Dulcy

I've mentioned when I reviewed a movie like The Owl and the Pussycat how there are certain characters who are just so obnoxious that the character would be better as the victim in a murder mystery. I couldn't help but have the same thoughts as I was watching the movie Dulcy.

Dulcy, played by Ann Sothern, is Dulcy Ward, the kid sister of Bill Ward (Dan Dailey, credited here as Dan Dailey Jr.). We don't see their parents, but presumably the parents left them loaded since they've got a big New York place, servants, and a place on a lakeside island up in the mountains. In any case, it's Bill we see first, trying to take a shower in the morning but being foiled by Dulcy's having tried to "fix" the boiler, a fix that only makes things worse. And, as we'll see over the course of the movie, it's not the only thing Dulcy makes worse.

Bill works in advertising, seemingly running his own agency. This has enabled him to meet lovely young Angela Forbes (Lynne Carver), daughter of an aircraft executive Roger (Roland). Indeed, Bill is engaged to Angela and is about to meet the family as they (Mrs. Forbes is played by Billie Burke) return from a transatlantic cruise. (The movie was released in 1940, by which time Europe was already at war again, but is based on a play by George S. Kaufman from before he met either Edna Ferber or Moss Hart.) Also on the boat is inventor Gordon Daly (Ian Hunter).

Gordon is working on a new sort of aircraft engins that probably violated the laws of physics, but is in some ways just a macguffin for Gordon to be able to meet the Forbes family as part of Dulcy's creating all sorts of complications. As you might guess, Dulcy sees Gordon's invention and thinks that Mr. Forbes would be the perfect person to talk to since Gordon needs venture capital. You might also guess that Dulcy is going to fall in love with Gordon along the way.

Now, that island vacation home I mentioned earlier comes into play. Bill is hoping to win Roger's approval for the marriage by inviting the Forbes family for a vacation there. Dulcy, of course, screws things up first by driving the boat to the island like a maniac. Then, she schemes to get Gordon onto the island with his invention so that he can have a chat with Forbes to try to get him to back the new engine. This, unsurprisingly, doesn't go well at first.

Further complicating matters is one Schuyler van Dyke (Reginald Patterson). He's the not-quite-sane brother of a wealthy man, taking his brother's plane for a flight and crashing it into the lake thinking it's a sea-plane and not a land plane. He also claims to be rich, so when he hears about the new engine he starts acting like a big shot investor and offers to get in on the plan in a way that would screw up what Forbes could do if he wanted.

Now, in a movie like Dulcy, she's supposed to be a sympathetic character despite her screwing everything up; also, everything is supposed to come out right in the end. Now, that latter half is in fact the case. But I found Dulcy to be so obnoxious that it made the movie difficult to watch. Somebody should have smacked her upside the head, or at least done what Bette Davis does to Miriam Hopkins at the end of Old Acquaintance. But no, that doesn't happen here at all. Then again, the original play was first staged in 1921, and audiences of the early 1920s may have enjoyed such a character a lot more than I did.

Sadly not a drama

Another of the movies that I recorded and was getting close to expiring from the DVR was the later Gene Kelly musical It's Always Fair Weather. It's on TCM tomorrow, Mar. 3, at 10:00 AM, so I've watched it in order to be able to put up this review.

The movie starts off with an introductory sequence set at the end of World War II. Soldiers are being demobbed, and three of them are spending their first day back on American soil at a bar in New York: Ted Riley (Gene Kelly), would-be artist Doug Hallerton (Dan Dailey), and Angelo Valentine (Michael Kidd). They have way too much to drink and go on a drunken dance sequence, this being a Gene Kelly musical after all. At the end of the day, the three "best friends" who made their way through Europe together vow that they'll meet at the same bar ten years from now, or October 11, 1955.

To remember this vow, each of them takes a third of a one-dollar bill and writes the date one it, so sure enough, when the main action of the film opens up on October 11, 1955 (oddly enough about a month after the film was released), they all see that they have a reminder of the day. Doug wanted to go back to Europe to become the great American artist, but wound up using his art skills to go into the more lucrative field of advertising. He's based out of Chicago, where he's in an unhappy marriage, but created the ad campaign for a New York-based slice-of-life show hosted by Madline Bradville (Dolores Gray), so he was going to be in New York anyway and shows up at the bar.

