The Only Game in Town (film)

Synopsis

Aging Las Vegas chorine Fran Walker (Taylor) drifts into an affair with lounge pianist and compulsive gambler Joe Grady (Beatty) while waiting for her married lover, San Francisco businessman Thomas Lockwood, to finalize the divorce he has been promising to get for the past five years.

By the time Lockwood keeps his word and is free to marry his mistress, she finds she has fallen in love with Joe, who has finally accumulated enough money to fulfill his dream of relocating to New York City and beginning a new life there. Faced with the choice of a possible career in Manhattan or marriage to Fran, Joe opts for the latter after losing a tough poker game.

Principal cast

Critical reception

Opening in 1970 to mixed reviews and was a box office bomb, this became the last film for George Stevens, leading him to retire from directing altogether.

In his March 5, 1970, review in The New York Times, Vincent Canby stated, "Assigning [Stevens, Beatty, and Taylor] to the film version of Frank D. Gilroy's small, sentimental, Broadway flop is rather like trying to outfit a leaky Central Park rowboat for a celebrity cruise through the Greek islands. The result is a phenomenological disaster . . . Nothing in The Only Game in Town seems quite on the up and up. Everything, including both the humor and the pathos, is bogus."

In an undated review, Time Out London called it "a hoarily old-fashioned romantic comedy ... [with] occasional moments of life injected by Taylor and Beatty."

TV Guide said, in an undated review, "Although some of the dialog sparkles, in general, [the film] is overly talkly and thinly plotted, a programmer dressed up in ermine."