Ada

During Dean Martin's turn as Star of the Month last month, TCM ran Ada, which I actually hadn't seen before. So I DVRed it and watched it to do a full-length post here on it.

Martin plays Bo Gillis, who at the start of the movie is running for Governor of one of those Southern states in the mid-1930s (there's a theater marquee with the 1935 MGM movie Escapade; you do the math). Bo is a backwater guy who would probably be happier just singing, and leaves the political stuff to the muckety-mucks, Steve (Martin Balsam), and the big power, Sylvester (Wilfrid Hyde-White). But Bo also has an independent streak. One night at a hotel he's made the acquaintance of Ada (Susan Hayward) who has a past of ill-repute and possibly a present of ill-repute as well. So what does Bo do? He marries Ada!

Since Sylvester is running a well-oiled political machine, Bo wins the governorship, and Ada becomes First Lady, although all the other political wives have no respect for her and her lower-class background. The other wives married into families that used their political influence to enrich themselves, and that sort of corruption is still going on throughout the state. Indeed, the whole point of putting Bo in office was to have a governor who would just sign what Sylvester wants him to sign without reading it. (There's one scene that shows just how shockingly uncaring Bo is about reading the things to which he's putting his signature.)

Ada finds out what's going on, and she's shocked! She thinks her husband should actually do his job and when she finds out what's going on, she tries to deal with the political machine herself. Her first attempt gets the machine to threaten the Lieutenant Governor, who resigns with the establishment appointing Ada to be the acting Lieutenant Governor, which makes no sense whatsoever. But it happens. Then, she gets Bo to stand up for himself, for which just hours later somebody obviously from Sylvester's poitical machine bombs Bo's car!

With Bo incapacitated, Ada becomes acting governor, although it's not easy in a bunch of ways. Bo thinks (wrongly) that Ada was conniving against him to get the governorship for herself, while she decides to go on a cruside by amending all those laws that the old political families used to enrich themselves. They don't like having their gravy train removed, so they start looking into her past. And if Ada was smart enough to get herself to the governor's office, you'd be surprised at how stupid she is in falling for somebody having a wire on them to record her.

When I was watching Ada, one of the movies I was reminded of was East Side, West Side, which I blogged about a few months back. They're both MGM potboilers about a dozen years apart, and I found myself having the same issue with both. Even though by the early 1960s MGM was beginning the long, slow descent that led to the backlot being sold off and the studio as we know it being finished, the studio still had a fair amount of gloss that really doesn't befit a movie like Ada. Also, the sort of material in Ada has been done a bunch of times, so it was going to be hard to do it as well here.

Still, everybody tries hard and gives at least a satisfactory performance, although sometimes you'd think Martin would rather spend the entire movie singing. Hyde-White is probably best as the machine boss. There's nothing notably wrong with Ada per se; it's more that there's nothing notably right with it. It's the sort of movie that you watch once and there's no need to watch it a second time.