She can't sink because she's a witch?

Every now and then, TCM runs a movie only a month or two apart. TCM ran The Unsinkable Molly Brown not too far back, and it's on the schedule for tomorrow at 4:00 PM, so I watched it a bit earlier than I might otherwise have done.

The movie starts off with a brief sequence of a baby being caught up in a flood in Colorado, shot both in distance with a doll in an actual river, and in close-up against obvious rear-projection photography. That baby survives the flood and winds up getting taken in by a widowed settler, Shamus Tobin (Ed Begley). She, now named Molly (Debbie Reynolds), has a couple of brothers who torment her constantly, as she wants to make something of herself in life even though she can't read or write.

Eventually she goes off on her own, inadvertently trespassing on land that's part of a mining claim of one John J. Brown (Harve Presnell), who takes her in at least to give her a meal. She doesn't like what she sees as his advances, since she intends to marry one of the rich Denver people, so at the first occasion she leaves for Leadville where she plans to get a job and take that first step to finding the rich guy.

Of course, Brown's mining claim is going to pay off at some point, so he's going to have the money to marry Molly and give her what she wants, at least to a point. When John first comes to get Molly and then gets the money for selling the claim, she's such an idiot that she hides the cash in the stove, where it's obviously going to get burned. Thankfully John has a second claim that strikes and they do get rich.




This leads them to move to Denver, but as nouveaux riches none of the hoity-toity people like them. So Molly gets the idea that they should go to Europe where they can learn a little class. They go to Europe and come back, but it still doesn't seem to help, so Molly wants to go back to Europe again, even though John doesn't. So they separate for a bit. Molly eventually decides to go back to John, and books transportation on the RMS Titanic to do so....

The Unsinkable Molly Brown is another of those movies that may not be your cup of tea if you're not a fan of the genre. Debbie Reynolds give a mostly fine performance, although there are a few parts where Reynolds-as-Reynolds comes through and the character becomes irritating. (The opening where she's being tormented by her foster brothers is one glaring example.) It also may be difficult for some that the movie is a musical, with the songs going on and on -- too long for me in some cases, but then, I'm not the biggest fan of musicals. I always thought the movie was about her surviving the Titanic sinking, but in fact this doesn't come up until the final 10 minutes of the movie.

Still, I'd have to recommend The Unsinkable Molly Brown, because there's enough in it that a certain type of movie buff is definitely going to like. But it's also definitely the sort of movie that wouldn't be first on my list of things to show to people who aren't already movie buffs.