I think we can guess who the beauty is

Red Skelton was TCM's Star of the Month back in 2025, and I recorded several of his movies. I don't think I got around to watching all of them before they expired, but since he worked at MGM his movies show up often enough on TCM. One such film is the star-making turn for Esther Williams: Bathing Beauty.

Bathing Beauty was made when Red Skelton was still the bigger star, so we get him first in the credits and the story is more about his character. Skelton plays Steve Elliot, a Los Angeles-based songwriter about to get married to college swimming instructor Caroline Brooks (that's Esther Williams, as if you couldn't tell). Steve talks to Caroline about starting a new life after getting married and finishing up his current job of writing a musical for producer George Adams (Basil Rathbone). George is none too happy about this, so he comes up with a way to scupper the marriage by claiming that Steve is already married to somebody else and producing that fake wife. With that, Caroline leaves him and goes back to her college back on the other coast.

Unsurprisingly, Steve wants to put things right, and follows her back to the college in New Jersey where she teaches, accompanied by singer Carlos Ramirez, who is clearly only in the script because the movie was made in early 1944 during the "Good Neighbor" policy with Latin America. However, the two men are blocked from entering campus because Caroline teaches at an all-girls' school. But this is a comedy, so we have to have a way for Steve and Caroline to end up in close proximity under odd circumstances. That happens when Steve meets one of the trustees and learns that the charter hasn't officially delared the college an all-girls' school. So Steve tries to enroll and, since the trustees can't legally stop him, come up with a way to admit him but with a plan to get him expelled for demerits.

Much of the rest of the movie deals with Steve's attempts to get back to Caroline, who is also being pursued by a botany professor Willis (Bill Goodwin), along with the comic predicaments the only male student at an all-girls' school is bound to get himself into. One such involves Steve's having to do ballet, in a skit that Skelton would reuse in the movie The Clown. There's also a whole bunch of musical numbers, including Harry James and his orchestra, along with Xavier Cugat and his orchestra. Oh, there's that Good Neighbor policy again. As you might guess with a movie like this, the film climaxes with an aquacade, along with Steve and Caroline winding up together at the end of the movie.

Bathing Beauty is one of those movies that was made in part as a morale-booster; indeed, the movie ends with a card mentioning that movies like this were also being sent overseas to entertain the troops who were off fighting the war against Germany and Japan. As such, the plot doesn't particularly matter here. Don't try to pay too close attention to the plot because that's not the point. Instead, the movie is more about the musical numbers along with the final big swimming number, along with Skelton's comic antics. The Technicolor is vibrant here, especially for that final aquacade. It's easy to see watching Bathing Beauty why it was a box office hit and the sort of movie that would get sent abroad to cheer up the troops.

If you're interested in Hollywood history, Bathing Beauty is a good entry into the phenomenon that was Esther Williams.

Ann-Margret is 85!

Today marks the 85th birthday of actress Ann-Margret, who was born in Sweden but became an American citizen before the age of 10. TCM is honoring the occasion with four of her movies:

8:00 PM Bye Bye Birdie
10:00 PM The Cincinnati Kid
midnight Once a Thief
2:00 AM Made in Paris

I haven't seen Made in Paris, so I'm planning to record that. However, I had Bye Bye Birdie on my DVR, so I watched that in order to write up a post on it for tonight's airing. Bye Bye Birdie is, of course, based on a musical, and before that, derived from an idea that a Brodway writer had when popular singer Elvis Presley was drafted into the Army.

Jesse Pearson plays Conrad Birdie, a singer popular with the teenaged girls because of his sex appeal who gets drafted into the army, causing an uproar amongst the girls of America. Songwriter Albert Pearson (Dick Van Dyke), hearing about the story, hopes he can write up a song quickly for Conrad to sing before Birdie goes off to the Army. Meanwhile, Albert has a complicated personal life. He's got a girlfriend Rosie (Janet Leigh) who should be his fiancée by now. But Albert's mother Mae (Maureen Stapleton) helped found the family music publishing business and consistently guilts the devoted Albert into not leaving. Rosie unsurprisingly wants Albert to choose between her and his mother, and it seems he's choosing his mother.

