The Reluctant Debutante

I've mentioned quite a few times recently about how the streaming movie channel thing has led to me discovering a bunch of movies I'd never heard of. With TCM, on the other hand, it's not surprising that there are movies that I've seen on the TCM schedule a bunch of times, but for one reason or another never got around to recording. Next up is a movie that falls into this second category: The Reluctant Debutante.

The titular reluctant debutante is Jane Broadbent, played by Sandra Dee. She's the daughter of a Brit, Lord James Broadbent (Rex Harrison) and his unseen American first wife. Jane has been living in America since her parents' divorce, but is now coming over to the UK to spend a summer as well as meet her father's new wife, Lady Sheila (Kay Kendall, Rex Harrison's real-life wife who died tragically young of leukemia a year after this movie was made). Dad has no intention of turning his daughter into a debutante, but then there's another woman....

Well, not another woman in that sense. The "other woman" is a friend of Sheila's named Mabel Claremont. Mabel has a daughter Clarissa who's about the same age as Jane, and Mable is about to put her daughter through the whole debutante thing, with coming out parties over the course of a "season" as apparently, it's the done thing for all the upper-crust British girls approaching 18 to go through this gauntlet. Mabel tells Sheila about Clarissa, and naturally expects Sheila and Jane will be doing the same thing. Sheila, apparently feeling class and social pressures, decides to make Jane a debutante without Jane's input into the matter.

Now, part of the point of these parties is to dress up and go to fancy parties in the hopes that the young woman will meet a nice man of the right social class. In this case, that means David Fenner (Peter Myers), a gentleman in every sense of the word, and one who would be able to provide well for whatever woman he marries. Both Sheila and Mabel think he would be perfect for their respective daughters, althogh Jane thinks he's a drip and Jim doesn't want to force his daughter into anything she doesn't really want.

And as you might guess, Jane meets a man more to her own liking. The parents organizing the series of balls have musical accompaniment for the dancing, and the same bands get hired over and over. David Parkson (John Saxon) is the percussionist for one of these bands, and as such he meets a lot of young eligible upper-class women. He and Jane meet and, since they both share a disdain to an extent for society, or at least the artifice that young women have to go through at these balls, they fall in love. This horrifies Sheila, of course. What a scandal it would be to have her stepdaughter marry the wrong guy!

The Reluctant Debutante is a comedy first and foremost, although the sort that has light drama. It's a genre that I think will play better to the sort of people who like the sort of comedy written for the stage, and not just because this is an adaptation of a stage comedy. It's just a bit more refined than a lot of Hollywood comedies, while at the same time not having some of the more artifical characters like the man Charles Boyer played in Barefoot in the Park. So with all that in mind, I have to say that I enjoyed The Reluctant Debutante more than Barefoot in the Park, although I can also understand why some people are going to be less amenable to this sort of comedy.

Rex Harrison unsurprisingly does well in this sort of British upper-crust comedy, while Angela Lansbury is a delight as the pompous antagonist, much like her walk-on part in Dear Heart. Kay Kendall glitters, and it's a huge shame that she died so young. Definitely look out for The Reluctant Debutante if you get the chance to watch it.