Nora Bayes

There's been a couple of days in the past year or two where the TCM lineup has been a bunch of musical biopics, of which there seem to be more than I realize. And here, by musical biopics I mean biographical movies of mostly composer/songwriter types; not movies about famous people that have for some reason been turned into musicals. Well, tomorrow, June 5, is another such day, and once again I've got one of the movies in the TCM lineup on my DVR just waiting more me to do a post on it. That movie is Shine on, Harvest Moon, which airs at 9:30 AM.

Shine on Harvest Moon is the purported story of the two people credited with writing it, Nora Bays (Ann Sheridan) and Jack Norworth (Dennis Morgan). They're certainly the ones who made the song a popular standard, although apparently in those days it was common practice for someone to buy all the rights to the song including being credited as the songwriters. As the movie opens, it's around 1905 in Milwaukee. Vaudeville is the big thing, and Jack is a single act in a traveling vaudeville show, as is Blanche (Irene Mallory), who is presented as someone you think is going to become romantically involved with Jack. Also in the show are the magician Georgetti (Jack Carson) and his ditzy assistant Margie (Marie Wilson) who eventually get married and become friends of Jack and Nora's, showing up several times throughout the movie.

Nora is only seen a bit later, when Jack sees her performing at a cabaret and realizes she'd be pefect for the sort of songs he's trying to get published. What he doesn't know is that Nora is being pursude by Dan Costello (Robert Shayne), who ones the place where Nora is performing. Nora resists Dan's advances, while Jack resists Blanche's, and Jack and Nora go off together, in part to do their own vaudeville act and in part for Jack to write songs for Nora to sing.

But what the two don't know is that they've made some powerful enemies. Costello becomes more and more successful as a producer and theater owner, while Blanche seems to become somewhat successful as a performer and wants to make certain that Jack sings with her. With that in mind, Dan pretty much blacklists Nora which effectively means blacklisting Jack too unless he wants to give in and do a double with Blanche or have her sing his songs. Even a good friend like "Poppa" Carl (S.Z. Sakall) can't help get them bookings. Oh, he does get them an audition, but Dan finds out before the scheduled time leaving Jack and Nora to audition for an empty theater.

Eventually Nora gives up and leaves Jack so that he can have some success, but we know the movie is going to have a happy ending, so Poppa Carl figures out a way to get Jack to bring Nora into the act that Dan and Blanche can't stop. They then perform the title song as well as another number, "Time Waits for No One", in a Technicolor finale (the rest of the movie is in black and white), before living happily ever after.

Or at least the movie Shine On, Harvest Moon would have you believe. Jack and Nora would get divorced and go on to have multiple spouses, while as mentioned above there's a question as to whether they even wrote the song. Indeed, the songs in the movie are mostly a pastiche of stuff from the first decade of the century. It's another of those movies that tries to bring turn-of-the-century nostalgia to audiences who were spending their time outside the theater worrying about the war raging over in Europe and the Pacific, having been released in the spring of 1944. Audiences of the day might have liked it, but it's one that, unlike Roughly Speaking, hasn't aged very well.

Cynthia

Somehow I also wound up with a whole bunch of movies that starred the reliably bland actor George Murphy on my DVR, and it's not as if he was ever TCM's Star of the month. One of those movies is Cynthia, a light family drama trying to restore some sense of normalcy following World War II.

Cynthia is played by an adolescent Elizabeth Taylor, although we don't see her at first. Instead, we meet her parents, Larry Bishop (Goerge Murphy) and Louise (Mary Astor) when they were college students before they got married and Cynthia was born. Louise was a musician and Larry a med student in 1930 both hoping they'd be able to go to Vienna to study their respective fields, with Larry making money in the summer by working at the hardware store back in his home town of Napoleon, Ill., one of those small midwestern towns that consistently shows up in movies like this. But the two fall in love and get married, which in and of itself is not a big deal. However, Larry knocks up Louise, and the two need to support themselves somehow, which necessitates moving back to Napoleon.