Meanwhile, The Ed Sullivan Show (with Sullivan playing himself) has the idea of putting Birdie on the show before he enlists, and even have Birdie kiss one of his legion of fans. Rosie has the membership rolls of the Conrad Birdie fan club somehow, and randomly picks a girl from the small town of Sweet Apple, Ohio. That girl is Kim MacAfee (Ann-Margret), who has a happy life with her kid brother, her parents (Paul Lynde and Mary LaRoche), and a boyfriend in Hugo Peabody (Bobby Rydell). Kim gets the call from New York, and she's naturally thrilled about having been chosen to represent the town of Sweet Apple to America, and get a kiss from Birdie.

Not everyone is thrilled, however. Hugo is ticked, fearing that he's going to lose Kim to Birdie. Dad also doesn't like it so much. He's still responsible for Kim, of course, and doesn't care for Birdie's music or the way in which Birdie drives everybody wild. But he warms to the idea when Albert suggests that perhaps Mr. MacAfee could get on TV too. Meanwhile, the subplot involving the long-simmering relationship between Albert and Rosie keeps rearing its head although one would think in a musical like this that Rosie and Albert are going to have a happy ending.

And then there's a twist. TV production is a complicated thing, and in the case of the Ed Sullivan Show part of that includes making certain everything times out properly considering that it's live TV. There's time planned for Birdie and Kim, although that gets cut into by Mr. MacAfee's desire to speak as well as MacAfee trying to promote the mayor, too. Worse is that the Russian Ballet which is also scheduled to appear that night decides it's going to do a number that would take up almost all the time allotted to the Birdie segment.

Bye Bye Birdie is the sort of movie that fans of musicals are going to like. If you're not that much of a fan of the artificiality of musicals, and I include myself in that genre, then it may not be quite as appealing. For the most part, everybody does well, although the material is such that at times it felt much too forced for me. Still, as I said, I can understand why some people are going to love Bye Bye Birdie.

A Ticklish Affair

Another of those movies that I had seen show up on TCM several times in the past, but had never actually watched beyond a few small snippets, was the family romantic comedy A Ticklish Affair. So with that in mind, the last time it showed up on TCM I recorded it, and only recently finally got around to watching that recording. It's showing up on TCM tomorrow, August 25, at 8:00 AM as part of a Summer Under the Stars day of movies dedicated to Shirley Jones, so with that in mind I've schedule the post for today.

A bunch of sailors from the Coronado Naval Air Station in the San Diego area are on an excercise in the Pacific Ocean just off land. Looking off to shore, one of the sailors sees coming from some place on shore the same sort of blinking light that ships use to communicate to one another in Morse code. (Technically these lights aren't blinking, of course; it's that the venetian blind-like slats that obscure the light make it look like it's blinking.) The only thing is, this light is blinking "SOS", which unsurprisingly gets their attention. The Navy sends a couple of people out to investigate, and find that it looks like the signal is coming from a regular house.

A group led by Cmdr. Key Weedon (Gig Young) walks right in, thinking it's a real emergency, and find a woman under the sink. That woman is Amy Martin (Shirley Jones), a widowed mother with three sons who are a bit of a handful since they have a knack for getting into trouble even when they don't mean to. The kids, not having a father, immediately like Weedon and Weedon, for his part, likes Amy. Amy would be perfectly willing to consider Weedon a friend, but she absolutely doesn't want to go any farther than that. Her husband was in the navy and died in service, which would explain why she doesn't want to get involved with another Navy man. That and having to move around, since she feels, not without reason, that the young boys need a stable home.

As for the Morse code light, that was given to the boys by their uncle Simon (Red Buttons), a pilot who has a bit of an eccentric streak himself, since who would give young boys that sort of blinker as a present. His next gift for them is even more eccentric: a canister of helium and the sort of weather balloons that the navy used in those days. He then explains to the boys that such balloons are used in astronaut training: gravity on the moon is lower than that on earth, so putting a bunch of balloons on men with a ground harness supposedly simulates what walking on the moon would be like.

