Bells Are Ringing

Vincente Minnelli's 1960 musical comes from the Broadway show written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green with music by Jule Styne. Judy Holliday had played the part on stage, and this turned out to be her final film. Ella Peterson works in the basement of a telephone answering service, hears her clients' lives going by, and brightens her own by adopting a different identity for each of them, among them an out-of-work Method actor, a dentist with musical ambitions and a blocked playwright. When she starts stepping into the writer's life, the lie grows. Minnelli's colour and Holliday's comic timing carry the parts of the script that have dated. Just in Time and The Party's Over outlived the picture. Who it's for: viewers who love classic Broadway adaptations and Judy Holliday. Who it's not for: anyone impatient with romances built on a deception, or with pre-sixties musical pacing.