‘The Women’ a flick chicks will hate

Largely forgotten among the heyday of MGM musicals in the post-WWII period is 1956’s “The Opposite Sex,” a disappointing attempt to inject men, music and Metrocolor into George Cukor’s 1939 classic “The Women,” which featured an all-female cast. Whereas “The Women” featured immortals like Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell and Joan Crawford exchanging barbed dialogue by Anita Loos and Claire Boothe Luce, “Sex” gave us such inadequate substitutes as June Allyson and Joan Collins; even worse, the man these two were fighting over was no longer unseen on screen — he had somehow become the utterly bland, pre-“Airplane!” Leslie Nielsen.

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