marcslope

Paramount biopic of the vaudevillian Eddie Foy and his seven kids benefits from a Shavelson-Rose screenplay (they knew how to write for kids) and some smart casting. Bob Hope, never my favorite, does some convincing emoting and fine song-and-dance, especially a highlight routine with James Cagney, reprising his George M. Cohan. Hope's style seems very close to the little we know about Eddie Foy, and his leading lady, Milly Vitale, is charming. Angela Clarke, billed below her as her stern sister and permanent babysitter, actually has more screen time, and she's good, too. The songs are the songs Foy introduced. Unlike many mid-50s musicals, it's not overproduced, and there's some touching family dynamics amid the wisecracks and song and dance. It's familiar stuff, but well done, and Hope may never have been this good again.

Dully plotted but energetic, this 20th Century Fox musical has more music than most '30s musicals, and some of the songs actually have something to do with the plot. It's a thin premise, with Yale mistakenly challenging tiny Texas State U to a football game, and new TSU coach Jack Haley putting together a winning strategy with the help of his shrill wife, Patsy Kelly, who's less fun than usual here. It's a large cast, with Betty Grable and Elisha Cook Jr. Well down on the list, and 14-year-old Judy Garland in her feature debut, ironically not at MGM. Playing a country bumpkin lured to the college campus to accompany her melon-hurling brother, Stuart Erwin, she has to shoulder some pretty dim comedy (her character, Sairy, changes her name to Murine--"I got it offen a bottle!"), and it takes quite a while to get her singing. But when she does... wow. A young Anthony (not yet Tony) Martin also gets a song, and a quartet called the Yacht Club Boys, who look neither yacht club nor like boys, get several, which they wrote themselves. There's not much suspense over how the Big Game is going to turn out, and the songs aren't MGM quality. But it's lively, the sort of thing David Butler knew how to direct, you'll probably enjoy all the silliness, and you'll certainly love Judy.

The director labored at Fox for some four decades, turning out entertainments of variable quality, but generally at least well-engineered. This 1952 drama, one of so many nostalgia entries studios were turning out at the time, shows him paying unusual attention to detail. The compositions are beautiful, and the screenplay, by Allan Scott from a novel, goes deeper than the genre generally did. David Wayne, absolutely superb, is the barber who arrives in a small Illinois town shortly before the turn of the century and spends the next 50 years there, starting a family, making mistakes, and genuinely growing in character. Jean Peters, his bride, gets top billing but is out of the movie 45 minutes in. They have a believable marriage, where the shortcomings of both cause tragedy, and the framing device, the town's 50th anniversary, brings about a very satisfying ending. It's a little uneven--Nellie's changes of mood are too quick, and Ben's withholding of knowledge from her frustrating--but it has unusual gravity and candor for studio product of the time. A generally no-name supporting cast does fine, and you also get a healthy glimpse of Alan Hale Jr., a decade-plus before "Gilligan's Island." He'd just starred in a Judy Canova musical, "Honeychile," and he's much better here.