Jeepers Creepers

Actor Dick Powell made Murder, My Sweet in no small part because he wanted to be able to show himself to be more than a light comic actor crooning away in pictures. Powell of course had that reputation going back to some of the great early musicals like 42nd Street, but watching a late 1930s musical like Going Places makes it so much easier to see why Powell wanted to do "serious" work.

Powell plays Peter Mason, who works as a clerk in a creaky old New York sporting-goods store under Franklin Dexter (Walter Catlett). It's one of those places that comes across as old-fashioned even by the standards of the 1930s, with one of the few customers being Col. Withering (Thurston Hall), who goes on fake safaris and buys stuff from the store to display as his catches to the society set who attend his lectures.

The store needs more business, but it's also the sort of store that finds advertising to be terribly gauche. They hit upon an idea, however, which is to have a famous horseman endorse their goods and mingle with the society set that would attend polo matches, the summer racing season at Saratoga, or in the case of this movie, a steeplechase in Maryland. And they even have just such a horseman under contract, Peter Randall. Unfortunately, Randall is currently racing down under, but since information traveled slowly in those days, they can just have Peter Mason impersonate Randall and none of the Maryland horse set will figure out the ruse. (Yeah, right.)

The first thing Peter and his boss find when they get to Maryland is a wild horse that only responds to the musical stylings of extremely musically talented groomsman Gabriel (Louis Armstrong) singing the standard "Jeepers Creepers" which here is the original. One of the next things the find is Col. Withering, who knows the ruse but has his own reasons for not revealing it: namely, that his sister-in-law who funds the safaris, has been threatening to cut him off. Another of the rich set is Ellen Parker (Anita Louise), and she and Peter immediately hit it off. But that's because Ellen thinks of Peter as the horseman, not as a lowly clerk there to imitate the horseman and advertise the store. Ellen is also pursued by Col. Withering's nephew Jack (Ronald Reagan).

Eventually the big race comes up, and there's going to be a lot of betting on who's going to win. Trying to influence the betting, albeit in a decidedly less-than-legal way, are the professional gamblers Maxie (Harold Huber) and Droopy (Allen Jenkins). Eventually Peter winds up having to ride the wild horse we saw at the beginning, even though he's barely able to ride a horse at all.

As I said at the beginning, watching a movie like Going Places, it's obvious why Powell had started to chafe having to make all these musicals with increasingly lesser music and even worse plots. Still, Warner Bros. had a lot of talented musical people, so the song and dance numbers mostly work for those who enjoy musical movies. Going Places is not a great movie by any means, but I suppose it could have been much worse considering some of the much more dire horse racing movies I've seen.