Call Me Mister

It turns out that there is at least one movie in the FXM Retro rotation that I hadn't blogged about before, at least according to my most recent search of the blog. That movie is Call Me Mister. I recorded it the last time it showed up, figuring that if I hadn't seen it before, it would show up again soon enough and I could do a post on it. With that in mind, the next airing is tomorrow (Feb. 28) at 8:55 AM.

The movie released in 1951 but based loosely on a Broadway revue that was first staged in 1946, starts off by informing us how on the evening of August 14, 1945, America was waiting for the news that eventually did come out of Japan, namely that Japan had surrendered to end World War II. The action then switches to Japan, since there were many many soldiers who were not going to be part of the occupation long term and they needed to be shipped back home.

One of those soldiers is Sgt. Shep Dooley (Dan Dailey). He was a vaudevillean before the war, and supposedly pressed into war service so quickly that he carried his tap dancing shoes with him throughout the Pacific. So now he wants to dispose of them on the black market. Good luck with that. Anyhow, while in Tokyo, he walks into a store that's selling kimonos. Who does he run into but one Kay Hudson (Betty Grable). She was his partner in vaudeville before the war, and was even married to him, but the marriage went sour in large part because Shep was a ladies' man and a smooth operator, consistently leaving Kay in the lurch. However, she was never able to finalize the divorce before the war.

Kay is in Japan as part of a group called the CATs, the Civilian Actress Technicians, a group set up by the Army to provide entertainment, but not quite the way the USO did. Instead, the CATs looked for talent within the members of the armed forces, and trained them to put on shows themselves. Kay having been an enertainer stateside, this is the perfect sort of service for her, and would have kept her far away from Shep, or so she thought. What bad luck running into him here.

But there are servicemen stationed in lots of places in Japan, and the army is looking at putting on some shows over in the Kyoto area in the west of Japan. They just need some volunteer CATs. Kay, wanting to get away from Shep again, volunteers, going with her friend Billie (Benay Venuta). At the base where she ends up, she's consistently told nobody can spare men to put on a show, at least until Capt. Comstock (Dale Robertson) sees her. She's so good looking that of course he's willing to let his men do the show just so he can keep her close by. One of his men has natural talent, but that man, PFC Stanley Poppoplis (Danny Thomas) is stuck doing KP. Will he get discovered by Kay?

Unsurprisingly, Shep finds out that Kay has run off to Kyoto, so he follows her out there, making up a story that he's been transferred to Kyoto. He even gets himself put in the show, what with being a more natural performer than any of the regular servicemen. But his story is a lie, and he when he goes back to Tokyo, he finds that the boat that was supposed to take him back to the States to be demobbed has already sailed, leaving him technically AWOL.

And that's part of where all the problems I had with Call Me Mister are. Dan Dailey worked well with Betty Grable, but in Call Me Mister he's being asked to play a character that's more like the sort of schmoozer Jack Carson was playing over at Warner Bros. If the Shep character were a supporting character and not supposed to end up with the leading lady at the end, it might work. But here, we're rooting against Shep until the orders from above that you know are going to come to reunite Shep and Kay as well as to satisfy the Production Code.

The 1951 release date that I mentioned also doesn't help. Fox had made a number of good morale-boosting musicals during World War II, and then followed that up after the war by making nostalgic musicals set a generation or two before the release date. This one, however, is only set five years or so before the release, so the old-fashioned pre-war style (musical numbers staged by Busby Berkeley) really make the film seem old-fashioned in a bad way. The movie isn't a period piece, but gives off vibes of being dated.

In many ways, that's a shame, since Grable is always appealing, and Danny Thomas does quite well relatively early in his career. There are also one or two good numbers, with "Goin' Home Train" probably being the best of them. So give Call Me Mister a chance, even though it's decidedly not the best movie from any of the people involved.

How to be very, very unfunny

Another of the movies that recently started showing up in the FXM rotation is How to Be Very, Very, Popular. It's going to be on again tomorrow at 8:10 AM, so I recently sat down to watch it and do a report on it here.

Stormy Tornado (Betty Grable) and Curly Flagg (Sheree North) are burlesque dancers at a club in San Francisco. One night, at the show, another of the dancers in another act is shot dead by a bald guy. Stormy and Curly, having witnessed the murder and knowing that they will be held against their will as material witnesses, decide that the best thing to do is skip town.