Worse, Cynthia has been a sickly child, with the result being that she's been sheltered her whole life, and her parents feeing trapped in Napoleon. Indeed, stupid Larry, despite having three years of college education, hasn't even bothered to get any better job than still working at the hardware store, and the family have been living in the same rented house for the past 16 years or so.

Cynthia too is getting to the age where she sees all the nice experiences that the other kids her age have had the chance to do, like going to school dances or performing in the school play. This latter even though Cynthia seems to have some musical talent that she inherited from Mom and takes lessons from a local music professor Rosenkrants (S.Z. Sakall). Matters reach a head for the family when the guy who owns the house decides he needs to sell, which may necessitate the Bishops having to move out if they can't come up with the down payment.

And then one day Ricky Latham (Jimmy Lydon), who dropped out of school to join the navy and presumably fight World War II, returns to town in the hope of finishing up his high school, which is another plot point that makes no sense. The guy would have to be at least 20 now, much too old for Cynthia or high school in general. But he takes a shine to Cynthia, and she might get to go on her first date to the big high school prom. That is, if she's healthy enough to do so. She hasn't really been sick for a year now, but suddenly, with all this activity, she might be coming down with another flu....

Cynthia is one of those MGM movies that you can see fitting in with what Louis B. Mayer wanted to do: good family values in a wholesome package, with some added post-World War II escapism. If these are the worst problems a family has, things can't be too bad, much like the Andy Hardy series that was by this time winding down. Unfortunately, for me the whole thing strained credulity. Cynthia really couldn't be that sickly, and the people around the Bishops, especially Larry's sister (Spring Byington) and her doctor husband (Gene Lockhart), couldn't be that impolite. Everybody tries, but Cynthia is another of those movies that ultimately falls under the weight of a saccharine script.

No, No, Nanette

Gordon MacRae was honored back in August 2024 in Summer Under the Stars, and that gave me the opportunity to record a couple of his films that I hadn't blogged about before. One was By the Light of the Silvery Moon which I blogged about when it aired back in July 2025. Another was Tea for Two, which you can see at 4:30 PM tomorrow (October 5) on TCM.

Doris Day is again the female lead here, although it's a couple of minutes before we see her. Instead, we get another of those establishing stories like the one in Margie. A couple of teens are hosting a party for some of their friends, and have pulled out some of Mom and Dad's old things, which specifically means 1920s flapper outfits and male fashions, along with Charleston records that you'd play on a victrola. Great-uncle Max (S.Z. Sakall) shows up and asks the kids what they know about 1929. As you might guess, this is the cue to go back in time to 1929....

Uncle Max is an investment banker who has made the mistake of not making the best investments. Well, to be fair, the investments didn't seem bad at the time, but then October 1929 came along with the stock market crash. Max is the uncle and legal guardian to the investments of niece Nanette (Doris Day), who can't be bothered to worry her little head about the investments, or the fact that they're about to lose a lot of their value. She's the former fiancée of Broadway producer Larry Blair (Billy De Wolfe), and has dreams of staring in a show herself. She's got the money, and Larry knows it. So with that in mind, Larry brings over the two writers of a show he's hoping to put on, Jimmy (Gordon MacRae) and Tommy (Gene Nelson) to try to convince her to back the show financially.

Uncle Max has to sign off on spending the money however, and what he's never told Nanette is that he's sold a bunch of Nanette's investments thanks to that crash. She doesn't really have the money to back that show any more. So Max comes up with an idea that he just knows Nanette will ever be able to agree to. He bets her that she can't answer "No" to every question for the next two days. If, somehow, she does, Max will sign the check that would fund the show. Now, as you can guess, this is going to lead to all sorts of complications. But as you can also guess, Nanette and Jimmy are going to wind up together. They have to, after all, since it's their children in the opening scene.

I have to admit that Tea for Two isn't quite my favorite musical. A lot of that has to do with the plot, since Nanette's having to say "No" to everything leads to the sort of "comedy of lies" that I've never really cared for. That's somewhat unfair to the cast, since they do well with the material they're given. The songs are also good, both the ones that were in the original musical as well as some that Warner Bros. dusted off from old movie musicals of its own. Notable in this second group is "I Only Have Eyes for You".

