Not home in Indiana

Another of the people honored in TCM's Summer Under the Stars in August 2025 was Shirley Jones. This gave me the chance to record a pair of her films. One is a supporting role in the horrendously bad The Happy Ending, which I gave up on halfway through and may or may not get to before it expires off the DVR, that's how bad it is. And it's not even bad in a good way. The other film was one from early in her career, April Love.

Pat Boone is the star here, and he does sing the title song "April Love", although not over the opening credits; instead, the opening credits are over establishing shots of what is supposed to be bluegrass horse country in Kentucky. We then get Boon, who plays young Nick Conover, in a mail truck looking for the Bruce farm. It seems Mr. and Mrs. Bruce are his uncle and aunt, and he's going to be spending some time working on their farm. Not that it's much of a farm anymore, not since Jed Bruce's (Arthur O'Connell) son Jed Jr. died in Korea and Dad lost his zest for living and raising harness racing horses.

It was also Aunt Henrietta's (Jeanette Nolan) idea to bring Nick to the farm. Nick's father presumably died; Nick's unseen mom has to work to support Nick and can't be the necessary presence in the kid's life. As a result, Nick fell in with the wrong crowd, went joyriding in a stolen car in Chicago, and got probation. As part of the plea deal, Nick lost his driver's license and is getting sent away to this farm. So you can understand why uncle Jed isn't exactly thrilled. If Nick were played by someone other than clean-cut Pat Boone, you might wonder whether the plot would have Nick engaging in predations on his aunt and uncle.

While Jed is showing Nick the work he's going to have to do, including some obvious foreshadowing involving a horse that won't let anybody ride him now that Jed Jr. is dead, one of the neighbors shows up: young Liz Templeton (Shirley Jones), whose father still raises harness horses. Liz is good with horses, too, and can even ride a sulky. She falls for Nick and invites him over, although she and the rest of the Templeton's don't know just why Nick is here. And why he doesn't want to get behind the wheel of a car. Liz has a big sister Fran who interests Nick's eye, although she already has a boyfriend in college kid Al.

Part of the plot involves the good influence that Nick and Uncle Jed wind up having on each other. Nick fixes up Jed's broken-down old tractor, while Nick rescues the horse when it falls during an escape. The horse starts letting Nick get in the sulky to race him. There's also the Nick/Liz romance. And then there's the plot about Nick's probation. After fixing another old car on the farm, Liz and Fran make comments that lead to a drag race between Fran's sports car and Nick's old jalopy. Fran gets some dents in her car, and the insurance claim reveals that Nick has been violating his probation. Oh dear, he might be hauled off to prison instead of being allowed to race in the grand prize race.

April Love is harmless stuff, being a remake of a World War II-era movie Home in Indiana. The update brings nice color photography and Cinemascope, along with the songs for both Boone and Jones to sing. Other than that, the movie is old-fashioned and totally inoffensive. Nick is technically a criminal, but at heart he's really got a good heart. There's no antagonist here, and the Templetons don't seem to care when they learn about Nick's past, that's how clean-cut the movie is.

If you want something clean cut and to be transported to a past that doesn't exist any more, you could do a lot worse than to watch April Love.

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.

Oklahoma

Hollywood has a long history of finding properties from the Broadway stage to turn into movies, both dramatic plays and musicals. Making roadshow versions of big Broadway musical hits really became a thing in the 1950s, I presume as a way to try to get people away from their new television sets and to a place where they could see something BIG on a big screen and in bright, vibrant colors. Fitting very well into this cycle is the 1955 version of Oklahoma!, which will be on TCM tomorrow, September 25, at 8:00 PM.

Gordon MacRae is the male lead here, playing Curly McLain, a cowboy in the late stages of Oklahoma's being a territory, so around the turn of the last century. He rides onto the scene singing "Oh What a Beautiful Morning", as he's heading to see Laurey Williams (Shirley Jones in her film debut), whom he loves. He wants to invite her to the big box social, but she plays coy because of how slow he's been in trying to woo her. As a bit of revenge, she actually thinks of going to the social with Jud Fry (Rod Steiger), a farm hand on the farm where Laurey lives with her Aunt Eller (Charlotte Greenwood).

Laurey has a friend, Ado Annie (Gloria Grahame), and she's the woman in a love triangle as well. Will Parker (Gene Nelson) is a cowboy like Curly, and wants to marrie Annie, but her father (James Whitmore) isn't so sure as he wants someone with a not so stable profession to marry his daughter. Perhaps if he can go to the big city and show himself to be a success. Will has done that, and his first appearance in the movie is his coming home on the train from Kansas City. However, in the meantime, a peddler, Ali Hakim (Eddie Albert), has come to town, and Annie has an interest in him too.