Unfortunately, they don't have very much money, so they're forced to get off in the town of "College City" not too far away, and home to Bristol College. Also unfortunate for them is that they've already been spotted, and the police back in San Francisco, as well as the killer, are going to be making their way to College City fairly soon.

The two women are not just broke, but cold and hungry. And unbeknownst to them, they've wound up right outside one of the men's fraternity dorms. So when they go in to try to get food, they wind up in a place that's not supposed to have any women in it other than house mother Miss Sylvester (Alice Pearce).

And a wacky group of students it is. There's Fillmore Wedgewood (Bob Cummings), a forty-something who has learned that he can keep living off of his grandfather's trust fund as long as he's still studying. Also there's Eddie Jones (Tommy Noonan), who attended a lecture on hypnosis and is trying to hypnotize his friend Toby Marshall (Orson Bean), a former student at the college who was expelled for his poor grades. However, Toby's father B.J. (Fred Clark) is one of the college's wealthiest donors, having spend the past few years attending to business in the Middle East, and doesn't know his son has been expelled, instead expecting to see Toby graduate tomorrow.

One thing that's obvious is that Eddie's hypnosis isn't going to work on Toby, but it will work on somebody else; that somebody just happens to be Curly. Stormy has also gotten in touch with Curly's father (Rhys Williams), who is planning to come get his daughter. He, like Toby's father, is bald, which as you'll already have figured out is going to play into the plot since the murderer is bald.

It all goes on like this for 90 minutes, always being tediously unfunny and cringeworthy. I don't know what audiences in the 1950s saw in Tommy Noonan, since he's been the obnoxious half of his comedy team with Peter Marshal in everything I've seen him in. Even though Cummings is supposed to be playing an overage student, he looks way too old even for that. Ditto Betty Grable, who is in her final movie. Apparently, the role Sheree North took was originally conceived for Marilyn Monroe, which is why North looks and sounds the way she does.

The only positive thing about the showing is that FXM left the movie in the original Cinemascope aspect ratio. But simply having widescreen is never going to be enough to overcome a myriad of flaws.

Coney Island

I think I mentioned the other day when I blogged about Strike Up the Band that it would have benefited from being in color the way that a lot of the Fox musicals of the 1940s were. In fact, one of Fox's musicals with a mediocre plot but some rousing music is coming up in the FXM rotation: Coney Island, tomorrow at 6:00 AM.

George Montgomery plays Eddie Johnson. He comes in to Joe Rocco's (Cesar Romero) joint on the Coney Island midway one day around 1900, looking for Joe. Apparently, the two knew each other for many years, but some time in the past the two got involved in a poker game where Eddie feels Joe cheated him out of a large sum of money. Joe is obviously pretty successful now with this place, and Eddie wants payback.

Joe unsurprisingly says "hell no", leading Eddie to start a place of his own with his new Coney Island friend Frankie (Phil Silvers) that purports to have a Turkish attraction. And then, to try to take business away from Joe, Eddie has another friend Finnigan (Charles Winninger) to make a fals claim that Joe's bartender has a contagious disease. Joe tries to turn the tables on Eddie by coming up with a similar sort of BS story.

Eventually, Eddie creates the story that will make him a partner in Joe's business. Finnigan suffers a concussion in a fight at Joe's place, and Eddie and Frankie send Finnigan off to Atlantic City to recover, claiming to everybody else that Finnigan actually died, implying that Joe is guilty of manslaughter. Joe falls for the blackmail, and Eddie is in Joe's business.

It's here that the star of the proceedings, Betty Grable, really becomes the key player. She plays Kate Farley, who always been the singer at Joe's place, singing with a brassy music-hall style. It's good for the working-class types who would come to Coney Island. But Eddie thinks that Kate could do so much better, and basically forces Kate to sing the sort of arrangements Eddie thinks she should be doing, never mind what Kate thinks. Eddie also falls for Kate romantically, even though it's strongly implied that Joe has held a flame for her for however long she's been the singer at his place. Based on the billing, you might guess the two end up together, but considering how nasty is to Kate and how he consistently tries to destroy any of her desires to shape her own career, you have to wonder what she'd see in Eddie. (To be fair, for most of the movie she resists him.)

