Blistering performances.

The acting in this movie is really good.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

The Bride Wore Red is a ridiculous but fun film. A drunken count, slumming it for the night, runs into a cynical and hungry young woman, Anni Pavlovitch (Joan Crawford). He decides to send her on a luxury vacation to prove his drunken point that the poor and the rich aren't so different after all and buys her new clothes and arranges for her to stay in a luxury resort. Anni, who obviously thinks the whole thing is crazy, decides to go threw with it anyway. Arriving in the alps she meets Giulio (Crawford's real life husband, Franchot Tone) a very pert mail employee who immediately takes a shine to her. The two have sparks aplenty, but when she arrives at the hotel Anni quickly realizes that she would rather always have food on her table than the love of a good man, and quickly sets about seducing Rudi, a flighty engaged man who is very taken with her. As with most romcoms the real test is if the chemistry works and here it does perfectly. Crawford and Tone have excellent chemistry here and he is very sweet and naive, persistently wearing down the jaded and bitter singer. It's a lovely sweet film.

This film is an 88 minute talky romantic fantasy melding a variety of concepts. Joan Crawford as the lead sings an alto song and plays a tight ensemble including her husband Franchot Tone, Robert Young, Lynne Carver, Billie Burke, Reginald Owen, George Zucco and Mary Phillips. An uneducated entry level worker the victim of a bet to train Crawford up as a phoney aristocrat smacks of MY FAIR LADY. Tone leading Tyrolean dancers more likely cast in comic operetta matches Tone dressed in peasant gear usually reserved for comic operetta. Crawford at the time she is engaged to be married ruining everything by wearing an inappropriate red gown to a fancy ball smacks of JEZEBEL. These disparate elements are nicely framed in photography and proceed in seemingly logical order making the film an excellent one.

Years ago, I had the pleasure of seeing this on the big screen at the Museum of Art in Los Angeles in a double-bill with "Jezebel". No, it wasn't a "Joan vs. Bette" festival, but a "the lady wore red" series, and in the case of these two films, the red was not captured because of black and white photography. While "Jezebel" is of course an all-time classic, "The Bride Wore Red" was considered at the time a box office disappointment in a period of Joan Crawford's career where repeat themes of films she'd already done lead her to be named on the list of "box office poison".To see "The Bride Wore Red" today is to show what MGM stood for in its heyday: beautiful stars, glamorous clothes and exotic settings. In "The Bride Wore Red", she's a cabaret singer down on her luck who is given the good fortune by one of her customers (George Zucco) who, like Henry Higgins, thinks he can turn this sow's ear into a silk purse. Before you know it, she's heading to an exclusive hideaway for the wealthy in the Alps, and has gotten the attention of wealthy Robert Young, as well as local postman Franchot Tone. Young is already engaged to Lynne Carver, however, but Crawford is determined to bust that up. All seems to be going well until she puts on the garish red dress she's been saving up for the right occasion, something which shows her for who she really is.Red, in high society, was apparently not a proper color for a nice young lady to wear, and indeed, the dress designed for Crawford is truly audacious and tacky. Everything else she wears, however, present her as more lady-like and of noble blood than she really is. Young's companions, Billie Burke (as a snooty contessa) and Reginald Owen (as Carver's father), can tell something's off with this seemingly "perfect" miss, and at a local social event (with practically every man in liederhosen), Crawford shows the truth of who she really is, down to earth and not at all uppity like the class she's trying to worm her way into. Glamorous with a capital "G", "The Bride Wore Red" is one of the most entertaining of Joan's MGM films, even if at times, it is a bit like the top of an overly stuffed wedding cake. Director Dorothy Arzner went out of her way to make this as beautiful as possible, and for some audiences (particularly the critics) it must have been a little too much, having been overstuffed with recently released glossy MGM films like "Maytime" and "Rosalie" where at least the lovers got to sing rather than argue before the love scene arrived.

Despite the provocative title and the first few scenes, which suggest this might be an interesting variation on Shaw's "Pygmalion," we're actually back in Joan Crawford's MGM universe, where one suitor isn't enough if you can have two, and where Adrian can be counted on to provide a drop dead gown at regular intervals.This airless, relentlessly phony picture did Crawford no favors. For a major star she is remarkably inexpressive. Her face, so strong, angular and meticulously made up, is striking enough to get all our attention, but this curiosity is never repaid. We search Joan's face looking for fleeting expressions, varying moods, complex emotions but we get only a single mask of anxiety. Crawford in this period seems incapable of shaping a performance or giving a character flesh, blood and heart -- she just sleepwalks from scene to scene looking as perfect and lifeless as a mannequin (coincidentally the title of her next film).If glamor without rhyme, reason or variation is your idea of entertainment, you are welcome to it, but I thought THE BRIDE WORE RED was both strange and boring. By the way, the eponymous dress is kind of tacky but undeniably spectacular, and it sure looks red, even in black and white.