I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

A very good Joan Crawford 1951 vehicle. As a successful Congresswoman, she returns to receive an honorary degree from her Alma Mater. There she meets up with an old flame, her former professor, now the college president, a widower with a daughter in the school. They keep hidden the secret that she was expelled from the school years before, but left so as to avoid his embarrassment with the school.You would think this is a definite comedy when Frank Lovejoy enters the story as a Life camera man sent up to the school to photograph the issue. Appears that the Lovejoy character and Agatha (Crawford) had something going when they were war correspondents. This along with Crawford uniting with Eve Arden, her co-star in 1945's "Mildred Pierce." Wise-cracking as ever, Arden plays Crawford's secretary.The picture is a good one as it soon turns into one talking about academic freedom and the right to teach what one wants taught as opposed to the stuffy college administration, represented here by Howard St. John.There is definitely a relation here to the McCarthy witch hunt which was sweeping the nation at the time.

While this picture ranks as a pretty heady Joan Crawford fantasy, this picture is NOT Joan! It is, however, Joan as she wanted to be seen -- younger than her peer Clara Bow, glamorous, caring about mothers and constituents and others, and hopelessly romantic. Truth be known, her only care for others was for her fans -- that they continued to write her, to adore her, to idolize what they believed to be her! Only one other reviewer tells the truth about the tawdry life of Joan before she was 18; none tells of the continuance of that life when she embarked on Hollywood and had her three or four careers there. That same reviewer, incidentally, is the only one who mentions that "Goodbye, My Fancy" was a hit play before it fell into the clutches of La Crawford, so while its premise and material might be heady for behind-the-times Hollywood, Broadway and the "road" had seen and enjoyed the play for a while before Hollywood tackled it! The 6-star rating is for the fact that this Crawford epic is meatier than the films-about-nothing that she usually made!While Robert Young played the usual stalwart, faceless, and characterless version of Robert Young that he usually played, and while Eve Arden managed to steal every scene in which she appeared -- even if only in the background -- no one mentions the name of the real man in the film, the really masculine character and actor who could more than handle La Crawford: Frank Lovejoy! He waited in the background, as he says, until she stops playing Little Nell from the Country and comes back to Earth! He and Arden are easily the best actors -- and give the best performances -- in the film."Goodbye, My Fancy" is better for these two actors, for the rest of the supporting cast, and for the production values than its two stars -- Crawford and Young, in case you forgot -- deserved!

Ridiculous fluff, that compounds its error by trying to have meaning. Joan, this time as a congresswoman, Agatha Reed, chairwoman of a committee dedicated to "investigating the high cost of food." Says Congresswoman Reed, "The housewife has been getting it in the neck too long. I'm going to keep fighting long enough so that the American family can take a vacation once a year, see a movie every week and feed an occasional peanut to an elephant." She's all business, but becomes all gushy when she is awarded an honorary degree from Good Hope College, where she was expelled for the crime of having stayed out all night (the parallel to Joan's real life is unmistakable here, as it is in all Joan Movies). The degree causes much consternation on campus ("That would make it the most broad-minded institution in the history of education!") – but Joan is unaware of this as she arrives. The college president, Jim Merrill, played by Robert Young, at his handsomest, happens to be Joan's former teacher – and lover. It was with *him* that she spent the night out, all those years ago, but Joan felt it was better to just disappear rather than try and explain to the skeptical college that they were about to be married. Naturally, this high-profile event will be covered by *Life* magazine – and who does the photographer turn out to be? Yet another of Joan's old lovers – this one, she hung out with in China "during the war", and he thinks Joan might be headed for trouble with her old flame. Eve Arden, playing Joan's assistant, "Woodie," is at her butchest and most smart-alecky in this movie – with her flippant and unnecessary remarks that would make you dismiss her from her job, if you didn't like her so much. But you not only like Eve in this, as in all her roles, you adore her. She is so droll and no-nonsense, you'd like to pay her just to hang around and be one of the boys. When Joan cries upon arriving at her alma mater, Eve tells her it "looks fierce." But Joan says that maybe others only see a collection of buildings, she, Joan, sees youth – herself at 18 "eager, expectant – a little frightened, asking 'What is life? What am I?'" But, of course, if we actually go into depth about Joan at 18, the truth may be a little different. For me, this is the major problem in watching any Joan movie. You can call her characters whatever you want to, but it's always all Joan, all the time. So, since what we're always seeing is Joan being herself, it's easy to dispense with character's names. It's just that it gets confusing when Joan tries to tell us something patently untrue, like her description of herself at 18 – when we know that at 18, Joan had already been around the block several times. Many men would have described her as eager, and as far as being expectant, she had already had several abortions at this point. But that's a personal problem, and I digress, but I simply wanted to explain why I say things such as "…and then Joan does…" this or that, or "We see Joan as..." when we are not literally watching a home movie.There is an unintentionally hilarious moment in which Joan is given the Clara Bow doll that she left behind in college – quick arithmetic tells us that Joan and Clara were contemporaries and this is a transparent ploy to make us believe Joan is much younger than she actually looks. It fails. What also fails is an attempt at early-50s political correctness. In the story, Joan has written a book about free speech and made a film (no, not the one about the plumber), and she attracts the attention of an early 50s campus radical, Dr. Pitt, who is about to be fired for his views, which are shockingly similar to Joan's. This is where the movie mysteriously becomes a morality tale –a weak one, to be sure, but perhaps the only thing that keeps it from sliding into oblivion.

This was one of Crawford's last films under her Warner Brothers contract and was probably here first big box-office failure since her MGM days eight years earlier. The film is not too bad, but not as good as "Mildred Pierce," "Possessed" or "Flamingo Road." Crawford plays a congress woman who returns to her alma mater to receive an honorary degree, but finds romance with professor Robert Young.