Joe has the chance to get Kate the featured role in a show for a big Broadway type, but Eddie blocks that by taking Kate on a date on the evening of what is supposed to be the live show audition, not telling her what he's done. It takes Joe a little time to figure out what Eddie's really doing, but then things speed up when Finnigan returns from his sojourn in Atlantic City. Joe decides that he's going to frustrate any chance Eddie might have of having happiness with Kate.

But the real point of Coney Island is to watch Betty Grable perform, not to see the Machiavellian maneuvering between the Joe and Eddie characters. To that end, the producers at Fox had her sing any number of period songs. "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" isn't my favorite, while Grable does well with "Cuddle Up a Little Closer". But the producers also brought in songwriters to write some new songs, and make some very energetic dance numbers. These all work quite well for anybody who likes musicals, especially the more nostalgic Fox musicals. Phil Silvers even gets to sing a humorous song when he finds that Finnigan has returned and is telling Eddie to take the money and run.

If you like musicals, then I think you'll really like Coney Island. If you also want a good story, I think you'd do better with some of Fox's other musicals, such as the musical biopics or the ones dealing more with World War II.

Give Me a Sailor

I had a movie set to blog about today, but it turns out that it's not back on TV until next Tuesday, so I had to look through what I've watched recently but haven't blogged about. With that in mind, I picked another movie off my Bob Hope box set, Give Me a Sailor.

The plot to this one is relatively simple. Hope plays Jim Brewster, one of a pair of brothers together with Walter (Jack Whiting) who are serving in the navy together on the same ship. The ship is about to get into port, and Walter informs Jim that he's finally going to ask Nancy (Betty Grable) to marry him.

That's no big deal, except that Jim is also in love with Nancy. Jim's obviously known about Walter's feelings for Nancy, as he has a contingency plan for this: he sends Nancy's sister Letty (Martha Raye) a coded message telling her about it and to do something to break up the impending marriage! What a nice guy.

Of course, you can probably figure out fairly early in that Letty is really the right one for Jim. But it's going to take a little while for Jim and Letty to figure this out, much to Letty's consternation, as she has to bear the brunt of Jim's schemes to separate Walter and Nancy that don't work. Letty, for her part, would prefer Walter (spare a thought for her when you consider that neither of the brothers wants her).

It's all a pleasant enough B movie, and you can see why Paramount would have plans for Bob Hope and Martha Raye. But it's also not without some serious problems. One is when we first meet Letty, who's making a cake for the two sailors' return home. She's accosted by an obnoxious young cousin Ethel who frankly should have been smacked like Jane Withers at the end of Bright Eyes. There's also a subplot about Letty's legs -- not Nancy's, which is humorous when you consider that Grable would be the pin-up girl in World War II -- and a contest that doesn't work.

Bob Hope and Martha Raye have both been in my opinion acquired tastes, and while Raye generally works, Hope often strays a bit too close to the Woody Allen nebbishness we'd see 30 years later. He's not nearly as likeable as Raye here, but would fortunately get better material.

The box set is relatively cheap considering how many movies you're getting, so if you don't like this one there's probably something else on the set that you'll like.

Mother Wore Tights

A movie that's been running in the FXM rotation recently is Mother Wore Tights. It's going to be on FXM again tomorrow at 11:00 AM and Tuesday at 9:20 AM.

Betty Grable plays Myrtle McKinley, the "Mother" of the title, since we see her at the opening retired with her husband and some voiceover from one of the daughters (voiceover provided by Anne Baxter). Flashback to about 1900, when Myrtle was graduating from high school in Oakland, CA, and showing she already had some musical talent.

Myrtle and a couple of her friends head off to San Francisco to start their working lives. One of the friends has a brother who works the box office at the local "opera house" (which was just as much a venue for hosting vaudeville in those days), and apparently told his sister that he could get her a free admission. So all three girls try to get free admission together!

Of course, this draws the attention of the owner/show producer (William Frawley in a one-scene part), and the brother says that these three young women were really there to try out as chorus girls! The producer calls his bluff, and when the three young women go upstairs, Myrtle is the only one not horrified by the request to show the producer their legs. So she's in the show.