Angie had been hoping to become a quality chef, but life didn't work out that way for him either. Instead, he got married (and as far as we can tell is happily married) running the sort of hamburger joint up in Schenectady that Thelma Ritter ran in The Mating Season. And as for Ted, he's a native New York who had been hoping to become a lawyer and marry his sweetheart. However, in the opening scene on October 11, 1945, he's learned that that sweetheart couldn't wait for Ted to come home and married another man, leaving Ted embittered. Instead of becoming a lawyer, he got into the fight game, training a second-class boxer who probably had pretentions of greatness at one point but is now being asked to take a dive.

Doug has an expense account, so he offers to take his two old friends to a swanky restaurant where the three find out that they really have nothing in common other than their service in the war. Ted and Doug think Angie is a hick; Ted and Angie find Doug snobbis; and Doug and Angie see Ted's act as kind of scammy, which in many ways it is. Especially when they run into some of the staff from the show who are having a business meeting in the same restaurant. This includes segment producer Jackie Leighton (Cyd Charisse), on whom Ted immediately starts putting the moves, only to discover she's much too smart for that stuff.

Except that there's a bit of a problem, which is that the show goes live, and the subject for the show's "surprise" segment won't be able to do it. So Jackie figures a surprise segment of having the three soldiers appear together on live TV for their 10th anniversary reunion would be a great thing. Except that she doesn't quite realize that the three men, having met each other, don't really want to see each other any more. So they're going to have to engage in some minor deception to make the reunion work. Meanwhile, Jacke and Ted learn about the fixed fight, which gives some extra motivation to what goes on later that evening.

It's Always Fair Weather is another of those movies with a really good premise, that unfortunately doesn't quite work in the execution. For me, I think that's for a different reason than a lot of the other reviewers I've read. Everybody else loves the Gene Kelly dance numbers, but I found myself thinking that this is the sort of plot that shouldn't have been set to the genre constraints of a musical. It's the sort of thing that could be a drama, either serious or somewhat lighter considering the finale is clearly being played for its comic effect.

Frank Morgan Star Vehicle?

Back in the day, the studios had access to a whole bunch of great character actors, most of whom weren't necessarily right for leading roles, at least not in the sort of prestige movies the studios put their stars in. Some of the character actors, when they did get leads, did so in B movies. Such is the case with Frank Morgan, around whom the movie Hullabaloo seems to have been designed.

Morgan plays Frank Merriweather, and as the movie opens he roaming the halls of radio station AJN looking for the talent department, as he's got a record he just knows will impress the talent scout types. But they've got enough auditions for the day, cut to bellhop Charles Holland and Virginia O'Brien of the deadpan singing routine both doing their own versions of "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny". This is really an opportunity for golfer Bob Strong (a young Dan Dailey, so young he's credited as Dan Dailey Jr.) to be introduced to the story. He's the boyfriend of Wilma Norton, daughter of one of the radio executives, who only has the job beause Wilma realizes this isn't the era where being the wife of a golf pro isn't a high-status position.

Also at the auditions, although not getting one, is Laura Merriweather (Virginia Grey), who styles herself a dancing singer, which doesn't make good radio. She tries to introduce herself to Bob, which makes Bob's fiancée jealous and basically scuppers any chance she has of getting a job. It's here that she meets Frank, who happens to be her father. He doesn't recognize her in part because he's got three ex-wives whom he hasn't seen in years because he's been trying to avoid the alimony that he doesn't have the money to pay. Together, the two go back to see Strong, who learns that Frank's talent is voice impressions. This gets him a job doing a version of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds, at which he's so good that he sets off a national panic.

This also brings all three ex-wives out of the woodwork (Billie Burke, Sara Haden, and Connie Gilchrist). Frank also fathered one child by each wife; the other two children are played by Leni Lynn and Larry Nunn. Frank needs to be able to pay off that alimoney, so all of the kids and even the ex-wives have a stake in getting Frank a job in radio. The kids, for their part, also have talent. Meanwhile, Bob has the difficult task of getting the Perkins pill company, led by Clyde (Donald Meeks) and his sister-in-law Lulu (Nydia Westman), to sponsor a new program for the network. Perhaps Frank would be a good fit for such a program. There are also all sorts of romantic complications along the way. Meanwhile, in a bit of cross-promotion for MGM, one of the episodes of the radio show has Frank doing a rendition of a scene from the then-current movie Boom Town, which Frank theoretically supplying the voices although in fact Frank Morgan was simply lip-synching to the real-life stars of the movie.

