Rudolph Friml, Jr.

Warner Bros. liked to make a lot of musical shorts, both two-reelers telling a bare-bones story and one-reelers that were more of a spotlight for a singer or a band. One that showed up recently was Six Hits and a Miss.

The opening credits are interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that they mention director Jean Negulesco, who was still at the stage of his career where he was directing shorts; he wouldn't graduate to features until a few years later with The Mask of Dimitrios followed by a string of interesting movies first at Warner Bros. and then at Fox. The other is that the band here is conducted by Rudolph Friml, Jr. That of course implies that Friml Sr. was someone of enough renown that there would be a need -- or have been a need back in the day -- to differentiate between the two. Sure enough, the original Rudolf Friml was a Czech composer of light operettas; you might know a couple of his works for having been turned into the Jeanette MacDonald movies The Firefly and Rose Marie.

As for the short, it involves Friml and his band, accompanied by a singing group called the titular Six Hits and a Miss for having a female lead and six men providing harmony, at least until the group was broken up by the wartime draft. They sing a song called "You've Got to Know How to Dance". And herein lies another interesting thing about this short. The song was earlier used in the 1936 movie Colleen, and here Warner Bros. reuses footage from the dance number that accompanied the song in Colleen to intercut the new footage. Now, it wasn't uncommon for such footage to be resued, or even movies to be re-released, as that was in 1942 the only way the stuff would get back out in the public and make a few bucks for the studio again. There was no television yet to have a late late show showing old movies.

As for the quality of this particular short, it's OK if not great. I'm not the biggest fan of these one-reel musical shorts since for the most part there's not all that much that was done beyond putting the camera in front of the band and maybe having a pair of dancers or more. So it's everything else going on with Six Hits and a Miss that makes the short worth mentioning.

Shipmates Forever

A couple of months back, I did a post on the Dick Powell/Ruby Keeler movie Flirtation Walk, mentioning that it was going to be airing in a double feature with another Powell/Keeler movie, Shipmates Forever; in fact I had both on my DVR from a previous double feature. Going through the long backlog of movies on my DVR, I've finally gotten around to watching Shipmates Forever, so now would be a good time to do a post on it.

This time around, Dick Powell doesn't start off in the US military. Instead, it's his father, a man named Richard Melville II and played by Lewis Stone, who is in the military. Specifically, he's an admiral who has reached the age where they can't really use him on a ship any more so that he'd be better for the Navy as the commandant of the Naval Academy in Annapolis. He's about to have his last watch ceremony on board ship, and would really like his son, Richard III (that's Dick Powell, as implied above) to come down and see it.

Dick III, being played by Dick Powell, is a radio crooner who loves his father, but would really rather continue being a radio crooner since his heart isn't anywhere near the navy and besides, his radio work really pays the bills in a way serving in the navy wouldn't. But since he loves his father, he travels to port to see his father's retirement ceremony. Dad uses this as an opportunity to try to manipulate his son into trying out for the Academy. Interestingly, Dad's rather selfish treatment of his son is consistently portrayed in Shipmates Forever as a good thing.

At the ceremony, Dick III meets a lovely young woman, June Blackburn (Ruby Keeler), and immediately falls for her. In talking about joining the Navy, June mentions that she's not so certain she wants a husband in the navy, since she lost her father and a brother in the war (which of course refers to the first World War, since the movie predates the European theater of World War II). But young Dick finally caves to his father's pressure, and takes the entrance exam with the intenion of refusing his commission when he graduates.

We then get introduced to a couple of other men who also want to enroll at the academy. Coxswain (John Arledge) is already in the Navy but wants to become an officer, which necessitates getting into Annapolis. Cowboy (Eddie Acuff) is joining from Arizona, while Sparks (Ross Alexander), who has a way with the radio, is also not from a navy family.

As you can guess, all for get in, and become roommates together, at least during their first year. But young Dick is still insistent on going back to crooning after graduation, refusing the commission, so he makes himself distant from those who would otherwise be his friends. This includes even Coxswain, who really wants Dick's help in not flunking out of the Academy. Once again, Dick's actions are presented as being a bad thing. And then, to make matters worse, June tells Dick that she can't marry him if he drops out of the Academy or refuses his commission!

Of course, as you might guess, Dick is going to get a chance to "redeem" himself at the end, and given what's transpired in the first 90 minutes or so, you can guess how that's going to go. Shipmates Forever is supposed to be a feel-good movie.

