Deep in My Heart

Tonight is the final night of Merle Oberon's turn as TCM's Star of the Month. One of her movies that I haven't blogged about before, but had on my DVR, is Deep in My Heart, which airs overnight tonight at 12:45 AM (which is technically December 31 in the Eastern time zone but still December 30 in more westerly time zones). So, with that in mind, I held off on watching the movie and putting up a review until I could do it in conjunction with tonight's TCM showing.

Deep in My Heart starts off with the MGM orchestra performing an overture. This is actually a medley of songs composed by Sigmund Romberg, who is the subject of the movie. After the overture and opening credits, we're introduced to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where a young Sigmund (José Ferrer) works as a waiter at a Viennese-style café owned by Anna Mueller (Helen Traubel), composing Strauss-style music for the band to play. A musical agent shows up and likes Romberg's ability, but notes that this is a type of music that's old fashioned: if Romberg wants to make it as a composer, he's going to have to write music that's more with the times.

Romberg does do this, coming up with a formulaic song called "Leg of Mutton", which brings him to the attention of J.J. Shubert (Walter Pidgeon), an impresario who together with his brother was about to open what is the Shubert Theater on Broadway that still stands to this day. Shubert is putting on a show with star Gaby Deslys (Tamara Toumanova) and would like Romberg to write a song for her. This leads to part of the dramatic tension of the movie, such as that is, in that Romberg has artistic principles while Shubert and a bunch of other people all know better than Romberg what would be commercially successful. Indeed, there's a scene late in the movie where an adolescent girl says she likes one of the songs, but decries the show as a whole as opera.

Back to the meeting with Shubert, and Romberg's song is enough of a hit that he gets to keep working with Shubert and makes a lot of money. Unfortunately, he spends even more money than he earns, which ultimately results in his declaring bankruptcy and being forced to go back to Shubert to work on the sort of material that Shubert knows will be a commercial hit and make Romberg a tidy sum of money. Along the way, Romberg meets another actress, Dorothy Donnelly (Merle Oberon), who is a bit of a champion of Romberg's and who has some pretentions to higher art of her own. While on a tour of Europe just after the Great War, she comes across a play called Old Heidelberg that she snapped up the rights to, to work on a translation with lyrics that could be set to music. She wants Romberg to write the music, and the result is the successful operetta The Student Prince.

To fill out the plot, there's a romantic angle involving how Romberg meets his wife Lillian (Doe Avedon) in the Adirondack resort town of Saranac Lake while trying to work on songs for a musical where he faces a very tight deadline. (In fact, this was Romberg's second wife; his first wife isn't mentioned and IMDb doesn't even list her.) But a lot of the movie is just an excuse to bring in MGM's stars to do musical numbers of Romberg's songs.

Not that this is a bad thing, of course; people who like the Freed Unit musicals that MGM was putting out in this era are probably going to love Deep in My Heart even if it is a slightly different type of music. For me, the one big problem with the movie is the sense that, the way things play out, Sigmund Romberg comes across as the sort of person whose life wasn't quite interesting enough to be the subject of a Hollywood biopic. The actors all do quite well with the material they're given, and the stars performing the musical numbers -- including Gene Kelly with his brother Frank; Rosemary Clooney; Cyd Charisse and her husband Tony Martin in different numbers; Ann Miller; and more -- are more than competent at what they're asked to do. But the music may not be to everyone's taste, and the dramatic scenes in getting to the musical numbers are slow.

Still, for anyone who wants a bit of musical history or who wants to see an MGM musical that isn't as well remembered, Deep in My Heart is a movie of a high technical standard.

Easter Parade

With it being Easter today, TCM has a traditional lineup of movies with religious themes. But one other movie that they seem to pull out every Easter is an appropriate one not just because of the title, but because the opening and closing scenes are set on (secular) Easter: Easter Parade.

The movie opens on Easter Saturday, 1911, although the movie doesn't quite mention dates until much later in the movie. Fred Astaire, playing dancer Don Hewes, is singing a song and doing some gift shopping. Eventually, he goes into a toy store to by a stuffed rabbit, but that's really just an excuse for a fairly spectacular dance number involving him and the little boy from whom Hewes is going to get that bunny.

