Trailer
Plot summary
Louisa May Foster, dressed in black, descends a mansion staircase as pallbearers follow with a coffin. She offers $211 million to the Internal Revenue Service, which takes the offer for an April Fools' Day joke. Sobbing, she tries to explain herself to her unstable psychiatrist, Dr. Stephanson. Her childhood was spent in a small Ohio town, where her mother pushed her to marry Leonard Crawley, a wealthy local businessman. Louisa chose Edgar Hopper instead, a poor shop owner who follows Henry David Thoreau and wants a simple life. The two are content in their poverty until Leonard, the suitor she refused, visits and mocks the way they live, humiliating Edgar.
Cast
- Lou Novaas Trentino
Show all 20 cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about What a Way to Go! (1964)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Marilyn Monroe was to make two films for 20th Century-Fox for a $1 million fee, one of them What a Way to Go (then titled I Love Louisa); she approved J. Lee Thompson as director and planned to meet Gene Kelly about co-starring, but died in August 1962.
- Robert Mitchum got his role after Frank Sinatra demanded $500,000 for two weeks of work, and he took it because he liked working with Shirley MacLaine and director J. Lee Thompson, who had directed him in Cape Fear.
- Gene Kelly originally held the rights to the story and intended to direct it, but gave them up; he then appeared in just one sequence and choreographed the dance himself, calling it a gentle spoof of old movie musicals.
- Apart from one scene at Los Angeles Airport, the whole film was shot on the Fox backlot on 73 sets over 45 days because the stars' limited availability, and the Pinky Benson swimming pool set was reused from Something's Got to Give.
- Shirley MacLaine said she worked with Edith Head on a $500,000 wardrobe budget, with 72 hairstyles to match the gowns and a $3.5 million gem collection loaned by Harry Winston of New York.
