WALK ON THE WILD SIDE (1962) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Edward Dmytryk
Laurence Harvey, Capucine, Jane Fonda,
Barbara Stanwyck, Anne Baxter, Joanna Moore,
Richard Rust, Donald Barry, John Anderson
Not Lou Reed's "Walk On the Wild Side", but a steamy melodrama starring Laurence Harvey as a drifter who tracks an old girlfriend to New Orleans, where she's working nights in a brothel run by Barbara Stanwyck. Capucine plays the girl he's trying to find. Jane Fonda plays a floozy he meets on the road, and wouldn't you know it, she ends up with a job at the brothel, too. The pot boils over and Elmer Bernstein's jazz score is incessant. Anne Baxter, as the down-to-earth owner of a roadside cafe, gives the movie's least hysterical performance.