People who like musicals and are looking for something undemanding that will entertain them will probably love Tea for Two.

Another musical biopic, this time about Marilyn Miller

I mentioned back in the run-up to St. Patrick's Day that in the decade or so after World War II, Hollywood put out a bunch of biopics about various figures in the world of music. Somehow, I wound up with a glut of them on my DVR, so now it's time for another of those musicals, Look for the Silver Lining.

This time, the subject of the movie is Marilyn Miller, a Broadway star who died tragically young, although that early death isn't mentioned in the movie, at least not explicitly. Miller is played by June Haver, and as the movie opens rehearsals are starting for a revival of Sally, one of Miller's biggest hits. But she has a headache of some sort (in real life, Miller's alcoholism led to a sinus condition that was, as far as I can understand, a contributing factor in her death in 1936), so she goes back to her dressing room. There, a man knocks on her door. He claims to be from Findlay, OH, where Marilyn got her start, and has a poster of her family's vaudeville act, the Five Columbians. As you can imagine, the film then goes into flashback.

Charlie Ruggles plays Pop Miller, who is traveling around the vaudeville circuit with his wife (Rosemary DeCamp) and two elder daughters, while younger daughter Marilyn, too young to work legally except as part of a family act, has been staying with grandma in Philadelphia. The family, currently the Four Columbians, does typical vaudeville numbers and is currently in Findlay, which is where Marilyn shows up to meet them at Christmastime because Grandma says she can dance and should be part of the act.

Marilyn shows up backstage while her family is performing, and there she sees another dancer. She doesn't realize this is Jack Donahue (Ray Bolger), an apparently very talented dancer whom Marilyn claims is her influence. They trade dance moves in his dressing room until her parents show up; after the show there's an opportunity for a Christmas performance by all the cast.

In this telling of the story, Donahue gives the juvenile Marilyn her first break. She's about to go on with the rest of the family, until Pop gets the mumps, forcing the rest of the family to quarantine. So Jack sets up a number in which Marilyn is a sort of shill, sitting out front and being "invited" on stage to dance with Jack. This gets Marilyn her start, and eventually the family makes its way to London. In London, an American producer shows up looking for talent, and loves Marilyn's talent, not realizing she's actually American. But given the chance to appear on Broadway in one of the revues of the day, she takes it.

However, she's still a juvenile, which means she's technically not able to work legally. She's paired in a musical number with Frank Carter (Gordon MacRae), who defends her when the authorities come looking for proof of age. The two fall in love and Marilyn's career starts taking off, but World War I comes, and Frank for some reason wants to serve. He also wants to marry her before he leaves, although she only wants to do it after he returns.

Marilyn's career takes off during World War I; Frank eventually returns, leading to an elopement, and a happy marriage, except for the fact that Marilyn is on Broadway while Frank's career has him traveling around. Marilyn eventually gets the lead in Sally, which is a big hit, except that Frank gets in a fatal car crash while traveling to New York for opening night. (In real life, Frank died some months before the opening of Sally.) Somewhat humorously, one of the characters in the play-within-the-movie version Sally is played by S.Z. Sakall, in lederhosen:

Reading up on Marilyn Miller, there's a lot that Look for the Silver Lining doesn't cover, especially her alcoholism and early death. But she also went to Hollywood and made a few not terribly successful films, notably a film version of Sally that I blogged about back in 2016. Look for the Silver Lining sanitizes Miller's life, and includes a lot of dancing. Having said that, it's Ray Bolger's big number that's really more worth watching than June Haver's songs and dances.

Two Guys from Milwaukee

In getting through the backlog of movies that I've watched off my DVR but have yet to do a post on, it's time to write about one of those movies that shows up on TCM often enough but that I'd never gotten around to watching before, Two Guys from Milwaukee.

