The Girl from Manhattan

This B-picture from 1948 doesn't really do anything to showcase anyone's talent, and it's a wonder Charles Laughton even made an appearance. Perhaps he was trapped by a contract or made someone at the studio mad. This is one of those "colorful characters in a small town" movie that doesn't leave a lasting impression and doesn't really endear you to any one of the colorful characters.

George Montgomery takes the lead as a football player turned reverend, and as he returns to his small town, he gets mentored by Charles Laughton, a bishop. Dorothy Lamour, who usually is only put in a movie because of her good looks, isn't given much of a love story-since her love interest is a man of the cloth. She has her own little hurdles to handle while she's in town, since she is the titular character and not used to small-town life, but I can't really remember any of them. Unless you love Dorothy and want to sit through all her movies, even the bad ones, I wouldn't recommend you watch this one tonight.

Playing the title role of The Girl From Manhattan is Dorothy Lamour who came over from Paramount to do this independent film released by United Artists. Her leading man here is George Montgomery slipping out of his western and action features to play a young minister assigned to a parish by Bishop Charles Laughton. Montgomery is excited about going to a parish which is about to get a brand new spanking church. The problem is that it is going to be built on the site of a boardinghouse which Ernest Truex owns. Truex is also Dorothy Lamour's uncle.

Montgomery is urged to board there by Laughton for a bit and he's caught in quite a dilemma. Of course that's nothing compared to the jackpot Truex is in. His generous easy going ways have put him in debt to Raymond Largay. In fact the only two guests that are paying regular are Lamour and Montgomery. The rest to be brutally frank are a gang of deadbeats. But they are delightful deadbeats like Constance Collier, Hugh Herbert, Frank Orth and more. It's just like the Vanderhof house in You Can't Take It With You.

Truex's jackpot is similar to the one Lionel Barrymore is in in the Frank Capra film. The tone here is far more whimsical than the one George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart took with their story. I wish there had been more of Charles Laughton. He isn't given much to do, but does create an interesting character in his Bishop with very little to work with.

The Girl From Manhattan is a pleasant bit of viewing, but could have been better.

The edges of this movie are tolerable. You have some fine, easily recognized actors doing some amusing bits, including Charles Laughton, Hugh Herbert, and George Chandler. The characters in the boarding house, eccentric misfits, are sweet and amusing.

The problem is the center of the movie. Why would anybody put Dorothy Lamour, one of the sexiest and most beautiful women in the world in 1948, in a movie where her leading man is a priest? Lamour is stripped of all sexiness and there's not a hint of desire in any of her scenes with George Montgomery (Rev. Tom Walker). The only emotions that she's allowed to display next to the priest is some nostalgia for their youthful friendship and a bit of anger that he doesn't help her to save her uncle's boarding house.

What should have been the center of the movie, Lamour seducing the new priest from his vows, gets sublimated into the priest trying to decide if he can be as good a priest as his dead father.

The movie is simply annoying most of the time. The sets, costumes, direction and editing are on the level of a bad, cheap, 1950's television episode. I kept checking how much time was left every five minutes.

George Montgomery, Dorothy Lamour and Charles Laughton fans might want to sit through it for the sake of cinematic completeness. Everyone else will have a difficult time making it to the end.

Back in 1987 Charles Laughton's biographer Simon Callow cited this sub-Capra fluff as the Laughton film absolutely nobody had ever seen. Talking Pictures has once again come to the rescue and one can now see exactly why it resides in such obscurity.

Although named for Dorothy Lamour's character the real star is George Montgomery as a virile former sportsman turned clergyman, whom Laughton sagely advises to "Try for that touchdown" when Montgomery comes to the aid of little man Ernest Truex threatened with foreclosure.

Ironically the villain of the piece is in cahoots with a bigger, flashier church; a lesson today's evangelicals could learn from.

The Girl from Manhattan (1948)

I feel like an ogre saying this is a goodie-goodie movie, and that is just a bore. It isn't bad deep down, not in any one way, and it moves along reasonably, the acting fine if unexciting, the filming solid if routine. But none of it is exceptional, even the leading role played by the title character, the super model of 1947 (in the movie): Dorothy Lamour. Charles Laughton as the bishop is impeccable but he's purely secondary.

What holds it back most is just the story, about some people who are misfits and yet lovable in their quirks, and who are facing eviction from their old boarding house. The local church, of all things, wants the land where they live and a local real estate bad guy is orchestrating the eviction. All of this has shades of two Frank Capra movies, "It's a Wonderful Life" (with the community pulling together to save a good, selfless man and his house) and the rather zany "You Can't Take It with You" (with a nutty family all living together being nutty and oblivious to the real world). But the writing here is neither impassioned enough, nor funny enough, nor just plain original and warm enough to rise above. It trods along dutifully.

The main character beside Lamour is a man who seems to have the poise and good looks to take command of his leading role but he is just lifeless on screen, and that's George Montgomery. I don't think even Jimmy Stewart (who was in both the Capra movies, by coincidence) could have lifted up this whole affair, but you can picture a much more moving and convincing and entertaining movie with him in Montgomery's place.

Of course, we know whose side we are on. The story of these good people being threatened by greed makes you root for them against the church meanies (shades of "The Bishop's Wife" also appears in this aspect). But I had to keep consciously trying to get involved, which isn't how a movie should work. I wanted to like it. Even the dramatic turning point toward the end is dull as old bread, in the writing and the delivery. The director, Alfred E. Green, is known for quantity over quality, and is really a 1930s director, which might say something about his approach in filming as well as subject matter. Though he helped Bette Davis launch her career in 1935, by 1948 he was at the end of his career in films. It's nothing much, enjoyable if you are open to something sweet and plain.