Tammy and the Bachelor

A fine film, Tammy and the Bachelor reveals that "B" films often give us more than their bigger, more glossy cousins. Notice what's good about Tammy and the Bachelor, and you will find that nearly everything about it is well-done. First, its script: almost fully visual, it develops three distinct, well-defined characters through set pieces in its first quarter hour, telling us everything we need to know about each -- including personal relationships, all of which are healthy though fully human. There's an absence of sinister intent, malice, self-loathing; Tammy has normal, natural human needs which she expresses with a degree of self-respect which would be disdained by a filmmaker today as naive. Setting is filmed beautifully, simply, naturally well-lit, visually interesting, full of the character which defines the personalities (Tammy the swamp child, Peter the affluent southern gentleman.) Acted superbly: there is no hamming, no larger-than-life glamor which would ring false. Withal, of course, there is little conflict in the film: only Tammy's adolescent coming-of-age in a modern world. But wait: what larger theme is there? All right -- this is not Scenes from a Marriage; Tammy cannot compete with Cabiria; the directing is not David Lean's, and the budget is not Cleopatra's. Reynolds is not Monroe and Nielsen is not Brando. But put them together with Walter Brennan and Fay Wray and a good script and a good cinematographer and the result is this film, which has its own light and sentimental rewards. And a great title song, one of the gems of 1950's screen musings.

It's hard to believe that Debbie Reynolds did this movie 5 years after Singin' In The Rain. It seems like she should have played Tammy 5 years before Singin'.

Reynolds infuses some complexity in the role - check out her sly grin when Leslie Nielsen picks her up in the barn. It's a role that could easily have been annoying to audiences but Reynolds never loses a viewers affections. In the two sequels Sandra Dee came very close to crossing that annoying line.

Besides Reynolds, the other treat is the great cast around her. It was fun to see a young Leslie Nielsen in a straight role as the leading man and Mildred Natwick does her usual excellent job (why did she never get more Oscar recognition). Fay Wray, Walter Brennan, Philip Ober & Sidney Blackmer also do a great job.

The director, Joseph Pevney, should get credit for keeping the story moving forward and not getting bogged down in the corny aspects of the movie. Had i been more than 1 years old when this movie came out, I'm sure it would have been a fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

Debbie Reynolds like so many of contract stars was being cut loose from MGM and she sure was fortunate enough to get this film which turned out to be one of her iconic roles. Debbie Reynolds is really something special as the back woods bayou girl with an uncommon amount of common sense.

In her memoirs she had a lot to say about Tammy. First off she had to watch that crafty old scene stealer Walter Brennan playing her grandfather whom she lives with on the bayou. That man did not win three Oscars for nothing, but fortunately he's only in the film in the first 15 minutes before the revenuers clap him in the pokey.

At that point Reynolds takes up an invitation to stay with Leslie Nielsen's family. She and Brennan had rescued Nielsen from a plane crash near their bayou home on the Mississippi. She had a lot of problems with Nielsen as Leslie at the time was not the lovable oaf Frank Drebbin that we later got to know. He was a rather serious Method actor from New York and he and Reynolds did not mesh well. She took some satisfaction in her memoirs at pointing that at the time she thought Nielsen had a great gift for comedy if he'd relax and forget the Stanislavsky. And by God later on he did.

Finally she notes that the film was initially a flop. But later on she recorded the title song and got a Gold record for it. In the movie The Ames Brothers sing it over the title credits and Reynolds sings it during the film. The popularity of the record caused Universal to re- release the film and it was a smash.

Despite Nielsen's serious demeanor and Brennan's irrepressible scene stealing, no doubt this film belongs to Debbie Reynolds. 56 years after it was first release, Debbie will charm the pants off you in this role. Sad she never did the other two films, but even in this she was pushing it to play a bayou teenager.

But she succeeded, oh how she succeeded.

Recommended to me by a friend, this romantic comedy will enlighten and touch your heart. I thoroughly enjoyed the view of life through Tammy's eyes where we are all reminded of just how much we all take for granted. See it, you won't be disappointed!

This is a movie that is extremely well-made, more-than-decently- acted, and it is a movie with a theme--"be the genuine article". Case in point--Tammy, a girl living on the bayou with her Grandfather in a houseboat, dreaming dreams and never going anywhere. Whatever she is, she is genuine; Tammy speaks her mind, a quick-learning one, and can do many things, although she lacks "book larnin'". And like her spiritual ancestor, Scarlett O'Hara, she wants Life with a capital "L", not a second-rate existence. So that when a handsome pilot crashes near the houseboat and she nurses him back to health, it seems perfectly natural that she and Nan her goat should walk all the way to find him to ask him to return the help, when Grandpa is taken away--not by death as the family of the pilot and he believe but by the authorities, because he has been making corn liquor instead of confining himself to preaching. Once she arrives, Tammy affects the life of every person she encounters from the cook to the real owner of the mansion, a whimsical Aunt who has always wanted to be a painter and live a Bohemian life in New Orleans. While she pursues the pilot, affianced to a stuck-up girl who does not understand him, she gets involved in the great tomato project, the lives of guests and family, the amorous fantasy of Pete's best friend, the annual historical reenactment--wherein Aunt Renie dresses Tammy in a low-cut gown like some modern transforming fairy godmother--and more. All comes out well in the end, since the pilot can no more resist Tammy than anyone else can. So Grandpa is released from jail just in time to see the boy come after Tammy to tell her she's his girl, forever. The cast of this very attractive and color-filled satirical comedy does very well with the material. Fay Wray is thin-lipped as a disapproving mother, Leslie Nielsen is very good as the pilot; Sidney Blackmer would have been Academy Award caliber as the father of this dysfunctional family if the author had given him more lines; Mildred Natwick as the artist aunt, Aunt Renie, has one of her best roles else. Others in the large cast includes Louise beavers as the cook and Craig Hill as the pilot's amorous friend, with Walter Brennan as Grandpa. The cinematography by Albert Arling is glowing and consistent; Bill Thomas's costumes represent another triumph for him in his department. Frank Skinner provided music, while Livingstone and Evans wrote the hit theme song, "Tammy". The art direction by Bill Newberry and Richard H. Riedel is unusually good as is the direction by Joseph Pevney. Credit for the clever screenplay goes to Oscar Brodney, who adapted the novel by Cid Sumner Ricketts on which the on screen events are based.  It can be objected that the event portrayed are not "real". Millions of moviegoer disagreed; the danger in the character of Tammy is that she is a pseudo-religious figure at basis, an "uncorrupted child of nature who brings the sinful rich folks in the big city back to the Lord and honest ways". Only not one element of this dangerously-wrong set of conventional ideas takes place in this film. What happens is that an unspoiled young girl, only somewhat glossy and overly-cute thanks to the author of her novel, comes across on screen in the person of Debbie Reynolds as an very attractive version of the country mouse, the Man From Mars, the outsider--the one who comes in somewhere and by being honest sees through and works to undo the pretensions of everyone she meets. It is not always realistic. although certain scenes are very strong, and the dialogue coming from Tammy is often amusing; but it is more than occasionally heightened realism, which is called 'fiction", a very scarce commodity these past thirty years in case anyone has forgotten what it looks like. The Tammy character as revived in several sequels with some charm but nowhere near the original effect.