The movie technically starts off at Pennsylvania Station in New York, although the opening scenes are really on a train. The two important passengers on that train are Prince Henry (Dennis Morgan) of one of those central European monarchies that in real life would have been overrun by Soviet-backed Communists a year or two after the movie was made, together with his advisor Count Oswald (S.Z. Sakall). Henry is on a goodwill tour of America, before his country votes on a plebiscite regarding whether to stay a monarchy. Henry thinks that if the vote is going to be rigged, he's going to want to meet real Americans.

Showing up at Penn Station and not realizing that a celebrity is about to get off the train is cab driver Buzz Williams (Jack Carson). He doesn't know anything about royalty, and if anything has mild contempt for them. In a plot twist that's fairly obvious, Henry decides he's going to escape from the train and pass himself off as a regular American, only to wind up taking the cab driven by Buzz. Unfortunately, Henry forgot to get any money when he absconded from the train, which is going to make paying for a cab difficult, as well as paying for dinner or getting a hotel room or anything like that.

Buzz lives with his sister Nan (Rosemary DeCamp), and since Henry has lied about where he was from and just happened to pick Buzz's hometown as where he is from, Buzz takes Henry home with him. Buzz also has a girlfriend Connie (Joan Leslie), and Buzz suggests the idea of a double date as Connie has a girlfriend Polly (Janis Paige).

As you might guess, Henry and Connie begin to develop feelings for each other, which is a problem since she's already got a boyfriend who's done nothing wrong, and because of that upcoming referendum. If monarchy wins, Henry getting married to a foreign commoner might be a problem. Meanwhile, there's still the issue that Henry is technically missing. Because this is a programmer, however, we know that it's going to resolve all its problems with a requisite happy ending.

Two Guys from Milwaukee is, as I just mentioned, little more than a programmer of the sort that Warner Bros. and the other studios churned out in the years before World War II. This one, however, was made just after the war, in 1946, so it does have the feel of being a bit out of place. That's not to say it's a bad movie, of course. Dennis Morgan and Jack Carson work well together, and the movie has a fun little coda at the end. But the sort of monarchy that Henry was a part of would have been destroyed by the recently-ended war, and the consequences of that are totally glossed over. Still, Two Guys from Milwaukee is entertaining enough, and definitely worth one watch at least.

Four Daughters good, seven daughters better?

I've got a bunch of movies on my DVR that I haven't blogged about before but that are coming up soon on TCM. One of them is Raintree County, but that's currently on the schedule for July so I've decided I'm going to blog about it then. But there are two on June 18, which is why the first of them is getting a post already on June 16. That one is Seven Sweethearts, which comes on TCM at 11:30 AM on June 18.

A brief opening includes some doggerel about the Dutch contribution to America, reminding us of the town of Holland, MI, which was founded by Dutch immigrants although as I understand it the demographics have changed significantly since this movie was released in 1942. Then, driving into New Delft, which I guess is supposed to be the stand-in for Holland, is New York photojournalist Henry Taggart (Van Heflin, who had just become a star thanks to his performance in Johnny Eager, although this movie was released before he won the Oscar). He's got an assignment to do a piece on the town's tulip festival, and he's looking for a place to stay.

Unfortunately for him, he winds up talking to somebody who it seems would rather give him the runaround, that being Van Maaster (S.Z. Sakall). Henry first meets Van Maaster sitting in the town square playing his oboe, while other guys in the buildings around the square play the other parts of the piece. It just so happens that Van Maaster owns the local hotel, although he really only advertises it to the people he wants to have stay in the hotel, which seems like a good way to go bankrupt quickly. Fortunately for Henry, Mr. Van Maaster is willing to have him as a guest.

Henry gets shown to his room by one of Van Maaster's daughters, who just happens to have a boy's name, because Dad, wanting a boy, preemptively gave all his kids boys' names before they were born, only for his wife to push out one daughter after another, seven in all. Henry also discovers that this is a rather odd hotel, in that there are guests who haven't paid their bills in months, and all the guests seem as happy as they would be if they were Stepford Guests.

The daughters are all unmarried, because of a family tradition. Even though five of them have boyfriends who anywhere else would be a fiancé already, in the Van Maaster family, the daughters always have to marry in age order. And the oldest daughter, Regina (Marsha Hunt), instead of wanting to get married, wants to go off to New York and become an actress. So she's thrilled that Henry is here, because perhaps he can get her out of town.

