What a Way to Go!

1964

Action / Comedy / Romance

11
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 67% · 12 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 67% · 500 ratings
IMDb Rating 6.9/10 10 6642 6.6K

dark comedy

Plot summary

A four-time widow discusses her four marriages, in which all of her husbands became incredibly rich and died prematurely because of their drive to be rich.

Director

J. Lee Thompson Photo
J. Lee Thompson

Top cast

John Roy Photo
John Roy as Police Officer
Marjorie Bennett Photo
Marjorie Bennett as Mrs. Freeman
Paul Newman Photo
Paul Newman as Larry Flint
Jane Wald Photo
Jane Wald as Polly
720p.BluRay 1080p.BluRay
1019.88 MB
1280*544
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 50 min
Seeds 3
1.85 GB
1920*816
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 50 min
Seeds 22

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by VADigger 7 / 10

Glamorous fluff

The premise is amusing - a woman who seeks the simple life, yet inadvertently ends up four times widowed and fabulously wealthy. There is also the charming conceit of each marriage being represented by a stylized mini film within a film. (Alas, these bits are often cut in network airings.) In the end, though, the whole thing devolves into little more than a lavish fashion parade of Edith Head's reported $500,000 worth of creations. And many a time everyone seems to be trying just a bit too hard to be amusing (except for the ever cool Robert Mitchum).But if there is no real "there , there" cinematically, it doesn't much matter. Not every movie needs to be another "Citizen Kane". Just relax and have fun.
Reviewed by blott2319-1 8 / 10

Goofy and wild with a remarkable cast

I love when I sit down to an older film and the first question I find myself asking is "Where has this movie been all my life?" What A Way to Go is the kind of silly romp I would have expected my Dad to introduce to me early in life. We've always shared a similar sense of humor, and the goofy farce that this black comedy utilizes is exactly the style he would love. In fact, I wasn't even 20 minutes in before I decided this was a DVD I'm going to loan to him before returning it to the library. I laughed, and I laughed a lot at the silly buffoonery of What a Way to Go! It has moments where it plays like a ZAZ comedy in the vein of Airplane or The Naked Gun, but years before those movies ever came around. The entire premise is hilarious in itself because it focuses entirely on a woman who DOESN'T want wealth, which flies directly in opposition to what most people would consider common sense and is diametrically opposed to your traditional Hollywood script.What makes it even more surprising that I'd never heard of What a Way to Go, is the unbelievable cast. Shirley MacLaine acts opposite a cavalcade of legendary actors that I never would have guessed had all appeared in the same film. Each one of them lends their own unique flavor to their scenes, and I could not get enough of it. They even have several homages to different styles of cinema throughout, and I was delighted by each one. Of course, as a lover of musicals I was particularly enamored with the Gene Kelly section because he choreographed a big bombastic song-and-dance that felt straight out of a Rodgers & Hammerstein film. The story can get a little repetitive at times, which makes it so you are several steps ahead of the action waiting for the movie to catch up, but I was still laughing and enjoying myself through most of that, so it wasn't a big deal. I won't say What a Way to Go is my favorite comedy of its era, but it's a highly effective one that I will seek out again.
Read more IMDb reviews

3 Comments

Be the first to leave a comment