But the main story is the Laurey/Curly/Jud storyline. Curly and Jud are entirely different, as if you couldn't tell from the casting of Rod Steiger as Jud. Jud is decidedly from the wrong social class, and you get the feeling that in a different sort of western he's be the outlaw, if you can really cast Rod Steiger in a western. He lives in little more than a shack on the farm, and he and Curly get into an argument in the smokehouse that leads to them firing their guns, although at least not at each other. We know, however, that Laurey and Curly are really right for each other, but Laurey has a really bad dream about marrying Curly and how Jud is going to react if that happens.

She was right to have that bad dream. Jud gets even nastier, leading to Curly offering to marry Laurey for protection, which sends Jud over the edge. But this is a musical, so we're going to get a happy ending that also satisfies the Production Code.

I've stated before that I'm not the biggest fan of musicals, so I'm not quite the write blogger to look to for a recommendation on a movie like Oklahoma!. The production is exceedingly well made, and according to the articles I read (I haven't seen any stage version of the musical), it preserves most of Rodgers and Hammerstein's songs, many of which have become standards. MacRae and Jones are also an appealing couple, as they can both sing as well as play convincing pioneer types.

For me, however, the movie did have some problems. One is that the movie runs a bit too long at 141 minutes (and TCM didn't run the roadshow version which has an intro/intermission/exit music). Part of that is down to the dream sequence, which reminded me of the Cyd Charisse number near the end of Singin' in the Rain: it may be well done, but it feels tacked on, and runs so, so long. Some of the casting is also interesting. I mentioned Rod Steiger who I think is out of place as a circa-1900 Oklahoman, although he could certainly play hair-trigger temper types. And then there's Gloria Grahame. IMDb's soundtrack page for the movie doesn't list anybody dubbing her, and it certainly sounds like her voice. Except that she can't sing. Her musical number, "I Can't Say No", brings the production to a screeching halt.

But fans of musicals will most likely love this adaptation of Oklahoma!, and it's easy to see why.

The Cheyenne Social Club

Henry Fonda was TCM's Star of the Month in February, which gave me the chance to record a couple of his movies that I haven't blogged about before. One of them is The Cheyenne Social Club.

Technically, the real star here is James Stewart, in real life a good friend of Henry Fonda. He plays John O'Hanlan, a cowboy in Texas in 1867, which was a couple of years after the end of the Civil War, when the states that had seceded were still in a fairly parlous economic state. John's best friend Harley Sullivan (Henry Fonda) is also a cowboy, and even though the two have been friends for years, there's still a lot they don't know about each other, which is a running joke throughout the movie. John gets a letter informing him that his brother has died up in Cheyenne, which is in the Wyoming Territory (actually a historical anachroism, as Cheyenne was only founded in the second half of 1867, and the Wyoming Territory not organized until a year later), quite a ways away from Texas. The deceased brother has included John in the will, so he's going to have to go to Cheyenne to deal with the inheritance.

Harley, being a good friend of John's heads up to Cheyenne along with John, an amiable portion of the movie that serves as character development while also showing how much the two friends really don't know each other. In Cheyenne, John meets with Willowby (Dabbs Greer), the lawyer executing the will, and is informed that his brother owned something called the "Social Club", and turned enough of a profit to bequeath not only the club, but also $1100, which was quite a sum to a cowboy in 1867.

However, when John starts asking about the club, some people seem rather offended by it. It's on the edge of town, over by the railroad tracks, and managed by Jenny (Shirley Jones). It takes John a while to figure out what's going on, but the place is actually a brothel, although Jenny and all the other young women there are actually the Hollywood stereotype of the PHG -- the Prostitute with a Heart of Gold.

John isn't so certain he wants to run a brothel, apparently having some moral issues with it. And since he's already met people unhappy with a brothel being in town, you can understand why he might not want a part of it. But the women are extremely unhappy with John's ideas about possibly turning the place into a rooming-house -- they don't really have anywhere else to go. And he starts telling the bartender in town about his plans, the town's men don't seem very pleased either. But what finally forces his hand is that he only owns the building, and not the land that it's on. That's part of the railroad right-of-way, and they let John's brother keep the building, on the condition that it host a brothel, I'm guessing for the benefit of the people constructing the railroad, but even then I find it hard to believe a railroad would want a brothel on its right of way.