It's youngest daughter Billie (Kathryn Grayson), however, who winds up weaving the web around Henry as this magical town grows on him. He and Billie fall in love, although there's a problem in that she doesn't really want to upset the family tradition and get married first. (I also couldn't quite tell how much of an age difference there was between the seven daughters.)

As I watched Seven Sweethearts, I couldn't help but think of the Four Daughters series that Warner Bros. had recently completed. That series worked in part because it was made before World War II came to America, during that latter stages of the Depression when that sort of small-town charm still worked. But also, Four Daughters had a hard edge of drama in no small part thanks to the presence of John Garfield and being done at Warner Bros.

MGM, on the other hand, put Van Heflin into Seven Sweethearts, and seemed to be of the belief that the thing to do with this material was to pour as much of the sentimental gloop as the studio could into the material. Another review I read used the word "cloying", and oh my is Seven Sweethearts nonstop cloy. You wonder why Henry didn't throttle everyone in town on his first day in New Delft.

But then, to make things worse, since they were grooming Kathryn Grayson for stardom, they had to give her a bunch of songs to sing. Her voice doesn't really work for me, and I've always considered her an acquired taste. But her vocal stylings work even less for this sort of movie.

There are going to be people who like Seven Sweethearts. But I'm not one of those people.

Never Say Goodbye

Errol Flynn did have the ability to do comedy, even if he didn't get much of a chance to show this ability at Warner Bros. Even when he was put into a comedy, he got a less than stellar script, as in Never Say Goodbye.

Errol plays Philip Gayley, who is looking to buy a coat for his daughter Philippa, nicknamed Flip (Patti Brady). Having just shown up earlier at the same department store to buy Flip a coat is Flip's mother Ellen (Eleanor Parker). It turns out that Philip and Ellen are divorced, but have joint custody of Flip. The daughter is expected to live for six months with Dad, followed by six months with Mom, and today is the day when Flip is supposed to go back to Mom along with Flip's nanny Cozy (Hattie McDaniel, who's much underused here).

Philip still holds a bit of a flame for Ellen, and wouldn't be opposed to getting back together with her, but he's a magazine artist whose job has him doing drawings of glamorous young women such as Nancy (Peggy Knudsen), so sometimes the temptation has gotten too great and he spent enough time with those women to make Ellen jealous. This, combined with a mother-in-law (Lucile Watson) who seems to have it in for Philip, and you can understand why Ellen has gotten a divorce.

Meanwhile, Flip definitely wants Mom and Dad to get back together, and encourages them to go to dinner at a restaurant run by Philip's friend Luigi (S.Z. Sakall), but that goes bad when it transpires that Philip had also invited Nancy there to dinner on the same evening and has to try to keep the two women apart, which you know he isn't going to be able to do. There's also the chance to make Flip happy by having Phil surreptitiously play Santa instead of Ellen's new love interest, but that one goes bad as well.

There's still one more chance, however. The movie having been released in 1946, it's right after the end of World War II. Flip did her part for the war effort by becoming a pen pal to a Marine in a program that apparently matched servicemen without anybody to write to them and people who wanted to help. However, Flip sent that marine, Fenwick Lonkowski (Forrest Tucker), a picture of Ellen which naturally leads him to believe he's been getting letters from a lovely adult woman and not an eight-year-old kid, although you'd think he could tell from the handwriting. Unsurprisingly, Fenwick shows up and all sorts of complications arise.

I said at the beginning that Flynn didn't get the best script here, and it's a shame because there's a lot of potential here that goes unrealized. Flynn's character is basically a good guy and Ellen probably knew in her heart that she had made a mistake. But the whole restaurant bit, with Flynn having to lie constantly, goes on way too long. The Marines subplot with Fenwick is also unrealistic, as I can't imagine him being fooled into thinking he got letters from an adult.

It's a testament to the quality of the actors, however, that all of them give their best and do pretty much as well as the script allows them to do. One just wishes the script were better.