie’s parents object among other things to his lack of a suitable profession, such as medicine or law. Noel himself warns Marjorie repeatedly that she’s much too naive and conventional for him, but they nonetheless fall in love. As they pursue an on-again-off-again relationship, Marjorie completes her studies at Hunter College, and works to establish an acting career, while Noel first leaves the theater for a job with an advertising agency, but later completes a musical he’d started writing before he and Marjorie had first met. Meanwhile, their relationship deepens (though, consistent with ‘50s Hollywood mores, the more full-fledged sexuality in their relationship is never explicitly communicated). They plan to marry, but after the musical’s critical failure on Broadway, Noel runs away. Marjorie finally tracks him down at the summer theater where they first met—and, realizing that this is probably where he belongs, finally gives up on the relationship. Helping her to move on with her life is Wally, once Noel’s assistant, now a very successful Broadway playwright, and all along, Marjorie’s unrequited lover. The movie ends with a clear implication Wally and Marjorie will finally be a couple. —TCM

Director

Irving Rapper

Irving Rapper (16 January 1898 – 20 December 1999) was a British film director. His most successful body of work is 10 films he made while under contract with Warner Brothers.

Rapper emigrated to the United States and became an actor and stage director on Broadway while studying at New York University. In 1936, he went to Hollywood, where he was hired by Warner Bros. as an assistant director and dialogue coach. He proved invaluable in translating and mediating for non-native English-speaking directors. By the early 1940s, he had metamorphosed into the one of the hottest directors on the Warner Bros. lot.

He made his directing debut with the 1941 film Shining Victory, in which his friend Bette Davis appeared as a show of support for him. He would go on to direct her in four more films, Now, Voyager (1942), The Corn Is Green (1945), Deception (1946), and Another Man’s Poison (1952). In later years, Rapper admitted that he found Davis very difficult to work with and that… read more