My Gal Sal

I've been recording a bunch of movies that have recently started showing up in the FXM rotation. One of them is My Gal Sal. It's going to be on FXM again tomorrow (August 3) at 11:25 AM and again Tuesday at 7:30 AM.

Victor Mature plays Paul Dresser, born Dreiser and, yes, the older (by about 14 years) brother of writer Theodore Dreiser (who has a writing credit on this movie having written about his elder brother). At the start of the movie, Dresser is living in Indiana with his parents and younger siblings, about the right age to go off to seminary, which is something his father wants him to do, but something in which he has no interest. So Paul decides he's going to run off and try to make a name for himself.

He winds up as an unwitting prop in the medicine show run by Col. Truckee (Walter Catlett), who also bilks people in small towns in other ways. One of those small towns results in Paul's being tarred and feathered, only to be Mae Collins (Carole Landis), another member of the show. This gets Paul a full-time job in the show, doing novelty piano numbers playing songs he's written.

At one of these shows, a carriage shows up at the edges of the show. In the carriage are actress Sally Elliott (Rita Hayworth), and her boyfriend/manager Fred Haviland (John Sutton). Sally is the more respectable type of actress, who would be in New York if she could make it there but is instead doing a national tour; she and Fred are pretty clearly slumming by watching this small town show during a break in her Chicago performance. But she likes Paul's piano playing, so she gives him two tickets to the Chicago show.

Paul and Mae attend, and they've obviously never been to such a show, as the laugh at all the wrong times, this being a musical revue and not a comedy. Their overly loud laughing and otherwise uncouth manners enrage poor Sally, who decides that she hates Paul. Of course, the movie to this point has been set up such that we know that attitude is ultimately going to change by the last reel. But at this point, Sally hates Paul enough that she's perfectly OK stealing one of his songs.

Paul eventually leaves the medicine show and makes his way to New York, where he meets music publisher Pat Hawley (James Gleason). He's heard the big hit from Sally's new show, she now being in New York as well. And Paul realizes that it's the melody he wrote back in Indiana, with her having set new words to it! Paul is pissed, but thankfully, he's got the manuscript to prove that he wrote the song. So Sally is forced to join forces with Paul and put her face on the sheet music, along with both of their names.

Paul has by this time fallen in love with Sally, not realizing that Fred has already planned to propse marriage to her. Paul is also so obnoxiously forward with Sally that it's no wonder that Sally doesn't particularly respond well to his advances. It doesn't help that there's a Countess (Mona Maris) apparently trying to pursue Paul even though she's married. Along the way we get a bunch of musical numbers, on the way to Paul and Sally winding up together at the end.

My Gal Sal was released in early 1942, a couple of months after the US entered World War II. The movie is sentimental and old fashioned, considering that Dresser was at his peak of success in the Gay Nineties, but with a nation at war, you can understand why a certain segment of the population would love this sort of nostalgia. It fits in well with the sort of musical Fox was producing in the 1940s, although it's not quite as good as the musicals that featured Betty Grable. It's also not particularly true to history; as far as I could tell, there was no such actress as the Sally Elliott character in Dresser's life. (Dresser's life also ended badly once his brand of music fell out of style. That, of course, is not shown.)

My Gal Sal is available on DVD on two different Fox box sets if you don't have FXM.