I'll admit that I'm not the greatest fan of musicals, but I think sometimes my not particularly caring for a certain musical is because the movie isn't all that good. I'm sorry to say that's the case with the musical Athena.
The movie starts off with a performance from an alleged TV star, Johnny Nyle (Vic Damone). Nyle sings in the sort of way that the part of Hollywood that still had one foot stuck in the past would like, and has a legion of adoring female fans who wear conservative long skirts. He's also got some sort of legal issue that has a process server going after him. With that in mind, Johnny goes to see his old war buddy Adam Shaw (Edmund Purdom) to see if Adam can fix his legal problems.
Adam, for his part, is trying to run for Congress, being the third generation of his family to go into politics and having the old solons from the party on his side. Regardless of the political considerations of helping someone like Nyle, Adam may simply not have the time to do it. He's also got his own personal problems, as he had bought some fruit trees from a tree nursery that didn't turn out the way he had hoped.
Adam is about to have much bigger problems when he goes to the nursery and runs into Athena Mulvain (Jane Powell). She's the sort of person who, when she's in public like this, would get the reputation for being "free-spirited", although that's putting it mildly. And Athena has decided that she loves Adam and is going to get him to marry her just by constantly being in his life. Never mind that he's got a fiancée already.
So Adam tries to find out who this Athena Mulvain is and where she lives so that he can go visit he and ask her if she would kindly break off the relationship. Instead, he finds that not only is she not going to take no for an answer, but she's got a really kooky family. She and all of her sisters are named after mythological figures, altough not all Greek as Athena's sister Minerva (Debbie Reynolds) is named after Athena's Roman equivalent. Minerva is also going to become a romantic interest for Johnny. This is determined by Athena's grandmather Salome (Evelyn Varden), who is into numerology.
Obviously, getting involved with Athena would cause all sorts of political problems for Adam, but he can't help himself. A further subplot involves Grandpa Mulvain's (Louis Calhern) views on diet and fitness, leading him to emcee a Mr. Universe-like contest which also serves as the dramatic climax of the movie.
For me, the movie Athena had a whole bunch of problems. One is that although it's a musical, it's one of those where the songs aren't particularly memorable and bring the proceedings to a screeching halt. Fans of musicals, however, probably won't have that problem. The bigger problem is that on multiple occasions, the main characters' motivations suddenly turn on a dime in ways that aren't realistic at all. And Athena isn't a charming free spirit, but an obnoxious blankety-blank since she can't take no for an answer.
Still, there are probably going to be some people who like a musical like this, so as always, watch and judge for yourself.
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