Greenes Please don't spend money on this.

Matrixiole Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Humaira Grant It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Gideon24 Fred Astaire proved he still had what it takes to command the screen in a musical with 1955's Daddy Long Legs.Astaire plays Jervis Pendleton III, a millionaire vacationing in France who meets an 18-year old girl in an orphanage (Leslie Caron) who longs to go to college in America. Enchanted with the girl, Pendleton decides to finance the girl's college education without her knowledge. The girl only knows Pendleton as Daddy Long Legs and unbeknownst to Pendleton, his assistant (Fred Clark) has been corresponding with the girl by letter under the guise of Pendleton and Pendleton panics when the girl insists upon a face to face meeting.The basic idea of this musical is very good. The idea of helping a young girl get an education and keeping it a secret and it is so nice seeing Caron's Julie adjusting to and loving college life, but the film takes a weird turn when Pendleton and Julie finally do meet and he is immediately attracted to her. Astaire and Caron do dance well together, but Astaire is WAY too old to play a romantic interest to Caron and it gave the whole on screen relationship a very incestuous feel that made me squirm.Fred Clark and Thelma Ritter do provide some laughs and as I said before, there is some great dancing, including a dream ballet, but Astaire and Caron as a romantic couple just didn't work for me and cast a pall over the entire film.

lzf0 Yes, Fred Astaire is in a scene with two Harry Mortons from the Burns and Allen Show: Fred Clark and Larry Keating. All we needed was Hal March and Johnny Brown! Now that the trivia is out of the way, how could Johnny Mercer's score have been so butchered in this film? The only song properly presented is "Something's Got to Give". It became an instant standard. In his tribute album to Fred Astaire, it is the only contemporary song recorded by Mel Torme. The rest of the songs came from the 1930s. With this said, all of the other songs in the film are given the short shift. Astaire's opening song "The History of the Beat" is truncated to one stanza. Mercer's lyrics are extremely witty, but are nowhere to be found in the film. "C-A-T Spells Cat" is buried under dialogue and what can be heard is butchered by Leslie Caron's out of tune singing. Where was Carole Richards or Betty Wand when you needed one of them? The beautiful theme song, "Daddy Long Legs" is ruined by having it performed by an off-screen choir. The lyrics can hardly be understood. Maybe they tried having Leslie Caron sing it, but it didn't work. "Welcome, Egghead" is destroyed by poor staging and truncation. "Sluefoot" almost works. Had Astaire sung it in the film as he did on the recording, it may have become a standard. The Skyliners handle the vocal and it is almost lost to the superb dance that follows. "Texas Romp and Square Dance" is part of a ballet dream sequence and it probably wasn't meant to stand out in the first place. Two more songs written for Astaire by Johnny Mercer, "Dancing Through Life" and "I Never Knew" were cut from the film. Even the Mercer standard "Dream" is given sub-standard treatment. Astaire and Caron perform a pleasant dance to it, but where is Astaire's vocal. It is sung by that off-screen choir, who hid the title song. The two Roland Petit ballet pieces show Caron off well, but Astaire is somewhat out of his element. Alex North's ballet music is unmemorable. The film is a bit long and a bit over-plotted and there are some who probably find the idea of the film disagreeable. To me, it's a sweetly innocent story that needed less dialogue and better presentations of the Mercer songs.

laddie5 One of the better late Fred Astaire musicals, since his advancing years are made part of the plot, and his non-conformist role suits his aloof and chilly persona. He probably was never more charming than the Prom scene in this film -- first ruefully contemplating his own irrelevance among the college-age studs, and then out-dancing them all in the "Sluefoot" number. Too bad his partner is the chunky and gauche Leslie Caron, who ruins the big romantic dance by waddling through it in a bouffant skirt. (In the 1935 farce "In Person," Ginger Rogers wore a disguise consisting of buck teeth, glasses and a horsehair wig, and managed to look just like Caron.) Thanks to DVD you can fast-forward through the gawdawful dream ballet -- every other musical after "Oklahoma" had to have one, it seems, and this is one of the worst.

edwagreen Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron were such marvelous dancing partners in 1955's Daddy Longlegs.The story line is wonderful. Astaire "adopts" a young Parisian orphan and pays for her college tuition. Throughout the years, she writes in gratitude but he chooses to ignore the letters.Fred Clark and Thelma Ritter, two veteran movie pros, gave terrific support as workers under Astaire. The sentimental Ritter, as Alice, is able to bring the two together and the film takes on a new meaning until Caron discovers that Astaire has been her benefactor. As romance blossoms, we're happy to see that Clark and Ritter have romantic designs on each other as well.The dance sequences have never been better. Both Astaire and Carone show their gracefulness. Fred even knew how to put-over "Something's Got To Give."