The I Don't Care Girl (1953) Poster

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7/10
Entertaining curio
Chris Clazie4 April 2002
This movie has been shown recently in England,so liking musicals,I decided to watch it.Curious mixture of voice overs,flashbacks and a film within a film,all packed tightly into less than 90 minutes.Mitzi Gaynor is astounding.The film works because of her.Although the period setting is earlier in the 20th Century,the dazzling production numbers are pure 50's.Paintbox bright colours are prevailant.Mitzi's costumes are spectacular.One wishes it was longer and more detailed,but it's an extremely agreeable way to spend 80 odd minutes.An entertaining curio.
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7/10
Despite it all Mitzi Dazzles
slush-13 June 2007
It's a great pity but "The I Don't Care Girl" was indeed severely cut. Scenes and numbers were shuffled, scenes and numbers ended up on the cutting-room floor, scenes were re-filmed, Jack Cole was brought in (and even his 'I Don't Care' and 'Beale Street Blues' traded places so that the one designed to end the film, didn't, and the other one, with its scene to follow, did), until what was released (in 1953, rather than 1952) was the hodge-podge you see today. Yet despite all of the butchery the multi-talented Mitzi sets the screen on fire whenever she appears, whether it's in a dramatic scene or dazzling her way through those Cole-choreographed production numbers. Sadly we'll never see the complete version, or those cut numbers. Drat!
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6/10
Disappointing "biopic" that isn't
vincentlynch-moonoi23 May 2014
Warning: Spoilers
It doesn't appear that this film is anymore a true biopic of performer Eva Tanguay than most biopics from the 1930s through 1950s were. But, despite having only a smattering of accuracy in it, some of Mitzi Gaynor's dance routines are fantastic.

I had never even heard of Eva Tanguay, although I was vaguely familiar with the old song "I Don't Care". It's interesting to read her bio on Wikipedia...preferably before you watch the film; in fact, the bio may be more entertaining than the film.

While far from her best film, Mitzi Gaynor shines here, although I doubt production numbers at the turn of the century were this lavish.

Oscar Levant is here as a fellow performer. He seems more ill-at-ease here than usually; this just wasn't the right kind of part for him.

David Wayne is surprisingly good as a song and dance man who, at one time, teamed with Tanguay. Bob Graham is a singer with his eye on Tanguay...but my reaction was Bob who? It's interesting to see George Jessel, as Himself, as the producer of the very film you're watching.

A rather disappointing outing.
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dance sequence - Johnson Rag
Towtree26 September 2002
Not the greatest of musicals I've ever seen, but I was fascinated by the combination of Mozart & The Johnson Rag. The intricate dancing was dazzling & I replayed this sequence several times. Turns out that the Italian lyrics were not the original ones but the combination of Mozart & jazz dance steps I thought were brilliant. One of the most intriguing dance routines I've seen. Being 20th C Fox & not MGM, this has never been given the credit it deserves. Oscar Levant, as always, was a bonus.
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7/10
Muddled
jjnxn-113 May 2014
What could have been a potentially interesting glimpse at a talent that has receded in the public memory is instead a garish collection of disconnected scenes.

To start the framing device of having George Jessel mounting a biography of Eva Tanguay is a wasted and contrived waste of time and should have been scuttled. Then the story such as it is tells you nothing of the real Miss Tanguay.

Mitzi is a talented girl, an excellent dancer and pleasing personality but she is given little too work with but she does wear feathers well. None of the male actors are given characters that make any sense. At least Oscar Levant gives his patented amusingly dry performance and gets a spotlight piano number which is the best thing in the movie. The leading man Bob Graham playing the fictitious Larry Woods is so bland he practically evaporates from the screen and makes no impact in the picture at all.

If you like flashy production numbers, staged by the legendary Jack Cole, than this has plenty to enjoy but if you want narrative structure along with them you won't find that here.
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7/10
Rashomon Don't Care Either
boblipton17 May 2008
The musical comedy biopic gets the Rashomon treatment in this faked-up biopic of Eva Tanguay, one of the great stars of turn-of-the-century vaudeville. Mitzi Gaynor, as always, gives a great performance and it's a pity that, with the exception of the movie version of SOUTH PACIFIC, she was always Fox's B musical star, doing whatever they gave her. The musical numbers are all overdone, as if choreographer Jack Cole is mocking the form; the semi-strip-tease to jazzed up Mozart (I'm not making this up! It's the most out-of-place dance number outside of Sally Forrest's weird one in EXCUSE MY DUST) and other numbers that recall LADY IN THE DARK -- all very modern for the era and absolutely bizarre in context.