Meanwhile, Key keeps pursuing Amy, and would like to propose marriage, but he gets a transfer to Italy, which is really going to make Amy hesitant to accept. But the romantic relationship between Key and Amy gets interrupted by another SOS signal coming from the house. Grover, is trying out the helium balloon thing when he slips the tether and starts floating off, although he seems blithely unware of the danger. Somehow the phone line at the Martin house is out, so Key is going to have to go over to the Martin house to find out what's going on. This leads to the climax as the entire naval base is put into action to save Grover.

A Ticklish Affair starts off as a relatively conventional, if inoffensive, family rom-com. Indeed, just a few months earlier, Jones appeared in The Courtship of Eddie's father, only as the woman gaining a family as the next-door widower is pushed into a relationship with here character. But then that climax comes, and that really takes the movie in a direction that doesn't suit it was as it makes for a finale that's supposed to be zany but is more tedious. Even without such a mishandled climax, however, A Ticklish Affair wouldn't have been as good as The Courtship of Eddie's Father. So you might want to watch this one once just to see how a reasonably premise can go wrong.

The Harvey Girls

I generally try to avoid doing posts on multiple films with the same star in close succession. Every now and then, however, the films on my DVR that are showing up on TCM happen to include a pair with the same star. That happens again this week; a few days back I posted on The Pirate, and now The Harvey Girls is showing up on TCM tomorrow, June 10, at 3:15 PM as part of a birthday salute to Judy Garland.

Opening title cards inform us of what the Harvey Girls were, which is a good thing because while a few people still living in 1946 when the movie was released might have remembered Harvey Girls, audiences today wouldn't. Fred Harvey was a freight agent for one of the railroads back in the 1870s who had the idea of setting up a series of restaurants at those stations along the line where the trains stopped long enough for passengers to eat. The restaurants became known as Harvey Houses, and employed unmarried women who were required to fit a squeaky-clean image in exchange for good-for-the-era pay.

As the movie opens, Judy Garland is not one of the Harvey Girls, but instead a young woman named Susan Bradley who is traveling west to the town of Sandrock to meet the man she's going to marry, having corresponded with him by letter. Also on the train is a new set of Harvey Girls managed by Sonora Cassidy (Marjorie Main). Susan gets off at the same town where the new Harvey House is being built, and finds that the putative man of her dreams is no such thing, but a drinker and old coot named Hartsey (Chill Wills). She doesn't want to marry him now, and thankfully Hartsey is OK with that, telling Susan that the love letters were written as a sort of joke by Ned Trent (John Hodiak).

Ned Trent runs the local den of iniquity, a saloon with dancing girls called the Alhambra, and Susan is so pissed with him that she vows to become a Harvey Girl herself and help drive the Alhambra out of business by bringing Harvey House civilization to Sandrock. Ned and his friend Judge Purvis (Preston Foster) plot to put the Harvey House out of business, but of course Ned eventually finds himself falling in love with Susan. Complicating matters is the fact that the head of the Alhambra dancing girls, Em (Angela Lansbury), is in love with Ned.

It all leads to the predictable conclusion, but with a bunch of musical numbers along the way because audiences expected that from a Judy Garland movie. Indeed, when we first see Garland on board the train she's singing a song. The musical numbers are certainly well-done and lively, although as many of you may know I'm not the biggest fan of Judy Garland musicals. It's easy to see, though, why Garland fans and audiences of the day would enjoy The Harvey Girls.

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.

Dancing with the Mice

Some months back TCM had a spotlight on child stars a couple of months back, which gave them a chance to highlight Dean Stockwell's appearance in Anchors Aweigh. Never having done a post on it before, I decided to DVR it so I could watch and do a post on it.

Stockwell, of course, is not the star, although his character is a key driver of the plot. The stars are Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. They play Joe and Clarene respectively, a couple of guys who have become best friends while in the navy in World War II; indeed, Joe even saved Clarence's life, so, after a musical number with MGM's bandleader José Iturbi (playing himself), Joe and Clarence get four days' shore leave.

Joe plans to go up to Los Angeles to see his girlfriend Lola (although we never meet her), while Clarence tags along hoping for some advice on how to deal with girls because he's really quite shy. But first they meet little Dean Stockwell, who's clearly not a girl and clearly too young to be romanced. Instead, he's Donald Martin, a young boy who wants to join the Navy to do his part for the war effort, his parents apparently having died. His home is now with his aunt Susan (Kathryn Grayson).