The gifts are for Don's kinda-sorta girlfriend, Nadine Hale (Ann Miller). But Nadine isn't just a possible romantic partner; she's also Don's dance partner in the dance pair Nadine and Hewes who do revue shows and the like. I say "is", but it's about to become "was". Don has signed the two of them up for another road show, but Nadine has decided she wants to try to make it on Broadway. With that in mind, she's signed a contract to appear in what is going to become the latest edition of the Zigfeld Follies.

Don can't convince her not to leave him, so he goes to a bar to try to drown his sorrows. Except that this is an odd little dive bar in that it also has a floor show, complete with numerous chorus girls. One of those chorus girls is Hannah Brown (Judy Garland), and Hewes is so taken with her that he decides to tell her she should come see him the following morning since he wants her to be his new dance partner. She thinks the guy is crazy, and even rips up his business card, until she finds out that he's the famous Don Hewes.

After rehearsal the next morning, Hannah runs into Don's best friend, Jonathan Harrow (Peter Lawford). Jonathan is also taken with Hannah, and proposes to take her out to dinner, but you know Jonathan is going to be the third wheel in any relationship in the movie. Indeed, he later winds up pursuing Nadine for reasons that don't really make much sense and don't do all that much to advance the plot.

Don and Hannah go out on the road and are able to work steadily if not spectacularly, at least not for several months. Eventually, Don signs a contract for the two of them to star in a musical revue of their own, which after rehearsals and road previews, is set to open on Broadway on Easter Saturday 1912. The premiere is in fact a success, but when the two go to the Ziegfeld Follies to celebrate, Nadine asks Don to do one of their old numbers with her, leading Hannah to think he only used her to get back at Nadine. This was in fact Don's original intention, but along the way he truly fell in love with her.

Easter Parade is a movie that has a very slight story -- indeed, it's the sort of on-again, off-again series of misunderstandings that I could easily have seen Fred Astaire doing with Ginger Rogers at RKO a decade earlier. Here, the story is set against a series of songs written by Irving Berlin that are used as the basis for dance numbers. The story isn't much, as I said, and frankly it's by far the weakest part of the story. Indeed, in that regard I'd rate the movie a notch below one of Berlin's earlier musicals, Alexander's Ragtime Band.

But what Easter Parade has going for it is a couple of things. One is those dance numbers. Fred Astaire was much better in terms of dancing that any of the cast of Alexander's Ragtime Band. It also has Technicolor, which makes a movie like this that much better. Indeed, I don't think the movie would be memorable at all if it had been made in black and white. That's how much weaker the story is than even the old Fred-and-Ginger films.

So, although I had some problems with Easter Parade, it's definitely a movie that's worth watching. And I think that if you're the sort of person who likes the dance numbers, you'll really love Easter Parade.

Kiss Me Kate

Tomorrow morning and afternoon, TCM is running a bunch of Shakespeare-themed movies. I'd never done a review of Kiss Me Kate before, so the last time it showed up on TCM, I recorded it with a view to getting around to watching it sometime. Seeing it on the schedule speeded up that process, so now you're getting the review.

Howard Keel plays Fred Graham, a Broadway star who is talking with his good friend Cole Porter (Ron Randell) about his latest project. Cole has written a musical treatment of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, and Fred would be perfect for the male lead Petruchio. They know who would be perfect for the role of Kate, actress Lilli Vanessi (Kathryn Grayson). There's just one catch: Lilli is Fred's ex-wife. And Fred is pursuing another woman now, dancer Lois Lane (Ann Miller), although she's got a boyfriend in Bill Calhoun (Tommy Rall).

After some persuading (and a spectacular if meaningless to the plot dance number by Miller), Lilli agrees to take on the role, and the play is a go. At this point, a substantial portion of the movie becomes the performance of the musical version of the play, although some of the backstage stuff is going to come into play.

