Probably the United Kingdom's most popular entertainer during the Thirties was Gracie Fields. She came over to the USA in the early Forties partly as a hands across the sea goodwill gesture and partly because of a scandal involving her new husband Monty Banks, real name Bianchini. Italians were not real popular over in the UK then, they were as bad as Germans, they never reached that degree of odiousness in the USA during World War II as Germans or Japanese.
In any event the American movie-going public got a real treat to see what our allies on the other side of the pond had been seeing for years. Molly And Me is very typical of the kind of character Fields did over there, the bright and chirpy working class woman with an every ready smile and song who solves everyone's problems. I only wish her work were more available here.
In any event out of work actress Gracie takes a job as a housekeeper for the rich and stuffy Monty Woolley who is expecting his son Roddy McDowall home. He and McDowall are distant from each other and while he's told Roddy that mother is dead, she in the person of Doris Lloyd is very much alive and living a sleazy life, divorced from Woolley. Monty wants to keep Lloyd away from their son.
When she arrives there after being hired by Reginald Gardiner the butler who is also a former thespian, Fields finds wholesale thievery among the staff and sacks the lot of them. She then hires a bunch of her former mates from the stock company she was with. Let's just say a whole lot of problems are solved before the film ends.
Gracie got to work with a few members of the British colony in America in Molly And Me. Yet the film from 20th Century Fox really did have the look and feel of one of her British films.
Despite good performances from Woolley, McDowall, and Gardiner, Molly And Me is totally a Gracie Fields production. I'm just glad this is available for American audiences. Do not miss this or any other of her work should TCM broadcast it.