For me, however, Shipmates Forever doesn't work as well as Flirtation Walk, for several reasons, and I say that as someone who didn't think Flirtation Walk holds up as well as the Warner's musicals from 1933. One is that, as I strongly implied above, Lewis Stone is just downright nasty here at times as the father trying to cajole his son into following his footsteps, and not what the son wants -- especially considering what the son wants is in no way unrespectable or immoral. Worse, however, is that Powell and especially Keeler are somewhat misused here. Shipmates Forever is somewhat of a musical, and Powell certainly gets to sing. But Keeler, known as a dancer (cue the jokes about the quality of her dancing), gets precious few opportunities to dance. And there aren't any Warner Bros.-style musical numbers here.

Shipmates Forever comes across as the sort of movie where the studio bosses saw the success of Powell and Keeler as a screen couple and wanted to put them in another movie together, but didn't really have anything ready to put them into. The result is a movie where the component parts don't really jell.

Flirtation Walk

There are several movies coming up on TCM in the next two or three days that are on my DVR and that I haven't blogged about before. Two of them are part of a double bill of Dick Powell/Ruby Keeler musicals that I think were on the same double bill when I recorded them some months back. The first of those movies is Flirtation Walk, which shows up overnight between May 9 and 10 at 1:45 AM (so that's technically early May 10 in the Eastern time zone, but still May 9 in the Pacific). The second one is Shipmates Forever, but that's not getting a post of its own just yet because I've never been the biggest fan of doing multiple posts on movies from the same person or in a closely similar genre in close succession if I can avoid it. That, and there are two movies overnight between May 10/11 which aren't really related, so one of them gets a post tomorrow, May 9, with the other getting a post on May 10.

Dick Powell plays Dick Dorcy, an enlisted man in the Army who is stationed in Hawaii (this being a dozen years or so before World War II) serving under Sgt. Thornhill (Pat O'Brien). Ruby Keeler plays Kit Fitts, who is the daughter of a general who is only passing through Hawaii on his way to a posting in the Philippines, since that was a US colony at the time. Gen. Fitts is traveling with his daughter, as well as an adjutant, Lt. Biddle (John Eldredge) who also happens to be Kit's boyfriend, something you'd think might be a problem considering Biddle might be serving under his future father-in-law.

Now, since Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler are top billed, you might guess that they're going to get romantically involved, and might just even wind up together in the final reel, although it's going to take several reels for them to get together for that requisite happy ending. The two characters are brought together courtesy of Sgt. Thornhill, who assignes Dorcy to be Miss Fitts' driver while she's on Oahu. Kit wants to see the island, so she orders Dorcy to take her off base to some of the more scenic spots, with the two of them winding up at a luau where it seems Dorcy already knows some of the ethnic Hawaiian locals, even singing "Aloha Oe".

But Dorcy is an enlisted man, and Fitts is not only the daughter of an officer, but a young woman who already has an officer pursuing her. So he doesn't quite understand it when he gets accused of wrongdoing and Kit says she didn't really love Dorcy. Dorcy first thinks about desertion, but ultimately decides that the way to get the respect of people like Kit and Biddle is to become an officer himself. I don't know if they had an Officer Candidates' School back in those days, but in any case Dorcy eschews this, applying to West Point instead!

Dorcy somehow gets accepted, and is good at the military stuff, to the point that by the time senior year comes along, he's considered a leader among men in his class. He's even given the job of writing the class revue for senior spring. But a monkey wrench gets thrown into the works when West Point gets a new commandant: Gen. Fitts! He brings back his daughter, who is still involved with Biddle although they're still not engaged. Nobody else at West Point knows about Dorcy's previous involvment with Miss Pitts, so when the cadets all meet her, everyone else is taken with her while Dorcy feigns complete indifference.

The other cadets, thinking Kit is so charming, decide that they want to break with tradition and include a female part in the revue, with Kit being just the woman for the part. Dorcy, of course, is mortified, and this leads to the complications that eventually get resolved in the standard-issue happy way in the final reel.

Flirtation Walk somehow got an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, although that was the first era of having 10 Best Picture nominees before it got cut to five in the early 1940s. Looking through the list of nominees (this was the year It Happened One Night won), it also looks like a fairly weak list of nominees. It's not that Flirtation Walk is bad; it's more that it pales in comparison to Warner Bros.' musicals of the previous year, and feels a lot more like a programmer than a prestige movie. I'm not the biggest fan of Ruby Keeler, but the movie doesn't give her enough to do. Ditto Pat O'Brien, since the movie in many ways seems like two movies grafted together, the Hawaii half and the West Point half.

Still, everybody is more than professional with the material they're given, and nobody really hits a wrong note. So Flirtation Walk winds up being something more than pleasant enough, and certainly entertaining for fans of musicals or romantic dramedies. But there's a reason why Flirtation Walk is less well-known than a lot of other musicals out there.