For some values of "road" and "happy"

Another of my recent movie watches was the slightly odd in terms of provenance movie The Happy Road. It's another of those movies available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so now you get a review here.

Bobby Clark plays Danny, a young American who's at a boarding school in Switzerland not far from the French border. One night, he climbs out the window of his dorm room in order to escape! He's got a plan, but unfortunately he didn't realize that his plans were going to get screwed up by a girl. Janine Duval (Brigitte) Fossey is a fellow student at the school, and decides she's got a good reason to run away as well, so she eventually badgers him into letting her accompany him on what is intended to be a voyage to Paris.

That's because Bobby's father, ugly American businessman (and widower) Mike Andrews (Gene Kelly), lives there, and Bobby wants to show his father that he's independent and able to take care of himself, something he can show if, well, he can get from Switzerland to Paris alone. As for Janine, she's got a divorced mother Suzanne (Barbara Laage) she wants to get back to.

The disappearance of the two students is duly noted at the school, which contacts both single parents, who make a beeline for the school. They don't like each other because of the culture clash, with Mike not being able to handle the French laid-back attitude towards life and Suzanne finding Mike the ugly American (and to be fair, he is brash and can't be bothered to try to fit into French culture). They set out together on a search for their children, which involves meeting a whole bunch of other people along the way.

The kids, for their part, are mildly resourceful, at least Danny. But they're also helped out by a bunch of other kids as well as a kindly deaf-mute forester. You can probably guess that this one is going to have a happy ending and that the two parents are going to wind up liking each other in spite of their differences.

This one is slightly odd in that Kelly made it in France, at the end of his contract with MGM. He produced and directed, and there being no musical numbers here, his direction is nowhere near as inspired as it was when he was working with Stanley Donen. (Whether or not that says anything about Kelly's direction is up to the reader to determine.) The story is pleasant enough although I found it cringe-inducing at the points where it missed more than it hit. A bicycle race at the climax of the movie was the big miss, although there were also times where I wanted Danny to smack Janine the same way Jimmy Stewart treats Doris Day in The Man Who Knew Too Much when she loses her wits.

Overall, The Happy Road is a movie that will probably appeal to families looking for a wholesome movie, although I'd also argue that there are better movies in that genre out there.