A House Is Not A Home

[Billy A. Anderson]

I've discussed this 1964 film and its theme song in the past, probably on the old ZAQB, altho I don't know if it was in a thread devoted to that film.

Below is a link to what I think is the entire feature film on utube, although I was just looking for a video of the opening titles with the theme song, which I had found 
previously, but not on the net search I just did.

For anyone interested there isn't any pre-credit sequence, so if you do click on the link, you'll get right to it, sung by Brooke Benton (who I best remember for Rainy Night in Georgia), written by Hal David and Burt Bacharach.  There are quite a few, or even many versions of the song, by different recording artists.

[Billy A. Anderson]

Well, my fellow ZAQBers, I am Searching My Soul as to whether I should invest any of my precious time in watching A HOUSE IS NOT A HOME.

The reviews of the film are mixed, some good and some bad.

I can't remember if I got the biography of Polly Adler, "American's Most Famous Madam," or not, if I did I probably found it a bore, and didn't read
it all the way thru.

And, it mnight be the same with the fim.  I think it runs about 1 & 1/2 hours, and, it could be worse as far as running time goes.


Still, that is a good bit of time, to me, to invest in watching the film.

There seemed to be a general concensus that the film really didn't have much sexual content, and was more like a 1940 film than a 1960s film, when 
censorship was starting to ease up in the USA.  One aspect of this, is that the words, "prostitute," and "whore" were freely used in the film, something
you wouldn't expect from a 1940s film.

But, still . . . 

Oh well, It might be better to waste my timne watching thefilm, thanwaste my time wriitring more on this post.

I can't see why the Rivoli theatre, in Myertle Beachg, SC, declared it "Adults Only," when at other times they showed films with more sexual content than A House Is Not A Home, and did advertise student card prices.

I'm attaching an ad, with poor density.  This one from the December 10, 1964 edition of the Myrtle Beach Sun-News, is way too dark.  I'll check other local newspapers and see if I can find a better ad, (if any of  you other ZAQBers even give a shit about this film.  Shelly Winters, Robert Taylor, Brod Crawford, Caesar Romero (well, some of you woiuld remember jhim as the Joker on BatmanP), but onthe whole the cast including evdn the then newbie Raquel Welch, mkight just be too before your times to interst hyou.  (and, while I'm a bit older than some of you other ZAQBers, a lot of the cast members were old timers pas ttheir prime, who would have been new to me at the time this flm was released.

[Billy A. Anderson]

After my last post, I started watching A House Is Not A Home, to the half way point. I'll wait until I've seen the Rest of the Story before I give a final opinion. I don't care much for watching feature films, and this is the first one I have committed myself to watching in a good while. It's pretty slow going, but I can't call it a "bad" film.

One thing I like is the night time photography, which isn't the obvious "day for night" technique, which I truly dislike.  

Good night time sequences in this film.

[Billy A. Anderson]

One detail, not included in my last post.  When i decided to take a break from watching A House Is Not A Home, it was during a scene where one of Polly's girls who was a herion addict, was undergoing withdrawal.

[Billy A. Anderson]

Well, last night I watched the second half of A House Is Not A Home, to the end title, and ending credits. The film was not in the greatest condition, and looks like it was from VHS, with recurring horizontal static marks from time to time.

For the most part the aspect ratio seemed OK, with people being out of the frame horizontally,on a very few occasions, and most notably the first letters of the cast members' names both left and right out of frame, at the end.

These are minor defects which didn't bother me.

I ended my last post of the film, with one of POlly's girls undergoing withdrawal from heroin.

In one sequence, she was being guarded by only one girl, who knocked her in the head, and escaped from the house and went to stay with her musician boyfriend, who had turned her on to herion in the first place. Polly and her main man or main men went to the musicians place, and after a struggle got the girl away from him and into the hospital, but it was too late and she died.

There followed a sad scene of the girl's funeral.

And, later, at a party countdown to the new years, another girl, depressed, jumped from a balcony to her death.

Some gangsters got into a fatal gunfight, and other bad things happened to Polly and her girls.

Polly had a boyfriend who did not know she was the madam of a a bawdy house, but found out, resulting in a temporary breakup between them, although later they reconciled, but Polly convinced they could never have any kind of life together, dumped him, and accepted that her life as a madam was all there was for her, and the film ended with her enjoying, or trying to enjoy herself at a party being held in her house.

As I expected, the film was not the kind of adults only thriller promised by the ad for the showing at the Rivioli.

I'm not all that much of a critic of dramatic acting, but I thought the film was OK as a drama, which some critics felt was so-so to good at times.

I suppose the film was somewhat of a generational thing, one critic noting that the film, set in the 1920s, and Polly's "best selling" biography being published in 1953, Polly and her story being pretty much forgotten by the time the film was released in 1964.

The film would best be appreciated by those who lived during the generation of the 1920s, and who remembered prominent gangssters like Lucky Luciano, who would not really be all that familiar to the 1960s generation of movie goers.

In the second half of the film, the action picked up and the drama became more interesting, altho I'd agree with those critics who found the film to bd "dull."

I do wonder how the film did at the box office and whether it lost money, or earned any profits.

I always thought the posters and newspaper ad mats were great, and some critics also noted that.

While it was somewhat of a chore to sit through the film (as it is to me, with many or even most feature films), I don't feel I wasted my time finally seeing it after all of these years of curiousity about it.

I couldn't find a trailier for the film. One Click on window claiming to have the official trailer produced only a brief ad for something not even related to AHINAH.

Some film critics felt the film's theme song was better known than the film itself, being covered by a lot of different artists. The matter of whether this was the first appearance of Raquel Welch was cleared up in my readings on the film, her actual first film appearance being uncredited taking a shower in Hal Wallis's Elvis Pressley vehicle Roustabout. Miss Welch's appearance in AHINAH being her first credited film appearance.

The film did have prominent major stars, Shelley Winters, as Polly, obviously although one critic mentioned her co-star Robert Taylor as a bit over the Hill. The film was nominated for an Oscar for costume design, although a critic said, the hairstyles and costumes looked more like contemporary 1960s than the 1920s, similar to claims that the youngsters in the opening party sequence in Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte, looked more 1960s-ish than 1920s-ish.

While I don't think I wasted my time watching A House Is Not A Home, I do kind of feel I am wasting my time writing about the film.

I'm glad that Deeky did like one of my posts to this thread, and I'll end with the great tag line from the film's ads:

The welcome mat is always out, the Door is always open, and the party is always on in A House Is Not A Home.