Our Miss Brooks

Another of the people who got a day in TCM's Summer Under the Stars this past August was Eve Arden. This gave me the chance to record one of her movies that I hadn't blogged about before, Our Miss Brooks. Recently, I watched it to be able to do a post on it here.

I don't know if Our Miss Brooks was the first TV show to get turned into a movie, although it has to be one of the earlier ones. However, several radio programs had received movie treatment, and Our Miss Brooks started off as a radio program in the late 1940s. So people who have seen any of the TV shows either in syndication or on one of the vintage TV channels if any of them are showing it will probably recognize a good portion of the synopsis.

The movie is apparently an encapsulation of the TV series' backstory, with a couple of subplots added in, this even though the franchise had been around for several years. Miss Connie Brooks (Eve Arden), an unmarried woman of a certain age, shows up in the Anywhere, USA town of Madison to start her new job as an English teacher at Madison High, although it seems as though she's starting in the middle of a semester, or else the movie takes some big jumps in time not long after the opening. On her first day, she runs into biology teacher Phil Boynton (Robert Rockwell), who for whatever reason is doing shirtless exercise on one of the school's lawns, during what certainly seems like school hours. Miss Brooks, apparently not having reached menopause, immediately develops the hots for Mr. Boynton, something that as I understand it was a running theme of the TV show.

Meanwhile, Miss Brooks and everybody else at the school has to deal with officious prinicpal Mr. Conklin (Gale Gordon), who treates education as a military campaign and whom nobody particularly likes. His subplot is going to involve the school board that would like to get rid of him, with the faculty and students joining in when a new elected position opens up that everybody tries to get Conklin to run for on the theory that this is going to be a status upgrade for him.

Also reprising her role from the TV show is June Morgan playing Mrs. Davis, the woman from whom Miss Brooks rents a room. Mrs. Davis is presented here as eccentric, and also one given to telling people's fortunes. She winds up playing matchmaker between Miss Brooks and Mr. Boynton, in more ways than one.

Finally, we get two characters who are apparently new to the movie. Gary Nolan (a young Nick Adams) is a student in Miss Brooks' English class who has decided to stop taking any interest in English class, with the logical result that his grades start to suffer. Miss Brooks, on asking him about it, finds out that Gary's father Lawrence (Don Porter) is the editor/publisher of the local newspaper, and even owns the new television station in town. Dad seems to want his son to follow in his footsteps, and Gary isn't so certain of it. Miss Brooks starts tutoring Gary after school, and the romantic subplot is that Gary's father begins to take a liking to Miss Brooks -- I can't imagine a light comedy of this era having a teacher/student romance.

You don't need to know anything about the TV series to follow the plot of Our Miss Brooks, as the script as written could just have easily been written about original characters. However, the script also feels like warmed-over sitcom plots from an era when a lot of shows weren't as good as nostalgia might have us remember. The movie is also a time capsule of how middle-class white America would have wanted to see itself in the 1950s.

For that, Our Miss Brooks is definitely worth one viewing. Just don't expect a particularly high-quality movie.