Beautiful But Broke

When I was a kid, I LOVE LUCY was the big comedy on TV, but in my household we watched I MARRIED JOAN, starring Joan Davis. Lucy was a beautiful woman who occasionally went crazy, particularly when things fell apart. Joan Davis was crazy from the beginning and much funnier from start to finish. Besides, I had relatives like her.

Columbia came out with this girl's musical co-starring Joan and Jane Frazee, who had just gone through a phase as Universal's teen-aged songbird when Deanna Durbin went adult. It's towards the end of the war, so all the bands have gone to war, as has Joan's, leaving her to book the acts. So she promotes some girl bands.

There are some excellent numbers, including a fine rendition of "Shoo-Shoo Baby", and it's all big-band boogie-woogie. Lively, tuneful and funny, it's a perfect artifact of its period.

Joan Davis was an unknown name, but Kansas City Kitty made me notice her, and then I got hold of this one, and I don't regret. If there is one who could pull it off, it would have to be some one like her of Russel - both I found to have charm and superb sense of timing (and silliness) - which is mandatory in screwball comedies. But before that, I had never been an aficionado of Lucille, I know it is a very rare case, even in 'I Love Lucy' series, so I will keep her out of my list of Supers. But where Rosalind excelled, thanks to her status and 'A movies, Joan was handicapped. In this movie, what was wrong was the conceptualization (i.e. direction), and with that weakness, how many actors can pull it through? This had been an out at out Joan's movie - yes others, and bigger stars, like Jane Frazee were there, but though they did get screen time, but couldn't manage to grab the presence, and in addition, the songs, or even the choreography, wasn't really top notch. Even without that, the movie could have pulled through, except two areas- one is personal - even for me - she was a lovely presence, young too - she wasn't looking like one who had to almost assault a man for a $10 Kiss- probably a man should have been there for her too. Second, as some one pointed, the interminable carpenter sequence. It was really interminable. Trying to bring slapstick into a perfectly timed screwball, is an offence, and the director did exactly that, and so much of that, that I had to fast forward it, and gladly missed tens of minutes of that. Of course even after skipping it, the ending was a bit contrived - there was really not much chemistry with Rollo, at least to have this ending.

Poor direction, but still, Joan almost made it into watchable.

Not much of a movie in overall aesthetic terms, but a real charmer with a lot of good swing music, capably sung by Jane Frazee and Judy Clark, and a great performance by Joan Davis. She appears equally capable of getting laughs from slapstick and dialogue, and through much of the movie she reminded me of Rosalind Russell's comic side in her sheer energy and indomitability. It's also got some good comic supporting performances by John Eldredge and the marvelous Byron Foulger, and the early scene in which the girls are trying to sing along to a record and it gets stuck eerily anticipates the performance glitch that undid Milli Vanilli (you remember). The ending is a bit of a patriotic cop-out but the film overall is a lot of fun and well worth seeing.