Three Sailors and a Girl

Warner Brothers musical Three Sailors And A Girl is based, very loosely based I might add on the George S. Kaufman play The Butter And Egg Man that ran on Broadway during the Twenties. It was one of Kaufman's earliest successes and one he did without a collaborator, unusual for him. It was the Navy participation in this film that was original.

Otherwise the plot has some down and out producer suckering a country yokel out of a lot of money to produce his show. In the film, the yokel is a sailor played by Gordon MacRae with a stern sense of morality, rather unusual for someone in the Navy. The crew has been on active duty for almost a year and their back pay which they've been unable to spend amounts to a considerable nest egg. While on Wall Street looking for an investment, MacRae, Gene Nelson, and Jack E. Leonard run into producer Sam Levene and he gets the boys to invest in his show. And the attraction is leading lady Jane Powell who falls for Gordon big time.

No big hits come from the score written by Sammy Fain and Sammy Cahn, but the numbers are serviceable to the plot. MacRae and Powell make a good team musically, too bad they were at different studios and didn't do more films together, Powell was on loan from MGM. Gene Nelson was as always great in the dance numbers, I've said it before on other of his films I've reviewed, he came along ten years too late, what a really big dancing star he would have been.

Jack E. Leonard was an early version of Don Rickles. I remember seeing him many times on the Ed Sullivan Show as a kid. His character was interesting, but too bad we didn't get one of his insult monologues for which he was so famous.

Part of the plot involves MacRae taking over the show and making a holy hash of it and Jane Powell calling in George Abbott, Ira Gershwin, and Moss Hart to contribute their talents to save the show. The real people weren't in Three Sailors And A Girl, just actors playing them. But as the show originated with George S. Kaufman, had all these people put their talents into this film for real, we might have seen a real classic unfold.

The mind boggles at the possibility.