How to Be Very, Very Popular

Stormy Tornado (Betty Grable) and Curly Flag (Sheree North) are a team of "interpretative dancers" (not "belly dancers" as incorrectly identified by a previous user comment) who witness the murder of Miss Cherry Blossom Wang and are the run from her killer. They pool their money to get on a bus and wind up in College City, still dressed in their stage costumes. They wind up in an all-boys college dorm and the film ensues with a series of not very funny events because of their situation, their lack of dress and Curly being accidentally hypnotized. This is one of Sheree North's first "big" roles (she was offered the part that Marilyn Monroe turned down, and at the time was viewed by Fox as their new "blonde" to replace their unwilling star Marilyn Monroe, who wanted more substantial roles). She delivers a very wooden performance. Betty Grable, on the other hand, made this her last film for Fox. While she delivers a typical sassy performance, she can not float the rest of the cast which is struggling with a really poorly written script. Orson Bean couldn't act his way out of a bag in this film. Tommy Noonan (Eddie) and Robert Cummings (Wedgewood) also deliver a zinger or two, but the film is really uneventful. A film only for die-hard fans of Grable or North.

Betty grable, and what appears to be a marilyn monroe knockoff, sheree north. Two beautiful women, at a college graduation, hiding out from a mob boss. It's all pretty silly. The awesome charles coburn is doctor tweed, and fred clark is in here as marshall. Alice pearce (from bewitched!) is in here as miss sylvester. Bob cummings is the college student who doesn't seem to really belong there. The girls kind of hide out with the college students, some silly sub-plots. The story lines are way over the top, but it's good to see grable and clark in their roles. Sadly, alice pearce will die so young at 48 from cancer. Apparently, the real m. Monroe refused to take part in this film, and this was also the last film role for grable; she, monroe, and fred clark had just made how to marry a millionaire. It's fun, but goofy. So goofy, they hardly ever show this one. One of the films where north allegedly filled in for a marilyn monroe.

Unlike the others who have commented on this film, I really enjoyed it. It is on my personal top-10 list of comedies. I like the fact that the two female stars (Grable and North) do not spend the whole movie prancing around in their skimpy dancing costumes--this is a comedy, not soft-core porn! I especially enjoyed the performance by Mr Coburn, who played the president of the college. His scenes, especially the one where he all-but-ignores the beautiful girl (North) on his lap while he fondly recalls an amorous episode from his own student days, make the movie for me. I did not know anything (before reading it here) about the Marilyn Monroe connection to this film, but I am glad she did not appear in it, as I have always thought her over-rated, both as a beauty queen and as an actress. Miss North was far better for the part. It has been at least 10 years since I last saw this, but I still remember much of it, and would gladly watch it again.

Anemic non-musical remake of 1934's "She Loves Me Not" stars Betty Grable and Sheree North as "hoochie koochie" dancers in San Francisco who take it on the lam after witnessing a shooting at their dive in Chinatown; seeking refuge in a college fraternity house, North is inadvertently hypnotized by an amateur psychology major. Written by producer-director Nunnally Johnson, who based his screenplay on Benjamin Glazer's '34 version, which was itself an adaptation of both Ed Hope's book and Howard Lindsay's play, later reworked in 1942 as "True to the Army" (!). With such a lopsided pedigree, it isn't any wonder why the finished results are so tepid. Terrible acting, ugly décor, poor cinematography (from the usually-reliable Milton Krasner), and lunkhead attempts at 'modern' humor cause this Twentieth Century Fox dud to look like hand-me-down goods. It also served as Grable's final bow--some actors just know when it's time to get out (and one can hardly keep from laughing when chorine Betty is described as a dancer in her twenties!). Unrelievedly noisy and dull. * from ****

With all the violence and utter filth passing as "art" coming out these days (and I don't mean the sexual sort, I mean actual filth- like graphic displays of meanness in all it's forms), how can anyone say THIS is a bad movie?! No, it's not. It's not bad AT ALL.

I like this. Haven't finished yet, but I'm confident I'll still feel the same by the end, cause the fact is, a movie of this era and type just wasn't capable of being bad- ever. And anyone who thinks it is just has no idea what an actual "bad movie" is!

But yes, this harmless bit of cute fun is what passed for "bad" back in the day, and that we today still label it as such when we should know better by now is a real shame.

GOOD movie.