Matcollis This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

NekoHomey Purely Joyful Movie!

Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

MartinHafer I saw this film for one reason--it starred Jack Lemmon. Lemmon was a very fine actor and I'd see him in just about anything. "The Notorious Landlady" must surely qualify as 'in just about anything'! The movie starts off very well but then just seems to drag on and on--becoming quite dull. Frankly, by the time it was over, I was more than ready.The film begins with a low-level American diplomat in London looking for an apartment. He happens upon a flat owned by an American--and it's odd, because practically EVERYONE in London seems to be an American in this film. Lemmon is thrilled to move in, as the landlady (Kim Novak) is very sexy. Soon they fall in love. However, things do NOT go smoothly, as he then is informed by his boss and Scotland Yard that she is suspected in the murder of her husband! What's to happen next? Well, although the film was very good at this point, the exact solution to the problem just never hit home for me. I wish that instead they had kept the film a romance--as the mystery and comedy seemed a bit thin. Overall, the actors tried but the script just wasn't very interesting.

Danusha_Goska Save Send Delete "The Notorious Landlady" exemplifies how all the right ingredients can add up to a failed movie. Jack Lemmon, Kim Novak, and Fred Astaire are megawatt stars. The look of the film is great; high quality, deeply textured black and white film stock records interesting, early sixties sets. The direction is the weak point. The film never comes together. It badly needs to be edited; it should be at least 25 percent shorter. Much of the humor is derived from extended dirty jokes about Kim Novak's spectacular figure. Jack Lemmon leers and gawks and cops feels. Yuch, not yuck. Even Fred Astaire steals a kiss. Sad, undignified, and not funny.The movie is clunky, awkward, and badly pieced together. Parts are leering dirty joke, parts are murder mystery and courtroom drama, parts are attempts at broad humor, and other parts are painfully bad romantic comedy. Jack Lemmon comes across as a very creepy, overbearing, almost stalker-like tenant. At one point he shoots the lock off of his landlady's bathroom and walks in on her as she is bathing. The audience that will find this scene appealing is, one would hope, very small, and certainly deranged and unaware of appropriate courtship behaviors.Sadly, according to IMDb comments, the director, Richard Quine, killed himself because he lacked the skill to make frothy romantic comedies. One can only shake one's head at the irony of that.

sussmanbern The opening scenes of this movie have, as background music, the melody of the Gershwin song, A Foggy Day in London Town. This, despite the fact that there is no fog in those scenes. The song was introduced by Fred Astaire -- who plays a supporting role in this flick -- in his 1937 movie Damsel in Distress.SPOILER: The concluding scenes, which include a chase on the beach at Penzance, has background music from the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, The Pirates of Penzance (which was also made into two movies in 1982 and 1983), with a coda from a melody in Gilbert & Sullivan's HMS Pinafore. One other mystery movie in which music from the Pirates of Penzance was significant was The Hand That Rocks The Cradle.

Zipper69 Lemmon gives his usual sterling performance, although rather closer to the wisecracking, raffish roles that someone like, say, Tony Curtis would normally appear in, Novak shows that hourglass figure in a series of body hugging outfits, her strange Harlow-like eyebrows look out of place in a 60's film. Astaire shows immaculate timing and a nice line is self deprecation, letting Lemmon bounce the laughs off of him.What undoes the film is the desperately phony "foggy London", the sets sprinkle British telephone boxes and black cabs for effect, then undo it by introducing a Cockney flower seller (with obligatory straw hat) and filling the streets with British sports cars and limousines (since they were the most common exports to the US; Since this same cheapo trick was used for so many years in long running TV series such as "Columbo" and "Murder She Wrote", it's clear that US producers realise that US audiences can be conned at low cost).At heart the film is a strange, unworkable melange of comedy, romance and melodrama and fails to hit the mark on any of them. Screwball comedies blossomed and died in the 30's and 40's, this attempt to resurrect them does not succeed.