She Learned About Sailors

"She Learned About Sailors" is a bad film and the only reason to see it is, possibly, to see Alice Faye in one of her earliest movies. Apart from that...skip it!

Larry (Lew Ayres) and his two idiot friends have just arrived in Shanghai. They are sailors on shore leave and Larry the ladies man immediately goes into wolf mode when he sees Jean (Faye)...badgering and sexually harassing her until she agrees to go out with him. Despite this, the pair get along great and soon they are talking about marriage. However, later Larry realizes being a Navy wife is a lousy life and sends her a letter telling her it's off (a classy move, I know). However, the idiot friends decide to intervene and they intercept the letter and write one instead...and soon Jean is head over heels in love with Larry and is going to head to the States to be with him. Surprise, surprise, however, when she arrives and sees him with another woman! Soon the idiots get involved again and to try to take care of the problem, they do what idiots do...they lie even more.

This is a terrible story. It never makes sense, it's about as romantic as psoriasis and it is a shame as Ayres and Faye are good actors...but it's not apparently in this bilge.

Larry Wilson (Lew Ayres) was a sailor and a ladies' man. On shore leave he could get any woman he wanted. While on shore leave in Shanghai where Americans called the Chinese "cooley" and yelled "chop chop" to get the rickshaw drivers to move faster, Larry won the heart of Jean Legoi (Alice Faye), a singer at a club. He employed the stalking and harassing style of courtship whereby the woman ends up bargaining with the man just to get him to leave her alone, then, invariably, she falls in love with him. Larry was the type who didn't take no for an answer--which was pretty much every successful loverboy in the 30's. They would stalk and harass until they broke down the woman's defenses. In this case Larry showed up in Jean's dressing room and her home. Four days later they were in love.

"She Learned About Sailors" was a bad romance and an even worse comedy. If we weren't watching the Don Juan who'd finally found "the one," we were assailed by the violent physical comedy of Jack Durant and Frank Mitchell who played Eddie and Peanuts. It really was a forgettable rom-com. It had the look and feel of a speedily churned out movie just to meet a quota.

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The extremely beautiful (and sexy) Alice Faye has long been underrated as an actress and a singer. One of the best moments of film acting I've ever seen was Faye's big scene in "Alexander's Ragtime Band", as the former girlfriend of bandleader Tyrone Power who has come to attend a performance of his Army show in the hopes of going backstage afterwards to tell him she loves him after all and she's decided to take him back. The show ends with a stirring finale, as Power and his cast (all in uniform) march up the theatre's gangway singing "We're on our way to France". The show has ended every performance with this number. Faye's great scene comes at the moment when she realises that this time it isn't an act: Power and the other soldiers are marching directly from here to a troopship, and if she can't get through the theatre crowd in time to say goodbye to him, he'll never know how she really feels... Faye's emotional response is riveting, and absolutely believable.

Sadly, for most filmgoers, Alice Faye is either altogether forgotten or a camp icon. In the original screenplay for 'The Last of Sheila', Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins made a cheap joke about Alice Faye's name being pig-Latin for 'phallus'. She deserves better.

'She Learned about Sailors', regrettably, is typical of the fare that 20th Century-Fox usually lumbered Faye with. She plays a nightclub chantoozey in Shanghai, although 'Shanghai' looks just like one of Fox's low-budget Chinatown sets. The later action shifts to Stateside ... which also looks like one of Fox's sets, but not quite so low-budget.

The great delight of this film is the knockabout comedy team of Mitchell and Durant, as two sailors who play a 'joke' on Faye and their shipmate Lew Ayres. Short stocky Frank Mitchell and tall urbane Jack Durant were a vaudeville act whose turn consisted of bizarre acrobatics and violent knockabout, with Durant picking up Mitchell and flinging him all over the stage. They first made their impression on film in 'Stand Up and Cheer'. Like a lot of other vaudeville acts, they soon discovered that the act they'd honed for years on the vaude circuit would get stale very fast on the movie screen.

In 'She Learned about Sailors', blessedly, Mitchell and Durant get to perform *two* knockabout routines, and these are classic examples of vaudeville pratfall humour. This film and 'Stand Up and Cheer' used up all their material. Afterwards, Mitchell drifted out of showbiz. Durant, a handsome man who strongly resembled Clark Gable (and who could have worked as Gable's stand-in if he'd signed with MGM), drifted through several more films, playing bit roles with no lines, such as his brief appearance as a lighthouse engineer in 'Captain January'. When Mae West left Paramount for Fox, Durant briefly dated her ... but it was a publicity stunt to hype her fading career and give him some name value.

Alice Faye sings pleasantly (and briefly) in 'She Learned about Sailors', but none of her material here is memorable. Harry Green does his usual annoying little Jewish guy routine, this time hiding behind a Spanish name. I'll rate this movie 6 out of 10, mostly for those two comedy turns.

I thought that this film would be one of the typical Fox musicals that they churned out in their 30s,alas no.Apart from one number near the beginning there is nothing.Nor is there much in the way of plot.I can only suppose that in order to get round this problem Fox decided to engage the services of Mitchell & Durant to fill in the gaps.I had fortunately never seen this pair before and i will make sure that i never see them again.I suppose the only way to describe them was an unsubtle version of The Three Sttoges.The "humour" of the dreadful duo seem to comprise of finding as many different variations as they could of hitting each other.For anyone interested in Alice Faye this film is a waste of time.As for Lew Ayres how far had he fallen from All Quiet to have to appear in this mess.Given that M & D are on screen for the majority of time this film is only for their fans or more likely fan.Otherwise give this a miss.

Although Alice Faye is in great voice and sings a very good number, Here's The Key To My Heart, in She Learned About Sailors the film itself is a rather dopey one about the romance of a café singer and Navy enlisted man when they meet in Shanghai.

Shanghai was a big port of call for our Navy in Kuomintang China, we had Marines stationed there for most of the years between the World Wars. The sailor in this film is Lew Ayres who even warbles a few unmemorable notes in passing.

Sad to say though other than Alice's singing, She Learned About Sailors will not go down as one of her memorable films. Lew Ayres is unfortunately saddled with a pair of stumble-bum comics, Frank Mitchell and Jack Durant, who are constantly interfering one way or the other with their buddy's romance. The film is really all about them and their interference.

Alice did manage to record Here's the Key to My Heart before Darryl F. Zanuck lowered the boom on her recording career. The record she does with it is a good one and it has the added attraction of Alice being backed by Rudy Vallee and the Connecticut Yankees with Rudy making an unbilled appearance on the record.

But take it from me folks, the record Alice made is far better than the film the song came from.