It's there that she meets Frank Burt (Dan Dailey), who does a single but who we know is just right for Myrtle, especially since we saw the two of them together before the flashback. But it's going to take a reel or two before they finally wind up together, with Myrtle briefly going on a road show in Los Angeles. Eventually they do wind up together, both on stage and married.

Myrtle has to retire when she gets pregnant, although this being a Code-era movie it's fun to see how they try to get around saying the word "pregnant". Eventually Myrtle has two girls: Iris (who as a young adult will be played by Mona Freeman) and Mikey (Connie Marshall). Mother and the two daughters live with Grandma (Sara Allgood), at least until Frank needs a new partner for his act.

The kids start to grow up, and on one family vacation they go to a resort that's incredibly boring for everybody, except Iris once she meets Bob. She's got a boyfriend now, but there is one catch: Bob's parents are wealthy Wall Street types, and Iris is worried about what everybody is going to think when they find out that she's got parents who perform on the stage. This even after Mom and Dad sends the kids to a boarding school close to where Bob is going to Harvard.

Mother Wore Tights is the first pairing of Betty Grable and Dan Dailey, and it's typical of the sort of movie the two would make as well as the sort of nostalgic musical that Fox was putting out in the 1940s. It's amiable entertainment, with Technicolor that probably could use a restoration, and an undemanding plot. There's nothing really wrong with the movie, but also nothing that will make it stand out against any of the other Fox musicals. I can't help but think there would have been something more interesting if the movie had Mothra wearing tights, or if Betty Grable had been paired with noir heavy Dan Duryea instead of Dan Dailey.

Still, if you want to sit down and watch with something that's just going to entertain you, you could do a lot worse than to watch Mother Wore Tights. In addition to the FXM showings, it got a DVD release courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme.

Heaven of Color

While starting to fill up my new DVR with movies to post about here, I actually watched one or two as they were actually airing, the horror. One of those movies was the Fox musical My Blue Heaven.

Betty Grable plays Kitty Moran, happily married to Jack (Dan Dailey). They're an entertainment couple that started in vaudeville and worked their way up into radio, where they've been fairly successful. That's about to change, as Kitty has found out she's pregnant! It's a happy occasion, at least for a little while. What makes it less happy is that as the two celebrate one evening, Kitty is the designated driver since she's not drinking during pregnancy and Jack is more than happy to drink for himself, Kitty, and the baby. But while driving on Fox's backlot, Kitty immediately gets in a car accident.

She's going to be OK, but the baby isn't. And her uterus probably isn't going to be OK either, since the doctors tell her she's likely never going to be able to have children. Unsurprisingly she's extremely unhappy about it. But the couple has friends the Pringles (David Wayne and Jane Wyatt), who have adopted three of their six children, and they suggest to the Morans that adoption is a good option.

So they do go to an agency, where they find a frankly nasty boss who doesn't like entertainers, thinking they never have time to take care of the children properly. It's nonsense because a successful couple, whether on radio or heading to the then-new medium of television to which Jack decides to decamp on the grounds that it's wide open, would have the money to hire help, and because the schedule doesn't have to be that much worse than your typical 9-5 job. Jack and Kitty aren't helped either by the fact that the Pringles organize a big party when the Morans finally get the baby. You'd think they would have known that the head of the agency wouldn't like such a loud party. So the head of the agency takes the baby back right then and there.

Mr. Pringle's next idea is to go through with what seems like a rather skeezy private adoption, which is presented almost as if the Morans are just buying their baby. But they get their baby. Kitty takes maternity leave to look after the baby, and her understudy Gloria (Mitzi Gaynor) starts putting the moves on Jack! Further problems arise when Kitty decides to go back to work and confront Gloria, and the mother who gave up her baby for adoption gets second thoughts.

My Blue Heaven is a movie that takes a bunch of nice ideas and puts them together in a way that's unfortunately less than the sum of its parts. I think a large part of it is due to the talents of Grable and Dailey. They were a nice screen couple, and suited to the sort of musical Fox was making in the 1940s, but in this one, there's enough of a plot that it didn't need to have musical numbers. It does, and practically every one of them makes the movie come to a screeching halt. I also found several of the plot points logic-defying.

