Janie

One of the things that World War II did was give audiences a taste for movies that would boost their morale, even if there was no actual fighting in the movies. I think I've mentioned Fox's more homespun musicals, but for something that was more contemporary, you could watch a Warner Bros. family movie like Janie.

Janie Conway (Joyce Reynolds, who didn't go on to have that much of a career) plays Janie, a high school student in Hortonville, one of those small to medium-sized cities that populated Hollywood movies back in those days. She's typical of the middle class teens who were the focus of a lot of such movies, since Hollywood generally didn't want to show movies about the dirt poor for fairly obvious reasons. Janie has a boyfriend in Scooper (Richard Erdman), but things are about to get a lot more complicated for the two of them.

Janie's father Charles (Edward Arnold) is editor of the local newspaper, who also has a lot on his hands. Professionally, he needs a new printing press, but with the war on the government get to control which businesses get which goods. And at home, Dad has to deal with Janie. She, being a typical teenager, makes life difficult for him in all sorts of ways, from constantly hogging the telephone to having an interest in boys. This latter causes a big issue when she and her friends go to a "blanket party" with a bunch of boys, a party that gets published in Life magazine.

And then there's the war coming to their hometown. A bunch of servicemen get stationed at a base near Hortonville either on their way out to the European or Pacific theaters, or on their way back. So a bunch of young men who are still older than the high school boys and consequently a lot more mature are in town, cutting a fine picture in their uniforms. So of course the girls start falling for these men, even though I'd think the solderis would want an adult instead of a 16-year-old girl. In any case, Janie meets Pfc. Dick Lawrence (Robert Hutton), and the sparks start to fly between the two of them, much to Scooper's consternation.

But how to meet Dick alone? There's the rub. The other girls have the same problem, although in some ways even bigger because of the editorials that Janie's father has published. As a result, none of the other girls' fathers will let them fraternize with the servicemen. They get the bright idea to do so surreptitiously, at Janie's house, one even when Janie's parents go out to a grown-up function and Janie thinks she'll have the house more or less to herself. One thing leads to another, and it seems like the entire base is at Janie's house.

Janie is the sort of movie where you can see why audiences of the day would have liked it, but looking back on it 80 years later, boy is it dated. It doesn't help that most of the characters are unappealing. Janie is selfish, Mom (Ann Harding) is too ditzy, and Dad is close to the stereotypical out-of-touch dad. And then there's kid sister Elspeth, who is given the sort of role Virginia Weidler had in The Philadelphia Story, only turned up to 11 and made much more obnoxious. I wanted Bette Davis to come in and shake her the same way she did to Miriam Hopkins in Old Acquaintance.

So while Janie is a curio that will appeal to some people, I don't think it will appeal to everybody.