IT SHOULD HAPPEN TO YOU (1954) B/W widescreen 86 m dir: George Cukor

w/Judy Holliday, Jack Lemmon, Peter Lawford, Michael O'Shea, Vaughn Taylor, Connie Gilchrist, Walter Klavun, Whit Bissell, Constance Bennett, Ilka Chase, Wendy Barrie, Melville Cooper, Heywood Hale Broun, Rex Evans, Art Gilmore

From The Movie Guide: "Charming satire in which Lemmon made a winning debut opposite the flawless Holliday.

"Holliday is Gladys Glover (a name you'll never forget once you've seen the film), a poor model from Binghampton who has come to New York. She's spotted by film documentarian Pete Sheppard (Lemmon), who is roaming Central Park with his camera. When Gladys looks up and sees an empty billboard, she promptly uses all her money to have her name painted there in huge letters. Suddenly, all of New York is wondering who she is and why she's done this. Lawford plays Evan Adams III, an executive for a huge soap company who wants the billboard for his products, making a deal with Gladys whereby he gives her several other billboards in return for the big one. Gladys and Pete become lovers, but he doesn't like what is transpiring. He thinks his feckless love is cheapening herself, and he wishes she would stop the campaign and settle in with him. Fame follows her, however, and she becomes a celebrity, appearing on talk shows and doing commercials. ...

"IT SHOULD HAPPEN TO YOU benefits from fine performances from some wonderful farceurs, a witty [Garson] Kanin script, and Cukor's light-hearted direction. Melville Cooper, Wendy Barrie, Constance Bennett, and Ilka Chase spoof the inanities of TV talk shows perfectly, and Lemmon and Holliday also get a chance to sing with 'Let's Fall in Love,' which had been written (by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler) almost 20 years earlier. In a tiny role, John Saxon is the young man who watches the argument in the park."

The following contains information you may not want to know before viewing the film for the first time:

From the British Film Institute website (www2.bfi.org.uk), this 2018 essay, "It Should Happen to You: a vacuous, or voluptuous, vision?" by Brad Stevens:

"One of early auteurism’s limitations was its emphasis on directors --- Sam Fuller, Fritz Lang, Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, John Ford --- who were primarily associated with the male-dominated western, war and gangster genres, or who contributed to the noir cycle, in which femmes were usually fatale.

"Of those American auteurs who privileged female characters, Vincente Minnelli, Max Ophuls and Douglas Sirk were often damned with faint praise, dismissed as empty stylists whose visual patterns were merely decorative. And when it came to the more classically restrained George Cukor, the assumption seems to have been that he wasn’t an auteur at all, that his oeuvre contained nothing in the way of a consistently pursued vision, and was thematically vacuous.

"Since most of the original auteurists were themselves male, they were generally drawn to explorations of masculine themes: the building of the west, the horrors of war, the limitations of the traditional heroic role. But their lack of interest in undertaking thematic (as opposed to stylistic) readings of Minnelli, Sirk, Ophuls and Cukor suggests an inability to comprehend how these directors were concerned with the oppression of women within a patriarchal culture. The problem wasn’t that auteurist critics believed such a theme to be uninteresting or trivial, but rather that they didn’t perceive it as a theme at all.

"Today, after several decades of feminism, we are somewhat better positioned to understand those Hollywood masterpieces made by female-identified (and in many cases gay) filmmakers. Yet Cukor is still regarded as a relatively minor figure. His highest rated title in Sight & Sound's last Greatest Films of All Time poll was A Star is Born (1954), which came 447th!

"Not a single person voted for the other film Cukor made in 1954, It Should Happen to You. Yet, watching this gem again recently, it struck me as both a model example of how radical ideas can be explored within a popular format, and one of those fascinating works whose distinction is in part the result of an artistic conflict.

"It Should Happen to You's protagonist is Gladys Glover (Judy Holliday, appearing for the fifth and final time under Cukor’s direction), a model who, after losing her job, decides to hire a billboard in New York’s Columbus Circle and have her name painted on it, thus making herself briefly famous. The film’s critique of Gladys’ behaviour connects with modern ideas about the superficiality of celebrity culture (see, for example, the Roberto Benigni sections of Woody Allen's To Rome with Love), and is almost certainly the contribution of screenwriter Garson Kanin.

"But what Cukor does with this theme is quite different from, and in certain instances directly opposed to, the ambitions of his writer. For if Kanin equates Gladys’ project with the pursuit of vacuous stardom, Cukor sees her need for recognition as the expression of a desire for sexual autonomy.

"The link between the billboard and Gladys’ sexuality is remarkably explicit: while watching two painters preparing her sign, Gladys breathlessly chants 'Faster, please, faster,' and later makes executive Evan Adams (Peter Lawford) drive her repeatedly around Columbus Circle so she can view the billboard ('What I’ve got that you want'), eventually admitting: 'Every time I see it I get a bigger one than last time. Boot!' The sign is Gladys’ sexuality proudly displayed and publicly asserted, and if Kanin mocks both Gladys and the culture she represents, Cukor is generally approving of his heroine’s behaviour.

"The key character in terms of the director’s dispute with his screenwriter is Pete Sheppard (Jack Lemmon, here making his screen debut). It seems reasonable to assume that Pete is Garson Kanin’s stand-in. He articulates all the cliches about the joy of conformity, of being part of the crowd, that one might superficially take to be It Should Happen to You's 'message': according to Francois Truffaut, 'the moral of the story is that it is easier to find glory than to justify it.'

"Yet Cukor’s mise en scene consistently undermines Pete, defining him as the mirror image of his romantic/ideological rival, the casual seducer Adams. From his initial appearance, Pete is associated with control of the look. He is introduced filming in Central Park, and encounters Gladys while shooting her arguing with a man who assumes she’s trying to pick him up (and who angrily informs her, 'I like to do the picking!').

"Pete’s camera is the first in a series of photographic devices that end up being trained on Gladys by males who are determined to turn her sexuality into a commercial product, pursuing in the public sphere the same project Pete undertakes in the private one. As usual, Cukor makes a precise visual distinction between male and female spaces, with Pete’s apartment, which is full of filmmaking equipment, being the domestic equivalent of those offices and boardrooms wherein Gladys appears as a lost and isolated figure.

"It is significant that Gladys’ billboard displays her name, not her picture, the subsequent process by which she becomes an object for the male gaze (see especially the moment in which the soldiers she is posing with are ordered to look at her) representing an attempt to recuperate her assertion of sexual autonomy by turning it into something that can be packaged and sold. The impression that Gladys’ pursuit of fame is, in its original form, a legitimate protest against masculine control is reinforced by Cukor’s treatment of her appearance on a television talk show, where she is one of four female panelists dominating the conversation, much of the scene’s humour deriving from the single male guest’s frustrated attempts to complete a sentence.

"The final scene, added against Kanin’s wishes, shows Gladys, now married to Pete, staring longingly at a roadside billboard with the words 'space to rent' written on it. Pete may have convinced Gladys to give up her celebrity/autonomy, but Cukor makes it clear that, although the proprieties have been observed, Gladys’ sexuality will not be contained within the boundaries of a respectable marriage.

"Kanin regarded this ending as a disaster, but it’s worth remembering that artistic conflicts are always traceable to ideological conflicts. In this case, the ‘betrayal’ of a heterosexual writer’s ‘vision’ by a homosexual director has resulted in a work whose conclusion shows assertive femininity triumphing over controlling masculinity."

IT SHOULD HAPPEN TO YOU was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Costume Design (Jean Louis).