Coney Island

I think I mentioned the other day when I blogged about Strike Up the Band that it would have benefited from being in color the way that a lot of the Fox musicals of the 1940s were. In fact, one of Fox's musicals with a mediocre plot but some rousing music is coming up in the FXM rotation: Coney Island, tomorrow at 6:00 AM.

George Montgomery plays Eddie Johnson. He comes in to Joe Rocco's (Cesar Romero) joint on the Coney Island midway one day around 1900, looking for Joe. Apparently, the two knew each other for many years, but some time in the past the two got involved in a poker game where Eddie feels Joe cheated him out of a large sum of money. Joe is obviously pretty successful now with this place, and Eddie wants payback.

Joe unsurprisingly says "hell no", leading Eddie to start a place of his own with his new Coney Island friend Frankie (Phil Silvers) that purports to have a Turkish attraction. And then, to try to take business away from Joe, Eddie has another friend Finnigan (Charles Winninger) to make a fals claim that Joe's bartender has a contagious disease. Joe tries to turn the tables on Eddie by coming up with a similar sort of BS story.

Eventually, Eddie creates the story that will make him a partner in Joe's business. Finnigan suffers a concussion in a fight at Joe's place, and Eddie and Frankie send Finnigan off to Atlantic City to recover, claiming to everybody else that Finnigan actually died, implying that Joe is guilty of manslaughter. Joe falls for the blackmail, and Eddie is in Joe's business.

It's here that the star of the proceedings, Betty Grable, really becomes the key player. She plays Kate Farley, who always been the singer at Joe's place, singing with a brassy music-hall style. It's good for the working-class types who would come to Coney Island. But Eddie thinks that Kate could do so much better, and basically forces Kate to sing the sort of arrangements Eddie thinks she should be doing, never mind what Kate thinks. Eddie also falls for Kate romantically, even though it's strongly implied that Joe has held a flame for her for however long she's been the singer at his place. Based on the billing, you might guess the two end up together, but considering how nasty is to Kate and how he consistently tries to destroy any of her desires to shape her own career, you have to wonder what she'd see in Eddie. (To be fair, for most of the movie she resists him.)

Joe has the chance to get Kate the featured role in a show for a big Broadway type, but Eddie blocks that by taking Kate on a date on the evening of what is supposed to be the live show audition, not telling her what he's done. It takes Joe a little time to figure out what Eddie's really doing, but then things speed up when Finnigan returns from his sojourn in Atlantic City. Joe decides that he's going to frustrate any chance Eddie might have of having happiness with Kate.

But the real point of Coney Island is to watch Betty Grable perform, not to see the Machiavellian maneuvering between the Joe and Eddie characters. To that end, the producers at Fox had her sing any number of period songs. "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" isn't my favorite, while Grable does well with "Cuddle Up a Little Closer". But the producers also brought in songwriters to write some new songs, and make some very energetic dance numbers. These all work quite well for anybody who likes musicals, especially the more nostalgic Fox musicals. Phil Silvers even gets to sing a humorous song when he finds that Finnigan has returned and is telling Eddie to take the money and run.

If you like musicals, then I think you'll really like Coney Island. If you also want a good story, I think you'd do better with some of Fox's other musicals, such as the musical biopics or the ones dealing more with World War II.