Oscar Levant plays the piano magnificently a few times and David Wayne gives a typically graceful performance in support.
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2/10
If you've ever wondered...
dish5530 July 2008
...why Mitzi Gaynor, certainly one of the most talented ladies in the business, never became a major movie star. here's your answer: too many movies like this. Taking a RASHAMON approach to the life of Eva Tanguay is certainly a novel idea, but right from the start post-production butchery is all too obvious and the remaining seventy-nine minutes make little or no sense what so ever. I truly believe someone was trying to do poor Miss Gaynor in with this one. Characters appear and disappear randomly, the score is mediocre at best, and the production numbers - where Miss Gaynor should really shine - are executed in such a sloppy, slap-dash way that it is hard to believe this film was released by a major studio. Gaynor shines during the first rendition of "I Don't Care" which is done in true (movie) vaudeville style and gives some glimpse of what the real Miss Tanguay must have been like as a performer, but the other numbers (I suppose those conceived by Jack Cole)are a mess, totally out of period, including a hep cat version of the title tune that has Mitzi dancing in a chug-chug style that does nothing to display her very real dancing talent. During this number her two male co-stars keep turning up in different guises long after one of them has left the story. Huh? Looking at a quartet of films (this mess, THE BLOODHOUNDS OF Broadway, DOWN AMONG THE SHELTERING PALMS, and GOLDEN GIRL) designed to make Miss Gaynor a star, one wonders what the powers that be were thinking. No wonder Marilyn arrived on the scene shortly there after and staked out the Fox lot for herself!
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10/10
Mitzi Gaynor gave a great performance in this film.
mauricelowe864 March 2004
I understand that The I Don't Care Girl was severely cut by Daryl F Zannuck which was his usual practice, despite this Mitzi showed what a Great talent she was, unlike other great female dancers of the time Mitzi was set apart because she had personality, I also think Mitzi was at the wrong studio and totally wasted in Hollywood, although she was'nt wasted in Las Vegas where she was the top box office star for years, and later her great tv shows.
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4/10
An I-don't-care movie
marcslope23 January 2007
It begins, even before the credits, with an onstage production number in which Mitzi, as famed vaudevillian Eva Tanguay, emerges hoarse and uncertain onstage, thus forcing the stage manager to ring down the curtain. AND IT NEVER COMES BACK TO THIS. That's how ineptly cut this Fox backstager is, leaving a major plot thread unacknowledged for the next 78 minutes. Along the way we get some clichéd show-must-go-on situations, the unappealing Oscar Levant (especially unappealing when deprived of good dialog, which Comden and Green provided him the same year in "The Band Wagon") plunking away on some classical piano, David Wayne in what first appears to be the leading-man role but turns into an inconsequential supporting part, the pleasant-voiced Bob Graham as Mitzi's love interest, George Jessel playing himself pretending to be a nice man, and several big, big production numbers. These have nothing to do with the vaudeville milieu and are set to undistinguished music, but the color's great, and Gwen Verdon gets to do some sinuous Jack Cole choreography in one of them. The whole thing's framed in a desperate-looking "Citizen Kane" conceit, as two studio boys are exhorted by Jessel to "come up with the REAL Eva Tanguay story," but the movie never wanders anywhere near the real Eva Tanguay story -- maybe it just wasn't that interesting. Worth looking at for the blazing Technicolor, the dances, and Mitzi, who's never less than professional, and never more.
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10/10
inspiring song
rowan19251 August 2009
In spite of its imperfections, the film contains one of the most inspiring performances of any song in any film. Mitzi Gaynor becomes Eva Tanguay, insists on coming out into the audience, hits a star quality personality in the song "I don't care" when she sings - "Let down the gangway, for I'm Eva Tanguay, and I - DON'T - CARE!!!" I have tried to find this on DVD, but it does not exist. CAn someone get this changed??? Does it exist on CD or MP3 anywhere? I believe that Judy Garland sang the song in the film "Good Old Summertime" but I can't find that either. I have been remembering this song for over fifty years now, which shows how memorable it is. Not many songs have this power to impress itself on the memory, and it is only because of the great performance of Mitzi Gaynor, who is apparently still going today with live performances!
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3/10
What's up with this one...
What could have been a very good musical ends up being bunch of mixed up scenes that make no sense whatsoever. Fox had a good idea with the material, but somehow botched it up. A good vehicle for poor Mitzi Gaynor, and she must have very dismayed with what ended up on the screen.