Still, the performances are nice, and it's an amiable enough movie. It's just not one of Grable's greats. It's available on a Betty Grable box set, so you may like some of the other movies on the set as well. Note that there's a 1990 movie also titled My Blue Heaven, starring Steve Martin and telling an entirely different story.

Die Frau im Hermelin

A few weeks back FXM Retro ran That Lady in Ermine. It's available from Fox's MOD scheme both as a standalone movie, and as part of a three-movie Betty Grable box set.

Countess Angelina (Grable), is the countess leading the principality of Bergamo in 1861. (There is a real Bergamo in Italy, but I think this Bergamo is supposed to be unrelated.) One morning she gets married to Count Mario (Cesar Romero). That night, Hungarians, led by Colonel Teglas (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) invade Bergamo, and are on the verge of overrunning the palace. This causes Mario to flee, and Teglas and his men eventually occupy the palace.

The isn't the first time the Hungarians have invaded. It happened 300 years ago, when Angelina's ancestor Francesca was running the place. Francesca looks amazingly like Angelina, as we can see from a portrait in the palace's entrance hall, which contains a bunch of other portraits of similar heroes from 1561. And then all of the figures in the other portraits come to life and implore Francesca to do something to save Bergamo!

Thankfully Teglas is taken by the exotic portrait of Francesca, as she's wearing a much too modern ermine and is also barefoot. And he gets the impression that Francesca is watching him. When he sees Angelina and realizes that Angelina and Francesca are dead ringers for each other (unsurprising since Francesca is also played by Grable), Teglas falls in love with Angelina. But she still has her husband to think of. And Teglas looks surprisingly like the Hungarian duke who invaded back in 1561....

It goes on like this, with Francesca putting ideas in Teglas' head without Teglas necessarily realizing it's Francesca he's dealing with, and Angelina figuring out how to deal with Teglas without being unfaithful to Mario. Meanwhile, we know that Teglas and Angelina are right for each other, but how are they going to satisfy the Production Code?

That Lady in Ermine is a mess for a whole bunch of reasons. The plot is muddled in no small part because of the Production Code. But the far bigger problem is with the direction. Fox hired Ernst Lubitsch to direct, and Lubitsch had the unmitigated chutzpah to suffer a fatal heart attack eight days into production. So Fox did the best the could and brought in the one director who could imitate the "Lubitsch touch": Otto Preminger. (Quentin Tarantino had not yet been born, so he was clearly unavailable.) You'd think they would have learned their lesson when Preminger had already been brought in to replace Lubitsch on A Royal Scandal after Lubitsch fell ill. That's another movie that's a mess because of the direction. The result is a movie that feels like it's had all the fun sucked out of it.

Interestingly, this is one of the rare occasions when a lot of the reviews I've read agree with my finding the movie a mess. But still, you should always judge for yourself. I don't think it's coming up on FXM in the next couple of weeks, but as I said it is available and in print on DVD.

Down Argentine Way

For some reason, I thought Down Argentine Way was available on DVD courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme. It's not as far as I can tell, but it turns out there is a standalone DVD that's probably out of print because you can get it at Amazon but not the TCM Shop. Amazon also does the streaming video thing, and there's also a four-film Betty Grable set that is apparently in print, as it's available from both Amazon and the TCM Shop.

Although the movie is in a Betty Grable box set, it's actually Don Ameche who gets top billing and shows up first. He's Ricardo Quintana, an Argentine and son of Don Diego, a wealthy horse breeder. Don Diego is looking to sell some of his horses in the US, and sends Ricardo there to handle the sales. Get the highest price, but with one caveat: don't sell to Willis Crawford (Edward Fielding), who apparently screwed Don Diego over while the two were at boarding school in Paris ages ago, or any member of his family.

While in America, Ricardo meets the beautiful Glenda (Betty Grable). He falls in love with her, and she with him, as well as with one of the horses he's selling. However, there's one catch. Glenda's last name is Crawford: she's Willis' daughter. No sale.

Glenda is determined to get that horse, and frankly determined to get Ricardo as well, so she follows Ricardo back to Argentina, accompanied by her aunt Binnie (Charlotte Greenwood). The usual complications ensue. One further complication is that Don Diego's horses only do show-jumping, ever since one of his beloved horses died in a flat track race 15 years earlier. Ricardo and Glenda decide to train Don Diego's current favorite for the big flat track race.

