The Daughter of Rosie O'Grady

Tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day, and as always, TCM is running a bunch of movies with Irish, or at least Irish-American themes. One that I hadn't seen before is The Daughter of Rosie O'Grady, which shows up at 9:30 AM. But I happened to have it on my DVR, so seeing it on the schedule, I watched it to be able to do a post on it here.

The movie opens in 1898, just as the Spanish-American War has ended and the victorious soldiers are returning home to victory parades for a heroes' welcome. The three O'Grady sisters: Katie (Marcia Mae Jones), Patricia (June Haver), and adolescent Maureen (Debbie Reynolds), are watching the parade. The reason is that just before the soldiers went off to war, Katie had married one soldier, James. The only thing is, she never told her father Dennis (James Barton) about the marriage. Not only that, but Katie and James consummated their marriage before he went down to Cuba, and that one act of sex knocked her up with twins!

Dad is very protective of the daughters, being a widower. In his younger days, he and his wife Rosie worked vaudeville, retiring after she started having kids, with dad taking a job driving horse-drawn trolley cars together with his friend Miklos (S.Z. Sakall, credited here as Cuddles without the initials). Dad thinks having to do all that work in vaudeville drove Rosie to an early grave, and because of that he put away all of the couple's vaudeville stuff, not wanting the kids to look at it or even entertain any thoughts of going on the stage.

After the parade, Patricia and Maureen go to take Dad his lunch at the depot, but take a detour to go by the vaudeville theater run by producer Tony Pastor (Gordon MacRae). Tony is sitting in the alley outside the stage entrance dressed as a tramp since that's one of the outfits he wears in the show. He tricks the two girls into giving him the lunch that's supposed to be for their father. At least the sisters have the plausible lie that they couldn't get past the parade lines.

When Patricia learns that the "tramp" was really Tony Pastor, she goes back to the theater to give him a piece of her mind. He learns that she's Pat O'Gradie, daughter of Rosie, and of course he recognizes the O'Grady surname and the significance that this has for vaudeville. So he'd love to see Dennis and talk shop, not realizing how much Dennis wants to keep his daughters away from vaudeville. As you can guess, things are going to get more complicated when Pat goes on stage with Tony and the two fall in love. And of course, there's still the issue of Katie and James. It's going to cause a lot of heartache before the predictable happy ending.

The problem with The Daughter of Rosie O'Grady is how predictable and formulaic the plot is. I wouldn't be surprised if Warner Bros. knew this, which is why they loaded the film up with what feels like even more musical numbers than normal for a movie like this. It makes the movie one that people who like musicals in general, and the nostalgia musicals from the post-World War II period that were set about a half century earlier than that in particular.