Fox Archives has released this recently along with other older films. Too bad they couldn't include the missing footage as it's very obvious scenes and details to the plot were left out on the 'cutting room floor', so to speak. The musical numbers, for the most part, are very good to excellent, even though they do not belong in the time element of the story. One very strange number, the second I DON'T CARE sequence, has Mizi changing costumes RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ACT, and a character that was long gone, back in the scene. I'm sure this number was supposed to be a 'dream sequence', that would be the only reasonable explanation!!!! What did Mr. Zanack have in mind when he edited this film??? I know he was responsible for all editing of films under his regime. He also ruined the fabulous MM movie, NIAGARA along with sever cuts to THERE'S NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW BUSINESS. And he was supposed to be a 'movie' person? I think not.
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4/10
Meet George Jessel, Eva Tanguay his discovery....
mark.waltz11 March 2015
Warning: Spoilers
There's really a lack of cleverness in this "biography" of the forgotten "I Don't Care" girl Eva Tanguay who was a major vaudeville and musical revue star of the early 1900's. What had already been done (and much better) by Paramount with two films starring Betty Hutton about former stars Texas Guinan and Blossom Seeley became an imitation of her life which switched the facts around to make her more sympathetic than she probably was. Even with her as the leading heroine, she's not all that sympathetic, and pretty much a hot-tempered star who was notorious for her off-screen antics. In real life, Tanguay took a number away from the rising Sophie Tucker, while here, that is blamed on another star, played by Hazel Brooks, for doing the same thing to her.

There's no sense in breaking the story down by producer George Jessel's attempts to film Eva's story by talking to two of the men who knew her best and trying to find the one she loved for years. David Wayne plays a drunken partner whose career fell apart as hers rose (think of a vaudeville version of "A Star is Born") and Oscar Levant an egotistical producer who claims his version is the truth. Other than the first version of the title song (performed as she ambles up from the stage to a box), the numbers are badly staged, the Ziegfeld Follies reprise of "I Don't Care" seeming more like something Marilyn Monroe would have turned down in present day character than something the real Eva would have done in 1906.

There's not even enough novelty numbers to make this entertaining enough, even though Wayne does get to reprise "This is My Favorite City" which Dan Dailey and Betty Grable had done with more success in "Mother Wore Tights". In fact, there's really little story, and at under 80 minutes, this really never gets a chance to develop Eva as a real character and make her interesting beyond simply being an almost forgotten historical entertainment figure. Mitzi Gaynor does her best in the title role, doing what she's directed to do, but overall this ranks as one of her few disappointments.
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9/10
Superb entertainment with a dazzling performance by Mitzi Gaynor
rockymark-3097413 April 2022
First things first. I am always puzzled by extra-cinematic considerations when critics (amateurs or professionals) discuss a film. Yeas ago I recall a review of A Man for All Seasons focused primarily on how evil Sir Thomas More was compared to the morally idealized image of him in the film.

As the Hollywood producer famously said, "If I want to send messages I'll use Western Union." If I want to learn about Sir Thomas More I'll read an historical biography of him.

I didn't go to see this film to learn about Eva Tanguay, apart of course from bare outlines. I WOULD have been disappointed if Tanguay was dramatized as a scientist working alongside of Madame Curie. But I'm content with the bare (no pun intended) outlines.

This film is perfect entertainment, though it ends on an incongruous note with the anticlimactic. New Orleans dance number, by far the worst in the film. The choreography and set design don't even make sense for a blues sequence in New Orleans.

Criticism of the frame story is misguided in my view. It's not to be taken seriously or coherently. The main purpose was to show precisely how biographical details can never be accurate, a technique, of course, made famous in a more serious vein in Citizen Kane.

The acting, especially by. David Wayne as Eddie McCoy. Is superb throughout, at least by musical standards, though Oscar Levant looks like he's mostly reading his lines.

But the standout, of course, is the energetic and ebullient Mitzi Gaynor in one of her finest roles, far more memorable than her later pedestrian role in the film version of South Pacific. Apart from the final dance number, all of her numbers are great, but especially the second *I Don't Care* sequence, with Jack Cole's famous multi-leveled choreography. But even David Wayne hat at least one good number.
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8/10
***
edwagreen23 August 2015
Warning: Spoilers
I didn't like the ending in this 1953 entertaining movie. Nice seeing David Wayne attempting a song and dance routine. Even though he mouthed the words, he got through it nicely.

The film tells the story of the making of a film based on Broadway luminary Eva Tanguay.

The dances and the songs centered around the theme of I don't care are marvelously staged.

