I Married an Angel

I've mentioned on a few occasions that I'm not the biggest fan of the singing of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. But I do watch their movies to do posts on here because the pair were a big thing back in the 1930s and I feel a bit of an obligation to see a wide variety of movies to post on here. So I recorded their final film, I Married an Angel, the last time it showed up on TCM, and recently got around to watching it. It's getting another airing on TCM early tomorrow morning (Dec. 5) at 3:45 AM, or overnight tonight if that's the way you look at things.

I Married an Angel was released in the summer of 1942, several months after the US entered World War II, but is based on a play turned into a Rodgers and Hart musical in 1938, which is why the opening informs us the story is set in Budapest in those gay times of years gone past. Anna Zador (Jeanette MacDonald) works as a secretary at the Palaffi bank, run by the third generation of Count Palaffis, with the current Count Palaffi played by Neslon Eddy. Anna has a crush on the Count, and brings wildflowers from the country to his office every morning, but Palaffi's executive assistant Marika (Mona Maris) says the count doesn't notice them. Or Anna, who is really only in the typing pool so why would she be noticed by the count? Besides, Marika is pretty certain the count is interested in her.

In fact, the Count is interested in a lot of pretty, upper-class women to the point that people see him as a sort of playboy, with the most important among such people being the largest depositors in the bank. They could move their assets elsewhere, which would start a run on the bank that would likely cripple it. So he really ought to get married and settle down. When another of the assistants, Whiskers (Reginald Owen) hears that the count is not only not planning on settling down but hosting an extravagant costume party for his birthday, Whiskers has Marika give an invitation to a regular bank worker -- Anna, of course -- to make it seem at least a bit more like a work function.

Anna doesn't have the money for the sort of costume that people wear to these high-class costume balls in movies of this era, so she wears a largely homemade angel costume instead. This subjects her to some ridicule because she clearly doesn't fit in, and didn't necessarily want to be in the spotlight like this even if it allowed her to get close to the count for one night. What Anna doesn't know is that Palaffi had said that the only woman he'd ever marry would have to be a real angel. So during the party he goes into one of the drawing rooms while everyone else is out on the terraces and lawns partying away, and falls asleep and starts dreaming. (I'm not giving anything away here since in the context of the movie, we know that what follows is an extended dream.)

In the dream, Anna comes back to him as an actual angel, named Brigitta, telling Palaffi that she's just the sort of angel that Palaffi needs to marry to save the bank. Palaffi marries her and takes her on a honeymoon to Paris, although he finds out that being married to an angel isn't all he bargained for. The first issue is that the angel is just too virtuous, with the sort of inability to lie that leads to her telling truths that people don't want to hear. If anything, that's going to make the investors more likely to want to start a run on the bank. Of course, we know that this is the sort of movie that's going to have a happy ending, with several songs along the way for both MacDonald and Eddy.

To be honest, I Married an Angel isn't exactly a bad movie, although my view of the sort of singing that MacDonald and Eddy do stands. It's just not my thing. As stated above, the movie was released in the summer of 1942, and I get the impression that public tastes were really changing, accelerated by the US entry into World War II. Several stars of the 1930s (notably Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer) saw the writing on the wall and retired, but I think MacDonald and Eddy were suffering the same fate if you will, only without a voluntary retirement. I Married an Angel was a box office failure and gets panned by the critics, but I don't think it's any worse than the other MacDonald/Eddy movies I've seen.

Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me

Today being Christmas, I thought I'd look for a family-friendly film on my DVR to do a review on. It turned out that I have one in The Sun Comes Up, so I watched that to do a review on.

The nominal lead is Jeanette MacDonald, although the real star of the show is Lassie. MacDonald plays Helen Lorfied, the owner of Lassie, as well as a widowed opera singer who has a son who loves Lassie. Helen is in training for a comeback, and it looks like it's going to be a success. But after the concert, Lassie goes running off into the street, and Helen's kid chases after Lassie, getting run over by a truck in the process. Helen now no longer has any desire to enjoy life, and doesn't care for Lassie, either. But Lassie also has no other family, so Helen takes Lassie with her when she goes off to the country to live.

She winds up in the town of Brushy Gap, in the same sort of mountains we'd see a few years later in I'd Climb the Highest Mountain and sees a house in the middle of nowhere that's available for rent. She rents it from property manager and stereotypical country store owner Willie Williegood (Percy Kilbride). Mr. Williegood is just the first of many people not to be accepting of an outsider, although in their defense Helen doesn't seem particularly well-suited to live in a place like this. Anyhow, the kids from the orphanage use the property to play on, and everybody is none too pleased that Helen puts them out because she doesn't want to see kids.

One kid, however, she's going to have to deal with, because he's actually pretty good at doing work around the place that a city slicker like Helen just doesn't know how to do. That kid is Jerry (Claude Jarman Jr.), who also lives at the orphanage because, as far as he knows, his mother was financially unable to take care of him (he would have been born during the Depression). Jerry also takes well to Lassie, and the feeling is mutual. Helen, of course, is not ready to have another adolescent boy in her life.

There's another hour to go in the movie, though, so we know that the two are going to figure out that they need each other, and it's going to be Lassie that brings the two of them together. Lloyd Nolan shows up as the owner of the house who ultimately convinces Helen to do the right thing, although it's also going to take a climactic fire rescue to bring Helen and Jerry together.

Jeanette MacDonald's singing isn't quite my cup of tea, and to be honest I'm also not the biggest fan of the stereotypical treatment of the locals that seems like it came straight out of the old Variety headline "Stix Nix Hick Pix". But then, this is a Lassie movie, so that's what you watch for, not so much the plot. In that regard, The Sun Comes Up will definitely be suitable for the whole family, although younger children will probably enjoy it more than older children.