Review of You for Me

You for Me (1952)
7/10
Greer Shines
31 December 2003
Glib, engaging romantic comedy with a sitcom-like feel, but a GOOD sitcom, with well-rehearsed actors delivering consistently witty dialogue with impeccable timing and skill. The film has a loose, likeable quality that seems to flow naturally from Jane Greer's down-to-earth, girl-next-door (but not the bland, idealized girl-next door) acting style. Her nurse is nobody's fool but also nobody's girl and therein lies the conflict.

Peter Lawford and Gig Young, typically second leads, are also in good form. Here, the two of them together add up to one more than adequate leading man. It truly is a contest and a mystery which one Greer will choose. They complement each other well; neither is all hero or heel.

What's most remarkable about the picture and most indicative of its quality is how minor characters keep surprising you. Young's Aunt Clara, who in other films would be a daffy but lovable eccentric overflowing with relationship wisdom and sage advice, is here a not completely innocuous free-thinker with radical beliefs. In a scene where Young introduces her to Greer, the two don't bond instantly as one expects; instead Greer squirms at the old woman's peculiar ideas about the medical profession and even challenges them (to little avail). Tommy Farrell's goofy, unthreatening intern, Dr. Rollie Gibb, in what would ordinarily be the thankless THIRD lead, gets kicked in the shin a few times for laughs early on, but emerges by film's end, refreshingly, as not only more of a man than Greer had ever imagined but also a bit of a hero. Scenes like this show that the filmmaker isn't on auto-pilot and is truly interested in fleshing out this fictional world and populating it with people, not types.

I don't do many reviews these days but when I saw how this was being so unjustly maligned I had to mount a defense. You for Me may be a small forgotten film, but most fair-minded viewers who stumble across it will be surprised at how good it really is. 50 years later it holds up remarkably well.
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