CARROLL BAKER'S 'SYLVIA' INVESTIGATED BY GEORGE MAHARIS

Title: SYLVIA Year: 1965 Rating: **

Beginning as a new take on the classic film noir THE BIG SLEEP, where a comfortably stricken rich man hires a streetwise private eye to investigate his missing daughter: well it's a fiance this time, here played by the lovely yet moodily enigmatic Carroll Baker, morphing from an older street-urchin to a younger well-read lush, and, in-place of a slowburn crime thriller is a jigsaw-puzzle study of a then-modern woman, pieced together by Maharis like the reporter in CITIZEN KANE...

So half of SYLVIA are flashbacks consisting of the title character, a runaway who grew up in a poor, abusive family, wandering from various homes, mostly man to man, as the kind of prostitute you've probably never of since she doesn't seem to actually sleep with anyone while Maharis, surprisingly subdued in weary cruise-control compared to his edgy persona from TV's ROUTE 66, falls in love with this lovely phantom LAURA-style in Gordon Douglas's theatrical yet episodically-paced neo noir that... since 1965 was too progressive for subtlety and too regressed for daring exploitation... would have been far better either twenty-years earlier or ten years ahead. 

Carroll Baker in SYLVIA

Carroll Baker in SYLVIA

Carroll Baker in SYLVIA with lushy roomate Ann Southern

Carroll Baker in SYLVIA with lushy roomate Ann Southern

George Maharis in SYLVIA

George Maharis in SYLVIA

Carroll Baker in SYLVIA with intellectual librarian Viveca Lindfors

Carroll Baker in SYLVIA

Viveca Lindfors in SYLVIA with George Maharis

Aldo Ray in SYLVIA

Carroll Baker in SYLVIA

Carroll Baker in SYLVIA

Carroll Baker in SYLVIA

Carroll Baker in SYLVIA

Carroll Baker in SYLVIA

Carroll Baker in SYLVIA with an early fiance Edmond O'Brien