marcslope

This biography of the first famous transsexual has such a bad rep, I was surprised to run across it on TCM and find it's not as bad as all that. The director, Irving Rapper, had a solid record, including "Now, Voyager" and several other Bette Davis melodramas, and the producer, Edward Small, also stretched back to Old Hollywood. So it does rather overdo the soap opera aspects, drenching everything in a slurpy musical score, and it doesn't look right-though we're dealing with the 1940s and 50s, the cars, clothes, and exteriors belong to all sorts of eras. But it seems well intentioned, it's not an exploitation pic, and however fictionalized it is, it grants Christine, who acted as a technical adviser, a modicum of dignity. In a no-name cast, John Hansen does quite well in the title role, and you may recognize a just-starting-out Elaine Joyce as a nasty model. This was an odd moment in Hollywood, the old studio system bumping up against the new wave, and this one seems to want to belong to both. It doesn't entirely work, but it's far from the embarrassment I was expecting.

Paramount biopic of the vaudevillian Eddie Foy and his seven kids benefits from a Shavelson-Rose screenplay (they knew how to write for kids) and some smart casting. Bob Hope, never my favorite, does some convincing emoting and fine song-and-dance, especially a highlight routine with James Cagney, reprising his George M. Cohan. Hope's style seems very close to the little we know about Eddie Foy, and his leading lady, Milly Vitale, is charming. Angela Clarke, billed below her as her stern sister and permanent babysitter, actually has more screen time, and she's good, too. The songs are the songs Foy introduced. Unlike many mid-50s musicals, it's not overproduced, and there's some touching family dynamics amid the wisecracks and song and dance. It's familiar stuff, but well done, and Hope may never have been this good again.

Dully plotted but energetic, this 20th Century Fox musical has more music than most '30s musicals, and some of the songs actually have something to do with the plot. It's a thin premise, with Yale mistakenly challenging tiny Texas State U to a football game, and new TSU coach Jack Haley putting together a winning strategy with the help of his shrill wife, Patsy Kelly, who's less fun than usual here. It's a large cast, with Betty Grable and Elisha Cook Jr. Well down on the list, and 14-year-old Judy Garland in her feature debut, ironically not at MGM. Playing a country bumpkin lured to the college campus to accompany her melon-hurling brother, Stuart Erwin, she has to shoulder some pretty dim comedy (her character, Sairy, changes her name to Murine--"I got it offen a bottle!"), and it takes quite a while to get her singing. But when she does... wow. A young Anthony (not yet Tony) Martin also gets a song, and a quartet called the Yacht Club Boys, who look neither yacht club nor like boys, get several, which they wrote themselves. There's not much suspense over how the Big Game is going to turn out, and the songs aren't MGM quality. But it's lively, the sort of thing David Butler knew how to direct, you'll probably enjoy all the silliness, and you'll certainly love Judy.