It Happened in Brooklyn

I didn't expect to do posts on multiple Peter Lawford pictures in brief succession, but it turned out that two of them were on my DVR as well as being on the TCM schedule. The second of them is It Happened in Brooklyn, which TCM is running again tomorrow, June 15, at 9:30 AM.

Peter Lawford is technically in a secondary role to Frank Sinatra. Sinatra plays Danny Miller, a Brooklyn-born man who as the movie starts is in England just after the end of World War II waiting to be demobbed and sent back to America along with a bunch of other soldiers. A conceit of the movie is that Brooklyn is full of very outgoing people but, in England, Danny just doesn't want to associate with anybody other than a pretty nurse (Gloria Grahame) tending to him. He's at a party for the soldiers about to go home, and is ordered to mingle. It's there that he meets Jamie Shellgrove (Peter Lawford), who might be even more timid than Danny but who happens to be the grandson of a duke. Danny suggests that Jamie come over to Brooklyn.

Danny gets demobbed, just in time for a housing crisis in Brooklyn, which basically forces him to room with an old friend, school custodian Nick Lombardi (Jimmy Durante) who has an apartment attached to the school where he works. Teaching at the school is music teacher Anne Fielding (Kathryn Grayson). Anne had wanted to be an opera singer, but she didn't get to study which is why she's in a backwater like this. One of the students is a piano prodigy, but he comes from a poor family, and he can't apply for the big music scholarship because he's a couple of months too young, which is going to be one of the plot points later in the movie.

Danny, having returned from the war, has the right to his old job back, reminiscent of Dana Andrews in The Best Years of Our Lives, but he naturally dreams of something better. He was working as a shipping clerk for a music store, when what he really dreams of doing is putting over the songs by singing them, the sort of job that seems more out of the 1910s than the 1940s, but whatever. He's actually able to get that job thanks to a little help from Nick that teaches Danny to be not quite so shy. Also, by this point, you expect Danny and Anne to wind up together in the final reel.

But then Jamie shows up from England since the Duke really wants Danny to help Jamie become successful enough that he'll overcome his timidness and be able to make it back in England. Jamie falls for Anne, and as it turns out she really likes him too, thanks in part to Danny's playing a bit of matchmaker. But Jamie is just too damn shy to tell Anne how he really feels, which is going to cause all sorts of conflict in the final act of the movie. This last act also involves the main characters teaming up to get a piano concert for that young prodigy in the hopes that they can get someone important to attend the concert and give the kid that scholarship.

It Happened in Brooklyn is one of those movies that doesn't really have any bad guys in it, although there is some conflict along the way. However, that's one of the things that doesn't quite work in the movie's favor here. Indeed, it feels like It Happened in Brooklyn is a bit of a mish-mash of plots that might have been lying around the MGM studio offices. (It's not related, but the characters pass movie theaters on a couple of occasions and there are a lot of MGM movies from the era being advertised on posters.) It's also a musical with a plot that doesn't really lend itself to being a musical even with two of the main characters working in music. Kathryn Grayson has an operatic number from Leo Delibes' Lakmé toward the end of the film that brings things to a screeching halt.

Somewhat surprisingly, even though I'm not a fan of Peter Lawford, he isn't the sort of weak link here that he was in some of his other movies. I think that's because the screenplay plays to his limitations as an actor by having him play a totally uncharismatic character. You wonder how much actual acting he had to do.