There's a fun idea behind Hullabaloo, although it's at the same time easy enough to see why MGM would only have this as a B movie and why it's not so well remembered today. Frank Morgan shows he's got talent, although he's not really a fit for lead acting. Giving audiences another chance to see a lot of routines, they way they would have in two-reelers, would have been another plus for MGM. Charles Holland, the black singer playing the bellhop, has quite a bit of talent as a singer but since this was 1940 it's obvious why he's not more famous. Virginia O'Brien's deadpan thing can be funny although I can understand why it might be an acquired taste to audiences in 2025.

Ultimately, Hullabaloo is a bit more of a time capsule than a fully coherent movie. But it's an interesting little time capsule.

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.

Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man

Another of the movies that's been back in the FXM rotation over the past couple of months is Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man. It's going to be on FXM again, tomorrow (June 21) at 6:00 AM, so I'm mentioning it now.

As you can probably guess from the title, the movie is based on works by writer Ernest Hemingway. Specifically, it's the Nick Adams stories, which I don't think I've actually read although as I understand it they're loosely based on some of Hemingway's own experiences. After all, they always tell starting writers to write what you know about. Nick Adams (Richard Beymer) is a young man of about 20 circa 1916 living with his parents, Dr. Henry (Arthur Kennedy) and Helen (Jessica Tandy) in a small town in northern Michigan. Mom runs the family and is frankly dominating, trying to force Nick into a marriage to nice local girl Carolyn (Diane Baker) and henpecking Dad. Nick has had enough of it, so after a bender one night with his friend George (Michael J. Pollard), he decides he's going to run off and grow up.

Nick tries to ride the rails, but gets knocked off by another man, ending up in the countryside where he makes the acquaintance of a man nicknamed the Battler (Paul Newman). The Battler was a boxer back in the day, but as with Anthony Quinn's character in Requiem for a Heavyweight, he's obviously taken a few punches too many and isn't good for anything. The Battler has a trainer in the form of Bugs (Juano Hernandez). Unfortunately, while Bugs doesn't dislike Nick, he realizes that the Battler needs to be kept away from everybody, so Bugs ultimately sends Nick on his way.

Nick ends up in another small town where he meets the chronically drunk Billy Campbell (Dan Dailey). Billy's job is to put up posters advertising the burlesque show run by Mr. Turner (Fred Clark), only to leave for the next town before Turner shows up to find Billy drunk and try to get Billy into rehab (or "taking the cure", as they called it back in the day). Ultimately neither Billy nor Turner is ultimately a bad person, but they're just incompatible and Billy really doesn't want to deal with his boss' hectoring him about his drinking. Billy and Nick sleep in late one day, not getting out of town before Turner shows up.

Since Nick hasn't been able to do much in life so far, he thinks about giving up, wiring Dad for the money for a ticket home (James Dunn plays the telegrapher). But just before the telegraph gets sent, Nick decides that no, he doesn't want to go home, and goes to New York City, where he thinks he can get a job writing for a newspaper even though he's never done this before. The editor tells him to come back when he gets experience. He then does some odd jobs, ultimately working as a busboy/waiter who is serving an Italian-American effort to raise money for the war effort in Italy, the Great War going on and the US not yet being involved in the war.

Nick signs up to become an ambulance driver in Italy, even though again he's got no experience and can't speak a word of Italian, qualities which understandably vex his commanding officer, Maj. Padula (Ricardo Montalban). Nick gets paired with another American, John (Eli Wallach), and actually does a fairly good job as an ambulance driver. But a bombing campaign leaves him badly injured and sent to a hospital in Verona, where he meets Rossana (Susan Strasberg), a nurse who takes care of him and with whom he falls in love.

Some people are going to like Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man, but I had three substantial problems with it. First off was the episodic nature of the story, although that's the smallest of the problems. There are a lot of people in the movie, but for the most part they come and go and you can't really get that invested in them. Secondly, the movie runs at a very leisurely pace, ultimately lasting 145 minutes. Boy does it feel slow at times.

But the biggest problem was with the casting of Richard Beymer as Nick Adams. To me he just didn't have the charisma to pull off the role. Most of the supporting players do well with their roles, drawing an even sharper contrast with the bland Beymer just walking through his part.

I'm not certain whether fans of Hemingway will enjoy seeing the Nick Adams stories put on film, or feel that Hemingway has been butchered and dislike the movie as a result. In either case, watch and draw your own conclusions.

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.