The Girl Next Door

Such an obscure '50s Fox musical that I'd never even heard of it (and I know my '50s musicals), and made very late in the cycle of modest entertainments starring the likes of Dan Dailey and June Haver, this one has a few aces up its sleeve. There's a surprising amount of sung exposition at the beginning, under the credits, and later on some very brief singing sequences in the middle of dialogue -- it's as if even standard Fox musicals wanted to be more like their Rodgers and Hammerstein cousins on Broadway. It shows how pervasive the whole musical-comedy mode was back then. Later there are a couple of animated sequences that delve psychologically into the characters' motivations, and of course a dream ballet, and an amusingly overblown production number with Haver, "Nowhere Guy." The story's no great shakes, the songs run from OK to pretty good, and Haver proves again that proficiency at singing and dancing is less vital than personality, which she lacks. Dailey is a likable romantic counterpart, and Cara Williams is an invaluable best-friend-making-tart-comments -- though it's hard to accept that she'd fall for the rabbity face and syrupy tenor of Dennis Day. The utterly '50s production design is fun, and the more thorough musicalizing than usual gives this otherwise standard effort a couple of bonus points. All in all, it's very watchable.