Impressively progressive with one line of dialogue and maddeningly retrograde the next, The Best of Everything induces whiplash when watched decades after its 1959 release. Based on a novel by Rona Jaffe and directed with pop-art flair by Jean Negulesco, the ensemble film centers around Caroline Bender (Hope Lange), a secretary at a New York City publishing company who rises through the ranks while watching her female coworkers fend off harassment and cruelty from the men around them. (Caroline has to deal with a few sexists of her own.) This is refreshingly honest about how awful men can be when given unchecked privilege and power, but it’s less enlightened about the professional aspirations of women. Meanwhile, the sprawling storylines begin to feel as if you’re watching a few seasons of a television series (Mad Men?) crammed into a single feature. Joan Crawford shows up on occasion to spit fire as a female editor, but the film largely presents her as an unmarried hag who can’t find romantic happiness because she’s prioritized her career. Her presence is a reminder that, a good decade earlier, Crawford was anchoring women’s pictures on this subject that had far more conviction (Mildred Pierce, Daisy Kenyon). Lange gets a Crawford-style speech near the climax lambasting men for callously treating women like playthings, but it’s hard to feel that the movie fully believes in it, considering there is a later comedic bit in which Crawford laughs off a senior editor’s habit of “pinching” the secretaries. The Best of Everything is a frustrating time capsule. A far better take on mid-century, workplace misogyny would come one year later, in 1960: Billy Wilder’s The Apartment.
(5/21/2022)
