Lillian Roth

Take a Chance was based on the hit Broadway musical of the same name, though only one
of the original songs, Eadie Was a Lady, has been retained. The thinnish plot involves the
misadventures of a pair of pickpockets, played on Broadway by Jack Haley and Sid Silvers
and on film by James Dunn and Cliff “Ukelele Ike” Edwards. Tired of fleecing the suckers in
a traveling carnival, our heroes head to Broadway, where they get mixed up with gangsters.
The soubrette role originally played on stage by Ethel Merman is herein essayed by Lillian
Roth, hardly a fair trade. Billed last in the huge cast is Marjorie Main, 15 years before
stepping into her trademark role as Ma Kettle.Read More »

Filmed on location; inside a woman’s soul.

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Deprived of a normal childhood by her ambitious mother, Katie (Jo Van Fleet), Lillian Roth (Susan Hayward) becomes a star of Broadway and Hollywood before she is twenty. Shortly before her marriage to her childhood sweetheart, David Tredman (Ray Danton), he dies and Lillian takes her first drink of many down the road of becoming an alcoholic. She enters into a short-lived marriage to an immature aviation cadet, Wallie (Don Taylor), followed by a divorce and then marriage to a sadistic brute and abuser Tony Bardeman (Richard Conte). After a failed suicide attempt, Burt McGuire (Eddie Albert)comes to her aid and helps her find the road back to happiness after sixteen years in a nightmare world, not counting the first twenty with her motherRead More »