Daddy Long Legs (1955)

Touches You

Pretty Good

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

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.

I loved the girls' novel "Daddy Long-legs" when I was a girl, and it was fun to see a movie made of it now. It is a charming story, somehow the utmost dream for a poor and lonely girl, so it ought to be impossible to make a fail of it! I loved the dancing scenes very much, as almost always when Fred Astaire is at it... But I was a little disturbed with the two main actors despite of that. First of all the age difference was much too big. I do not find it right that a 56-year old actor - who looks his age - should play a man who marries a college girl. Daddy Long-legs in the novel was not this old either. I cannot remember now if his age was ever spelled out, but he certainly was not 56. It feels a little like cradle-robbing... I have often wondered why Hollywood in the 1940:s and 50:s so often paired off young women with men 30 years their seniors or even more..? I am afraid that also struck some kind of weird standard in society at large. I mean: a movie in which the leading man was 24 and the leading lady 56 would have been an impossibility!Secondly, I did not like Leslie Caron as the orphanage girl. She was a wonderful dancer and had a good body for dancing, no doubt about that! But I did not like her face, her expression or her "aura". She was not beautiful enough for the role, and there was also something cheeky, tomboyish and even clownish over her, that the main character of the girls' novel did not have.Some actors like Zelah Clarke and Timothy Dalton, as they were when they played Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester - and with no bigger age difference than 18 or 20 years at most - ought to have played Daddy Long-legs and the orphanage girl! I was also put off with the very long dance scene towards the end, which should take place in a bar in Rio or something, with sailors. It was too blatantly erotic, and Leslie Caron also showed much too much of her body. I think this was very unsuitable in a screen adaption of a very sweet and innocent girls' novel! I would not want my young daughter to watch that scene! Also, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the story. The movie was also a little too long, and if that long scene had been cut the length would have been perfect!With all these negative things said, I was suddenly inspired to find a dancing school and pick up my dancing again! That is good marks for a dance movie! :-)

In the mid 1950s, Astaire inexplicably turned into Cary Grant, romancing women less than half his age in this film and his next, "Funny Face." In this musical based on the popular children's novel, he is a 50-something millionaire who sponsors a French teenager's education in the U.S. and then falls in love with her. As in "Funny Face," where Astaire lusted after Audrey Hepburn, it is not only embarrassing but downright icky watching this May-December romance. The musical numbers are actually not bad, but the film far outstays its welcome at a running time of over two hours. Caron plays basically the same role she did in "An American in Paris" and "Gigi."

Jean Webster's novel Daddy Long Legs has certainly been popular enough ever since it was written in 1912. First a play the following year that starred a young Ruth Chatterton, than film versions with Mary Pickford as a silent and an early sound film starring Janet Gaynor. There was even a Dutch language version in the Thirties and a couple of years back South Korea filmed a version of the story. Still the best known one is the one with the singing and dancing of Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron.Johnny Mercer who can well lay claim to being the greatest lyricist America ever produced occasionally wrote the music as well for some songs, an example being I'm An Old Cowhand. Another one he did both music and lyrics for is Dream which was interpolated into this otherwise original score and sung by the Pied Pipers. Mercer did music and lyrics for the rest of the score as well which included the Oscar nominated Something's Gotta Give for Best Song. It lost in 1955 to Love Is A Many Splendored Thing.I've got a feeling that Jean Webster took as her inspiration for the Daddy Long Legs Story the marriage of Grover Cleveland. The future President of the United States was practicing law in Buffalo, New York when his law partner, one Oscar Folsom, was killed in a carriage accident leaving a widow and small daughter. Cleveland took over the guardianship and raised young Frances Folsom and when he was president in his first term he married young Ms. Folsom when she came of age in the White House.In this updating of the story, Fred Astaire is a millionaire diplomat on a trade mission to France after World War II. The car breaks down near an orphanage and while there spots and becomes enchanted with young Leslie Caron. He becomes her unseen benefactor, putting her through college in America and she calls him, Daddy Long Legs. Of course like the Clevelands the March/July romance commences.Daddy Long Legs gave Darryl Zanuck an opportunity to try and respond to MGM's classic ballet in An American In Paris, where not coincidentally Leslie Caron danced with Gene Kelly. In an incredible generosity of spirit it's not Fred who dances, but Caron. In her fantasy Astaire just ambles through. It's a nice number but doesn't come close to what Kelly achieved. It's interesting to speculate what might have happened had Fred danced here.Thelma Ritter has some nice lines herself as the usual wisecracking girl Friday and for once Fred Clark is a good guy as Astaire's factotum. That must have been a welcome change for him.If you should be with your beloved watching Daddy Long Legs, you can bet as sure as you live, Something's Gotta Give, Something's Gotta Give, Something's Gotta Give.