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In most ways, Vincente Minnelli’s Designing Woman (1957) is a disaster. It’s a romantic comedy where the romance is staid — fails to ever really get you invested on its own — and the majority of the jokes don’t land. It’s too long; the narrative goes increasingly askew and convoluted the more it tries to fill up what becomes an unnecessarily outstretched running time. It never finds a real identity or sense of purpose as a movie.

But pretty much everything bad about Designing Woman, at least for me, mostly gets neutralized by various “but”s. The romance may not be working with much chemistry. But the actors play-acting as the main couple — Lauren Bacall and Gregory Peck — are so individually appealing that we get invested in this much-tested husband and wife working out just because we’re so used to investing in them in other movies. (It’s also easy to take to the fox-like sense of mischief Bacall is emanating here; same goes for the comic haplessness Peck sinks deeper and deeper into the more his character misguidedly lies as a way to get out of trouble he’s sure is coming.) The comedy doesn’t usually inspire out-loud laughter. But the movie’s assured, fast pace works decently enough as a stand-in for real wit. (And some of the extended gags — one involving the hands-and-legs-everywhere theatrics of a flamboyant theater producer Bacall’s character is friends with and another involving a fist fight where one of the guys fighting is too block-headed to be able to distinguish the good guys from the bad — are well-choreographed.)     

I can’t so easily excuse Minnelli thinking this movie, which has big “less than 90 minutes” energy, needed to be so close to two hours; and I also can’t excuse how much the movie tries to convince us that Dolores Gray, like Ann Miller if she was blonde and desiccated of any charisma, is a star — could be the type of secondary love interest that in any way could for a second trick us into thinking Bacall might not end the film with her career as well as her man.

Designing Woman accidentally makes a better case for Bacall’s character leaving her man than sticking by his side, though. Bacall plays a successful, New York City-based fashion designer, Marilla, who impulsively marries a sports reporter from her same neighborhood, Mike (Peck), after a dreamy barely-week-long romance in Beverly Hills, where they both concurrently happen to be on business. Their very short courtship is so hastily dramatized that we don’t get any feel for why they felt it best to curtail the usually dating long game you expect to herald a marriage. The closest thing we get to heat is Marilla’s inclination to flirtatiously bite Mike’s ear from time to time. 

Signs that they might be better off friends than spouses come quickly once the pair come home. Their lifestyles are incompatible, for one thing: she prefers decadence; he could live in squalor and be content. Their social circles also intersect uneasily, with Marilla finding most of Mike’s friends unappealingly uncultured and Mike, in turn, finding most people in Marilla’s orbit irritatingly pretentious. (Marilla also despises sports; when she accompanies Mike during a boxing match, she’s so unsettled by the violence in the ring that she winds up letting out a hyena screech and storming out after deciding she’s seen enough.) Mike also won’t stop lying about things about which he doesn’t need to be dishonest with Marilla: his in-the-rearview-mirror romance with an actress (Gray), for whom Marilla is designing clothes for a show; the days-long hideout — which dovetails with a blacking out of all communication — he has to go on in order to report, without endangering himself, a series of stories about a corrupt local boxing promoter (Mickey Shaughnessy).

This couple probably shouldn’t have evolved into anything more than an on-vacation fling; Peck and Bacall, friends in life, don’t crackle enough when together to make up for the writing’s lack of frisson. (That George Wells won an Oscar for his unfocused, overly busy screenplay is among the film’s most baffling bits of trivia.) Yet Designing Woman is never a bad time. It’s an exemplary bit of beautiful-people-beautiful-problems moviemaking that gets extra polish from ultra-vivid CinemaScope photography that puts an extra pop in everything and especially an effervescent performance from Bacall that recasts the fact of her never really getting comedic leading roles of this one’s caliber into kind of tragedy. Considering she’s this great while she was dealing with something ruinous behind the scenes — the terminal cancer diagnosis of her husband, Humphrey Bogart — begs the question of what else she could have done with a movie whose making was allowed to solely be a creative joy and not double, as she’s put it sometimes, as a distraction from something terrible.