Wonderful character development!

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

There is nothing interesting going on, in what is basically a two-person, one-set play. I'm not sure I fault either Taylor or Beatty. The Barrymores couldn't have salvaged this one. There's simply no reason to get invested in either character. In the (fake) Las Vegas setting. The dull camera work. And the farcically bad score - surely Jarre's worst of all time. I'd like to think he sub-contracted it to an intern. The play lasted 16 performances before folding. I'd be shocked if this film last 16 nights in the theatre.

Within the first 5 - 10 minutes I felt that this film was a waste of the talents of Elizabeth Taylor and Warren Beatty. Both are miscast as there is little 'energy' between them throughout the entire film. A great film starts out with a great story. This story is from duds-ville. Taylor, as an adult, is best in dramas, intense dramas, where the story allows her to be in conflict with the male paramour. That's why Burton-Taylor's rendition in Wm, Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew" is so great. Anybody could have done Beatty's role in this film. He is lackluster, to be fair. I guess the players did it for the money and not for the art for there is no real art in the story or the setting or the movie itself. Sorry, George Stevens. Not a film to be proud of.

. . . than during THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN, in which "E.L. Taylor" plays "Mutt" to the "Jeff" of "C.L. Barrow." Because E.L.'s Real Life Hubbie "Dick Button" wouldn't let E.L. out of his sight, and since Dick was making another flick in Paris, France, when it came time to film THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN, the latter movie was shot in a "fake" Las Vegas set up in Germany's Playground (aka, France). Of course, the phrase "fake Las Vegas" is as redundant as calling something "a bogus counterfeit." At any rate, THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN fled out-of-town to become a boring snooze-fest which may interest a few drunks who have frittered away all their cash at the nickel slots, forcing them back to the cheap casino hotel rooms in the steerage section, in which GAME pops up on a free movie channel from time to time. However, for everyone else, THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN may well prove to be the ultimate yawner, indicating that it's time to move on to a new town.

Miss Taylor may have already been too old for the part. There are scenes opposite Warren Beatty where her age is really starting to show.This is basically the story of two losers who find love in Las Vegas. If Beatty really wanted to leave Vegas, he could have done it in the way that an Oscar winner did it in 1995's "Leaving Las Vegas," where Nicolas Cage gave the performance of his career.Near the end of the film, the two stars are basically playing out their life stories. Beatty finally wants to settle down and Taylor is as usual, unsure about marriage.A better, gritty script was needed for this **1/2 production.