Two Guys from Milwaukee

In getting through the backlog of movies that I've watched off my DVR but have yet to do a post on, it's time to write about one of those movies that shows up on TCM often enough but that I'd never gotten around to watching before, Two Guys from Milwaukee.

The movie technically starts off at Pennsylvania Station in New York, although the opening scenes are really on a train. The two important passengers on that train are Prince Henry (Dennis Morgan) of one of those central European monarchies that in real life would have been overrun by Soviet-backed Communists a year or two after the movie was made, together with his advisor Count Oswald (S.Z. Sakall). Henry is on a goodwill tour of America, before his country votes on a plebiscite regarding whether to stay a monarchy. Henry thinks that if the vote is going to be rigged, he's going to want to meet real Americans.

Showing up at Penn Station and not realizing that a celebrity is about to get off the train is cab driver Buzz Williams (Jack Carson). He doesn't know anything about royalty, and if anything has mild contempt for them. In a plot twist that's fairly obvious, Henry decides he's going to escape from the train and pass himself off as a regular American, only to wind up taking the cab driven by Buzz. Unfortunately, Henry forgot to get any money when he absconded from the train, which is going to make paying for a cab difficult, as well as paying for dinner or getting a hotel room or anything like that.

Buzz lives with his sister Nan (Rosemary DeCamp), and since Henry has lied about where he was from and just happened to pick Buzz's hometown as where he is from, Buzz takes Henry home with him. Buzz also has a girlfriend Connie (Joan Leslie), and Buzz suggests the idea of a double date as Connie has a girlfriend Polly (Janis Paige).

As you might guess, Henry and Connie begin to develop feelings for each other, which is a problem since she's already got a boyfriend who's done nothing wrong, and because of that upcoming referendum. If monarchy wins, Henry getting married to a foreign commoner might be a problem. Meanwhile, there's still the issue that Henry is technically missing. Because this is a programmer, however, we know that it's going to resolve all its problems with a requisite happy ending.

Two Guys from Milwaukee is, as I just mentioned, little more than a programmer of the sort that Warner Bros. and the other studios churned out in the years before World War II. This one, however, was made just after the war, in 1946, so it does have the feel of being a bit out of place. That's not to say it's a bad movie, of course. Dennis Morgan and Jack Carson work well together, and the movie has a fun little coda at the end. But the sort of monarchy that Henry was a part of would have been destroyed by the recently-ended war, and the consequences of that are totally glossed over. Still, Two Guys from Milwaukee is entertaining enough, and definitely worth one watch at least.