Lois and Bill ahve both been cast in the play too, as Bianca and Lucentio respectively, if you know the original Shakespeare play, which I have to admit I don't know that much about. That's no big deal, except that Bill likes to gamble and has racked up a substantial amount of gambling debt. Worse, he forged Fred's name on an IOU to the gangsters.

The gangster, however, sends some henchmen who don't know what the guy who signed the IOU looked like, or else they'd find Fred and realize that Fred isn't the one who racked up those debts. Instead, the henchmen, Lippy and Slug (Keenan Wynn and James Whitmore respectively), simply expect Fred to pay up. At least Fred has the good sense to realize that he has a hit on his hands and try to wait for the box office to come in long enough to pay off the IOU.

But here there's a big catch: Lilli got a bouquet of flowers from Fred, whch she thought was part of an attempt to make up. But it was a mistake: the flowers were meant for Lois. When Lilli sees the card addressed to Lois, she threatens to quit the show then and there, like literally between acts of the performance. This would obviously be a disaster for Fred, and leads to the film's funnier moments of Lippy and Slug being dressed up in Shakespearean garb and going on stage to watch Lilli and make certain she doesn't bolt.

Kiss Me Kate has a lot of potential. Whether you like it, however, is going to come down to whether you like the singing and the dancing. For me, that was a bit of a problem, as neither Howard Keel nor Kathryn Grayson are my favorite singers. Not that they can't sing; they're more than proficient enough. It's just a style that I don't think holds up so well today. The dancing, unsurprisingly, is quite good, thanks not just to Miller, but Rall and also a young Bob Fosse as two of Miller's suitors in the stage version of the show.

Kiss Me Kate wouldn't be my first choice when thinking about any of the stars, or for Cole Porter musicals, but there are definitely going to be people who like it a lot.

The Kissing Bandit

Another of the movies I watched recently is the lively Technicolor musical/romantic comedy The Kissing Bandit.

Frank Sinatra plays Ricardo, a young man originally from Mexican California who went east to study in Boston. However, his father has died, so now Ricardo is returning to run the family inn, with help from Dad's assistant Chico (J. Carrol Naish). However, what Ricardo doesn't realize is that the inn was actually a front. You see, Dad was the notorious "Kissing Bandit", who robbed passing coached and was romantic with all the women he robbed. And the Bandit has a large bounty on his head, courtesy of the governor, Don José (Mikhai Rasumny).

Meanwhile, the Governor's daughter Teresa (Kathryn Grayson) is returning home from convent school. The old members of the Kissing Bandit gang set out on another mission with Ricardo in tow, even though Ricardo can barely ride a horse -- he's clearly no bandit. Worse, when it comes time to rob a coach, the one they pick just happens to have Teresa in it. Ricardo meets her, and the two immediately fall in love despite the fact that Ricardo is going to be in danger if he's caught out as the Kissing Bandit. Not that he realizes this is the governor's daughter

That just may happen, because the Governor has other problems. Apparently, he hasn't been doing a good enough job collecting taxes, as a general, Felipe Toro (Billy Gilbert) is sent to collect those taxes by any means necessary. Fortunately, though, the general and his adjutant stop at Ricardo's inn, allowing the gang to waylay him and send Ricardo in the general's stead. This is where he's going to learn that he's fallen in love with the governor's daughter....

Frank Sinatra hated this movie, and it was a financial disaster for MGM, and in some ways it's easy to see why. Sinatra and Grayson are a big clash in musical styles, so the music doesn't always work. Indeed, the producers shelved the movie for a while before adding a specialty dance with Ricardo Montalbán, Cyd Charisse, and Ann Miller, which is really the highlight of the movie. Yowza what a combination. That having been said, I don't think the movie was quite as bad as a lot of people think. The color is nice, and Sinatra, Naish, and Mildred Natwick as Teresa's aunt Isabella are all appealing. Still, having seen it, I can understand better why Sinatra was so desperate to get the role of Maggio in From Here to Eternity and revive his flagging acting career.

The Kissing Bandit is available on DVD should you wish to watch for yourself.