As you can guess, Susan is going to become the romantic lead. She works sometimes as a film extra, and in the evenings as a singer at a local Mexican-themed restaurant/nightclub. But her real dream is to be a singer in the movies, and if she can just get an audition with José Iturbi, she knows she'll be a big hit. Joe claims that Clarence will be able to get Susan that audition, and much of the movie deals with Joe and Clarence trying to meet Iturbi to get that audition for her.

The second part of the movie has to do with the various romantic entanglements. Clarence falls in love with Susan, but then at the restaurant where she sings she meets he meets a waitress who, like Clarence, is also from Brooklyn (Pamela Britton), hence the nickname Brooklyn. Clarence falls in love with her, which is going to make breaking off the relationship with Susan tough. Except that by this time, Joe has fallen in love with Susan, and he's worried about how to let Clarence know that he's going to lose Susan to Joe.

The third main theme of the movie is the musical numbers that have little to do with the plot. The most famous of these is the highlight of the movie, a scene in which Gene Kelly dances with Jerry, MGM's cartoon mouse. The framing for this is Joe telling little Donald and his classmates a story about a joyless king (Jerry) who has banned dancing in the kingdom, and how Joe taught Jerry to love dancing. In fact, of course, the scene has little to do with the rest of the plot of the movie.

And if there's a problem with the movie, it's the massive number of song and dance numbers that bloat the movie's running time to 140 minutes. Sure, we go to a Gene Kelly movie to see him dance, and go to a Frank Sinatra movie to see him sing. But there's so much of both here that it keeps bringing the movie to a halt. The plot is also little more than serviceable, so serviceable in fact that it's been used in service of lots of movies. Plotwise, there's nothing original here.

That's not to say I wouldn't recommend the movie. It's more that I would recommend other things first; Singin' in the Rain for example has a top-notch plot with most of the musical numbers fitting in reasonably well. Add in Sinatra and On the Town is better, and shorter. People who like Gene Kelly and/or Sinatra, however, will definitely love Anchors Aweigh.

Pal Joey

I've said on several occasions that musicals are not my favorite genre. One of the movies that's a good example of my thoughts on the genre is Pal Joey.

Frank Sinatra stars as the titular Joey, that being Joey Evans, a man who got booted out of San Francisco's Barbary Coast nightclub scene for, well, reasons. Some time later, he shows up back in San Francisco, in need of a job. Fortunately for him, his old friend Ned Galvin (Bobby Sherwood) plays piano for the band at the club Joey walks into. The MC has failed to show up for the evening's show, probably for having drunk too much. So Joey decides to be assertive, going up on stage and taking the part of the MC, singing a song and even dancing with the chorus girls in one of the numbers!

One of those chorus girls is Linda English (Kim Novak), he immediately develops feelings for her, although those feelings are not exactly mutual. Indeed, Joey wangles his way into getting a room next to Linda's at her rooming house, and continuing to pursue her.

The band is asked to do a show at a party put on by wealthy widow Vera Simpson (Rita Hayworth). Joey recognizes her as a former chorus girl who did a striptease act on stage. Joey even blackmails her into doing the act under the guise of raising money for the charity auction that Vera has been holding at her party. But Joey realizes Vera has two things he could use: class, and money. Joey has dreamed of opening up his own nightclub, and here's a woman who could help him achieve that goal.

So Joey is trying to pursue two different women, and neither one is particularly happy about Joey's relationship with the other woman. It gets to the point that Vera agrees to fund the club, but when she learns about Joey's relationship with Linda, she says she won't let the club open unless Linda is sent packing.

Pal Joey is filled with the songs of Rodgers and Hart, and some of the songs are quite good. However, they aren't from the original Broadway musical of Pal Joey; I immediately knew that "I Didn't Know What Time it Was" comes from Too Many Girls. Some of the songs slow the proceedings down way too much. And then there's the ending, which really struck me as untrue.

On the other hand, a lot of people will like Frank Sinatra's singing (Hayworth and Novak, of course, were dubbed), and the songs as a whole. It's just that they're in the service of an inane plot that doesn't quite work. Still, as alwys, judge for yourself.