The plot of Down Argentine Way is silly and predictable, and you know where it's going. But there are still good reasons to watch it. Charlotte Greenwood provided support in several Fox musicals of the 1940s, notably this one and The Gang's All Here, and she's got a great high kick for musical numbers and pretty good comic timing. More noteworthy would be the Hollywood debut of Carmen Miranda. She was still under contract at a New York nightclub at the time of production, so Fox had to film her scenes in New York and then splice them into the movie. That's probably why she only shows up as a musical performer, with just two or three songs. The one you'll most recognize is "South American Way", which is sung by the two daughters in Mildred Pierce as well.

Also appearing for the musical numbers are the Nicholas brothers, doing one of their dance routines including cringe-inducing splits for those of us who aren't quite as flexible as the brothers. Since they were black, the numbers have fairly obvious cutting points where exhibitors in the South could snip to remove the scene so that white audiences wouldn't have to see it.

To be honest, there's nothing in Down Argentine Way that movie buffs haven't seen in any number of other movies. But it's still solid entertainment, and anybody who likes the early 1940s musicals or romance movies will certainly enjoy it.

The Dolly Sisters

So I watched The Dolly Sisters on FXM Retro this morning in order to do a blog post on it seeing as it's going to be on again tomorrow morning at 7:35 AM.

Jenny (Betty Grable) and Rosie (June Haver) Dolly were real-life twin sisters born in Hungary in 1892. They emigrated to the US with their parents at about the age of 13; the first change in the movie is that they emigrate with their uncle Letsie (S.Z. Sakall). The two have talent which they immediately show off by dancing to one of Liszt's Hungarian dances. Fast forward to 1912, and they're still dancing but getting nowhere. But their uncle and booking manager (Sig Ruman) get them a job up in Elmira, which ultimately leads to bigger things.

On the train to Elmira, they meet a nice young man Harry Fox (John Payne) who, as it turns out, is also going to Elmira to perform at the vaudeville hall there. In real life, Harry was a real person and Jenny's dance partner; in the movie, this has been changed into a singer-songwriter presumably to allow for the inclusion of more songs into the movie. Harry and Jenny immediately fall in love, and that's going to set the dramatic conflict for the rest of the movie. The Dolly Sisters are a sister act, and there's no room in a sister act for a man, at least not according to Rosie and Letsie. Jenny loves her sister and the sister act, but also loves Harry.

The conflict goes on like this. Jenny and Harry part ways for a while during which time the sisters eventually become big. And then Harry runs into Jenny again and she makes him a hit with the song "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows"; the two finally get married. But there's the lure of the stage and a big engagement in Paris for the sisters, while Harry winds up enlisting once the US joins World War I. After the war, Harry wants Jenny to return to the States with him, while Rosie meets a department store magnate Irving Netcher (another real person, played by Frank Latimore). He loves her, but she's still not ready to dtich the sister act.

What eventually does break up the sister act is that Irving gives Rosie an ultimatum, while Jenny decides to run off with the first man she meets. Technically, it's a duke who's been chasing her for some time (Reginald Gardiner). While eloping to marry, Jenny gets in a serious car accident (again, something that happened in real life).

The Dolly Sisters is the sort of movie that people who enjoy the Fox musicals of the 1940s will love. Everybody does a good enough job here, although the production values aren't quite as high as you get from an MGM musical. The plot is nothing new (indeed, I was reminded of Alexander's Ragtime Band by the end), although it's in service of all those musical numbers which take the bulk of the running time. Some of the numbers are odd, such as one dedicated to cosmetics.

What I found far more interesting is reading up on the Dolly sisters afterward to see how Fox changed details of their lives to make for a Hollywood story. In real life, Jenny and Harry did get a divorce and that was that; there's a coda in the movie to make for a Hollywood ending. Far more fascinating is that Hollywood completely overlooked the fact that Rosie got married just one year after Jenny, and that they kept their careers going while being married. Indeed, the movie portrays Irving as the only man in Rosie's life. In real life he wasn't in the picture until after the Dollys' retirement.

The Dolly Sisters is a well-made movie and certainly worth a watch. And there is a Betty Grable box set available for purchase on both Amazon and the TCM Shop that has the movie. But it's not quite a true story.