It Happened to Jane

Doris Day was TCM's Star of the Month back in March, and I hadn't gotten through all of her movies that I DVRed during the tribute. Recently I watched another of the movies, It Happened to Jane.

Doris plays Jane, a widow in Cape Anne, ME, one of those old-fashioned New England towns that still has a town meeting and enough of a civic spirit that everybody in town attends the meeting. George Denham (Jack Lemmon) is an attorney in town who runs for First Selectman at every meeting and keeps losing; he's also in love with Jane and would love for her to marry him now that she's a widow. (The movie doesn't say how long she's been a widow, but implies that it's been long enough for her to consider dating and marriage again even though she has two kids.)

Jane supports her family by fishing for lobster, which she ships off to various hoity-toity places in New England and beyond courtesy of the Eastern and Portland Railroad, which is headed by Harry Foster Malone (Ernie Kovacs). However, due to staffing cuts at the railroad, one of her shipments was not able to be signed for by anybody at the station, with the result that it sat around for a couple of days and the live lobsters wound up dead, which defeats the point of having lobster. Jane is pissed, rightly so, and since she's out a good deal of money, George writes a threatening letter to the railroad.

Malone sends two lawyers up to Maine to meet with Jane and George. They know that the company is in the wrong, and offer her to settle for the value of the shipment, which is probably all they're legally liable for. However, Jane thinks she's lost more than just the value of the lobsters; there's a cost to her reuptation of being able to provide a good product. So she wants more, and sues the railroad.

Since the suit is held in a local court, Jane is able to win, but there's a problem with collecting the money. For Malone, there's the principal of the matter, even though he doesn't realize that trying to dick over a small businesswoman like this is going to be much worse for his business in the long run. So he has his lawyers take the case to the next higher court, meaning Jane doesn't get her money yet.

In the meantime, Jane learns that it's possible to attach somebody's property to get the money one is owed, and Jane has George do this to one of the railroad's trains, which I'd think is worth for more than the value in dispute in the case. Malone escalates further, and the case become a national cause célèbre, with Jane getting invited down to New York to do a round of all the New York-based shows. It's here that she meets reporter Larry Hall (Steve Forrest), who quickly falls in love with Jane too.

Eventually Malone decides to play hardball by just closing the line servicing Cape Anne. This would prevent Jane from shipping her product entirely, at least in a way that's not cost prohibitive, but would also make life difficult for the rest of the townsfolk since the town has a better rail connection than road connections. Jane could use that locomotive to ship the lobster, but she needs fuel and access to the tracks, and Malone is going to make that difficult, too....

As a game show fan, I knew that It Happened to Jane has some of the only color footage of the set to I've Got a Secret, as Jane appears on the show (with the actual host and regular panelists) with her secret being that she's in a legal fight against the meanest man in the world. But that and the other cameos might be the highlight of what is very much a lesser Doris Day vehicle. Cape Anne is just too stereotypically New England, replete with quirky characters. Malone is too one-dimensionally mean, and the humor overall feels too forced. I'd recommend one or another of Doris' movies with Rock Hudson or James Garner to those who don't know much about Doris Day rom-coms.