Romance on the High Seas

A few weeks back TCM ran a salute to Oscar Levant, showing sevreal of his movies. One that I hadn't seen before was Romance on the High Seas, so I watched it to do a post here.

Levant, unsurprisingly, isn't the star, since he was always in a supporting role. Top billing goes to Jack Carson, although we don't see him for a while. First up is second-billed Janis Paige, playing Elvira, getting married to Michael Kent (Don De Fore), who runs a drugstore chain together with Elvira's uncle Lazlo (S.Z. Sakall), because Janis Paige is oh-so Hungarian. (Don't think too hard as you watch this movie.)

Anyhow, although the marriage seems a relatively loving one, there is one problem in that Michael is constantly swamped with work, such that he had to beg off going on a planned vacation for the couple's first anniversary, and another one for the second anniversary. The third anniversary is coming up. Elvira is planning a boat trip to Brazil, and at the travel agency she learns about Georgia (Doris Day in her movie debut), a nightclub singer who keeps to the agency for the brochures but never has the money to go anywhere.

Unfortunately, when Elvira goes to Michael's office, she finds that he's got a new secretary, and claims he's going to have to delay the anniversary trip again, because he's got an important merger to deal with, although he swears it'll only be four days and he can join Elvira after that. (Maybe Elvira should have watched Ex-Lady.) But Elvira, seeing the new secretary who isn't a very good typist, gets the suspicion that her husband might be having an affair with the secretary, as executives in the movies of those days are wont to do.

Elvira has a great plan to get back at her husband: she's going to find that Georgia from the travel agency and pay her to take Elvira's place on the cruise so that Elvira can stay behind and figure out whether Michael is in fact having that affair. As for Oscar Levant, he plays the manager of the nightclub, and is none too happy about the possibility of losing Georgia to a hare-brained scheme like this. But Georgia sees visions of the $1,000 that Elvira is going to pay her (in 1948 dollars) and a free first-class cruise, so she jumps at the offer. All she has to do is be virtuous on the cruise.

Michael, for his part, has other ideas. He gets the idea that if Elvira is insisting on going on the trip ahead of Michael, and alone, that perhaps there's somebody on the boat that she's seeing. So he hires a private detective, Peter Virgil (finally we see Jack Carson show up), to go on the boat as well and find out just what Elvira is up to. Of course, Michael fails to give Peter a picture of Elvira.

You can probably guess what happens next. Peter meets Georgia on the boat thinking that this is Elvira. He falls in love with her, which for him is a big problem since this is supposed to be a married woman and the wife of his client. Georgia, for her part, falls in love with Peter, which is also a problem. And then to complicate things further, Michael, Oscar, Elvira, and Lazlo each wind up making their way down to Rio to find out what's going on.

Romance on the High Seas is predictable, but what it does it does mostly well. This being Doris Day's debut, she's given several songs to sing, and that might slow the movie down for some viewers. But she does a very good job not just singing but acting as well. Carson is his normal solid self, Sakall the comic relief, and De Fore and Paige OK in what are clearly supporting roles since much of the action takes place on the ship. There's also lovely Technicolor photography.

If you want an undemanding feel-good movie, you could do a lot worse than to watch Romance on the High Seas.