To make matters worse, the movie suddenly switches tone because it needs to have an ending. John gets in a fight at the bar that winds up with someone drawing a gun on him and John shooting the guy dead in self-defense. That guy is one of the Bannister clan, and they've got a bunch of male relatives who are going to be pissed, and try to drive John out of his building and kill him.

However, The Cheyenne Social Club is for the most part one of those amiable westerns that bring a couple of older stars in for some entertainment that's not too taxing. Stewart and Fonda seem like they're generally having a lot of fun, and Shirley Jones and the rest of the supporting cast do a good job in support. There's nothing great here, but nothing terribly wrong other than the sudden plot swerves. Still, it's definitely worth one watch.

Bobbikins

Yet another movie is coming up on FXM Retro that will be getting an early afternoon showing one day, followed by an earlier showing the next day. This time, however, I'm blogging about it before the afternoon showing. Bobbikins is coming up twice in the next couple of days: tomorrow (June 21) at 1:30 PM, and again on Monday (June 22) at 11:50 AM.

British comic actor Max Bygraves plays Ben Barnaby, who at the beginning of the movie is returning from a conscripted stint in the Royal Navy. He's got an American wife Betty (Shirley Jones) and a son he hasn't seen, since he conceived the child before going off to the Navy. Indeed, he doesn't know his wife all that well. But Ben intends for all that to change now that he's back on dry land and out of the Navy. In his pre-Navy life, Ben had worked as a nightclub performer, and he's got a standing offer from a club owner to come back and be the star attraction. This will enable Betty to give up her job as a fashion model and look after the kid. But a strange thing happens. When Ben goes to the club to get his job, he meets the man whose job Ben is going to take. There's an awkward moment. The other guy has much greater hardship than Ben, and since Betty is still working, she can just work a little longer until Ben gets that job. So Ben makes the magnanimous decision not to take the job on offer.

The only thing is, Betty already quit her job, in no uncertain terms, while Ben was at the club where he was as far as Betty knew getting his old job back. What's a young family to do? It doesn't help that things are about to get a whole lot more complicated for Ben. His infant son, who has been nicknamed Bobbikins, starts talking to him! And by talking to him, I don't mean baby talk like mama and dada, but real, fully formed sentences using adult (in the sense of needing an education, not dirty) words. And to make matters worse, Bobbikins declares to Ben that he's only going to talk to daddy, because you know how women gossip. Unsurprisingly, nobody believes Ben when he claims that Bobbikins is talking to him, and everybody treates Ben as though he's having a nervous breakdown or something.

Out of a job and supposedly going nuts, Ben is given the advice to get some fresh air. And take the kid for a walk, since Ben has the time to look after the kid. So Ben goes to a park, which is where Sir Jason (Charles Carson) bumps into him. Sir Jason is the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a mild nonconformist, in that he doesn't have a family of his own, loves children, and likes to take his lunch in the park. So when Sir Jason meets Ben, Sir Jason immediately takes a liking to Bobbikins. And then one of Sir Jason's advisors comes up to him and Ben, and tells the Chancellor that he's going to have to cut the conversation with Ben short because the advisor has some important top secret news for the Chancellor. Ben goes off for a few minutes so the Chancellor can have his conversation in private, but the Chancellor continues to look after Bobbikins since he likes children so much.

Of course, the Chancellor has no idea that Bobbikins talks to Daddy; after all, the idea that an infant this age can talk is preposterous. But Bobbikins hears of a news development that's going to mean an obscure business is going to become big overnight, so he tells Daddy this and tells him to get thee to a stockbroker! Daddy does it, the stock takes off, and the Barnabys become rich. Nobody knows where he's getting his stock tips from, although the authorities quickly figure there has to be a leak somewhere....

Bobbikins is a movie that has a good idea. I couldn't help but think of Francis, in which Donald O'Connor winds up paired with a talking mule, with nobody believing him that the mule can talk. Unfortunately, the execution in Bobbikins is way off. A lot of that, I think, comes down to Bygraves himself, who acts incredibly annoying, mugging for the camera form the scenes where he's supposed to be having a nervous breakdown through the rest of the movie. Shirley Jones tries, but she's got a relatively thankless task and frankly, not much to do. As for the story, it doesn't help that the movie tries to tack on a message that you shouldn't try to get ideas above your station. All in all, Bobbikins really falls flat. But then, even when I don't care for a movie I still think you should judge for yourself. You'll have to catch the FXM Retro showings to see this, since it doesn't seem to be available on DVD.