Wayne appears in and out of the film and his telephone drunk scene was so similar to when he gave up Susan Hayward (Jane Froman) to Rory Calhoun via the phone again the year before in "With A Song in My Heart."

The film tells of different men in her life telling her story with differences that seem to come all together at the end.
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10/10
release full version of I don't care girl
theduchess868 September 2007
perhaps now twentieth century fox are at last releasing Mitzi's bloodhounds of Broadway, they might set about putting out the full version of the I don't care girl, it would be great, although it was a silly plot and not at all true to the life of Eva Tangway, and Mitzi leading men did not help her at all, Mitzi 's fabulous dance numbers showed why she was completely wasted in Hollywood, would love this film to be released with all the great production no's that were cut, also great to see Mitzi's TV shows being released on DVD, why do these things take so long? another great mitzi film although it was pure sinatra, not released is the great film the joker is wild, lets hope that one is released too
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9/10
Wonderfully charming and enjoyable
I_Ailurophile6 March 2022
There is no form of cinema that has gone out of fashion quite so substantially as the musical, and though not purposefully, there's no other that I've engaged with so little. That especially goes for mid-century studio pictures that distinctly tie stars and producers together in the type of emphatically staged, choreographed fare that seems so particular, at least in the public imagination, to the 1950s. With all this said, it's hard not to plainly be charmed by the simple, earnest entertainment that 'The I don't care girl' represents. I could foresee wearing out the welcome of that five-letter word within the next few moments, as the film is oozing from top to bottom with irrepressible charm: in the honest countenances of its cast, in their sprightly performances, in the vibrant displays of song and dance, in the witty dialogue and scene writing, and in the very construction of the narrative that by more recent standards feels somewhat unconventional. This is really just such a joy!

I very much appreciate the detail and artful consideration seen in the set design and decoration, hair and makeup, and not least of all the costume design that in telling the story of Eva Tanguay is so essential. In other titles such exceptional aspects would simply round out the presentation of light and sound that is dominated by concrete storytelling, but here they are critical - owing to the specific content, but also to the nature of the production as indicated. As these elements build the literal structure of each scene, every passing moment is then filled with tremendously clever writing - by which I mean both the screenplay, and the music. I cannot overstate how delightful and unexpectedly invigorating, and even entrancing, each number is. The tunes and their lyrics are sharp, lively, and engrossing, and the choreography is utterly terrific. Meanwhile, though less physically demanding, the broad scene writing and any given line is just as absorbing - smart and dynamic, rich and compelling. There is a great deal of heart that was poured into this feature, and I admit I'm surprised by just how much and how quickly I fell in love with it.

Of course none of this is possible without a brilliant assemblage of players to bring the film to life, and 'The I don't care girl' is overflowing. Everyone here demonstrates fine range, nuance, personality, and physicality in realizing their characters. Above all, though, Mitzi Gaynor is absolutely riveting in the foremost role as Tanguay. Even without the magnificent set pieces, sartorial arrangements, chords, and fluid movements that define the music selections herein, Gaynor could carry these scenes all by herself with her exquisite charm, presence, and utmost skill - and still, in the slightly more quiet scenes of personal drama, she's no less capable and captivating. And though Gaynor is most prominent, so it is down the list of credits with all others involved here, including Oscar Levant, Bob Graham, David Wayne, and Hazel Brooks as the various figures in Tanguay's life.

If there's any flaw here, it's that the sequence of events is sometimes smashed together with a brusque inelegance that makes the whole come off as contrived, and unconvincing. It's an unfortunate indelicacy - though to the credit of cast and crew alike, they very ably roll with the punches and smooth over the rough edges as best as they can. It's also perhaps worth noting that any cursory reading of Tanguay's life reveals that the fictionalized rendition concocted for this feature is a sterilized reduction of a figure whose exploits onstage and off were all but legendary. Still, in any event, these seem like minor detractions compared to the bewitching, charming, robust fun that the feature otherwise represents. It's ever so marginally imperfect, but every possible facet is so roundly superb that it's easy enough to overlook the blemishes - with, once again, star Mitzi Gaynor and the musical numbers standing out most of all. I couldn't begrudge anyone who engages honestly with the title and finds that it's not their proverbial cup of tea; I once would have included myself in the same camp. However, for anyone open to the wide variety of entertainment that cinema has to provide, and especially for those viewers who admire the films of past eras, 'The I don't care girl' is a fantastic, mesmerizing, lovely good time that's worth far more than the 79 minutes it takes to watch. As far as I'm concerned this is a must-see, and earns my enthusiastic recommendation!
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