by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I was in the mood for a big, splashy musical, and
I more or less found one in Coney Island,
a 1943 vehicle for Betty Grable at 20th Century-Fox, which had the
expected virtues — lots of singing and dancing for Grable (the studio had just
pulled the celebrated publicity stunt of having her legs insured for $1 million
by Lloyd’s of London, and not surprisingly they had her do a lot of performing
in short-short outfits to get maximum exposure for those literally million-dollar legs!) and Fox’s usual neon-bright
Technicolor — but also a lot of problems. Like Holiday Inn, the classic musical made at Paramount the year
before, Coney Island’s plot (the
screenwriter was George Seaton, who three years later would write and direct
Grable in one of her best films, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim) is an actively unpleasant story of two men playing
mean, vicious and stupid tricks on each other in order to get into the pants of
the female lead. And whereas at least in Holiday Inn the two men were Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire and
they got to sing and dance to incredible songs by Irving Berlin (when I watch Holiday
Inn I hold my nose through the plot
portions and let myself be dazzled by the great stars doing those great songs),
in Coney Island neither of
Grable’s would-be boyfriends sing or dance. The story begins in Joe Rocco’s
(Cesar Romero) club on Coney Island — depicted here essentially as a giant
carnival midway (anyone who thinks of Coney Island as primarily a beach town is
going to be sorely disappointed — there isn’t a shot of an actual beach, or
even a studio simulacrum of one, anywhere in this film!). He’s running a rather
tacky show whose only real asset is his girlfriend and female star, Kate Farley
(Betty Grable), who’s showcased in a series of typically raucous songs for the
period (the film is nominally set in 1900 but many of the songs were from the
next two decades after that, and the four new songs by Leo Robin and Ralph
Rainger are mostly in a similar style).
The club is crashed by Eddie Johnson
(George Montgomery, annoying as usual, though at least in this role his
character is supposed to be
annoying and therefore his nasty streak is rather appropriate), who was once a
business partner of Rocco until one night, when they each bet their shares of a
traveling circus against each other in a poker game. Rocco presented three aces
and won sole ownership of the show, but then Johnson discovered the cards he’d
hidden to substitute the aces. Rocco sold the circus he’d won by cheating and
used the money to open his Coney Island club, which is frequently visited by a
drunken old Irishman, Finnigan (Charles Winninger — a refugee from considerably
better musicals — including the 1936 Show Boat and the 1939 Babes in Arms, even though his casting as Mickey Rooney’s father in
Babes in Arms makes overacting
seem like a genetic trait!), who interrupts whatever other entertainment is
going on to lead his fellow patrons in a sing-along of “Who Put the Overalls in
Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder?” (It was probably Mr. Murphy just before he walked out on her!) Johnson
blackmails his way into half-ownership of Rocco’s club after Finnigan is hit in
a bar fight and hits his head on the bar rail — he gets Finnigan out of town
and convinces Rocco that his punch killed the old guy — then insists on
remodeling the show so it will be classier and showcase Kate in a way that will
attract upper-class patrons. After this plot point is established the next shot
we see is Kate Farley doing a duet on “Pretty Baby” (a song composed by a Black
Gay singer-pianist named Tony Jackson, whom Jelly Roll Morton remembered from
their days in New Orleans) with a singing, dancing horse (actually two people
in a singularly obvious “horse” costume), and while the scene is entertaining
(and “Pretty Baby” is by far the best song in the film, new or old!) it hardly
seems to represent the step up in Kate’s career George Seaton’s script tells us
it is.
Johnson wants to take Kate out of Rocco’s club into a new one he’s
building on Coney Island — of course he also wants to take Kate out of Rocco’s
arms into his! — and Rocco tries to forestall this by bringing Broadway
producer Bill Hammerstein (Matt Briggs) to the club to discover Kate and sign
her for one of his shows. (Bill Hammerstein really existed; he was the son of Oscar
Hammerstein I and the father of Oscar Hammerstein II — yes, Oscar Hammerstein
II was actually the grandson, not
the son, of I — and the real Hammerstein II would write a series of successful
musicals, and of the seven shows he wrote with Richard Rodgers that were
filmed, six of them were made at 20th Century-Fox.) Only Johnson
gets wind of Hammerstein’s impending arrival and takes Kate for a walk on Coney
Island so she’ll miss the show Hammerstein is scouting and her far less
talented comic-relief sidekick Dolly (Phyllis Kennedy) will go on in her place.
Of course, Hammerstein discovers her anyway — she goes to his Victoria Theatre
to audition and Johnson substitutes himself for Hammerstein’s audition pianist,
though for once he behaves like a nice guy and doesn’t crab her act by deliberately playing badly as we
were expecting him to — and ultimately Kate gets the job with Hammerstein and
gets a big, preposterous dance number called “There’s Danger in a Dance,” which
begins with Kate singing and dancing with a chorus line of men in top hats and
red-lined black capes. The original audiences for this film probably didn’t get
the parallel, but today one can’t help but wonder, “Why is she dancing with a
chorus line of Draculas?” And the night after watching the film The
Delightful Rogue, whose big song is called
“Gay Love,” Charles and I couldn’t help but be amused by the line “a gay
romance” in the “Danger in a Dance” song — looking at the chorus boys Charles
joked, “There’s probably a lot of
Gay romance going on behind her!” The film segues into a blackface number with
four minstrels doing a routine that starts as the spiritual “Deep River” and
goes downhill from there (earlier there’d been a blackface number featuring
Betty Grable called “Miss Lulu from Louisville” in which she was made up to be
about the color of Lena Horne), and the number (choreographed by Fred Astaire’s
assistant, Hermes Pan — he worked out the fabled Astaire-Rogers dances with the
Master and it was he, not Rogers,
who first had to do everything Astaire did only backwards and in high heels;
alas, without Astaire to work with Pan was a pretty simple-minded choreographer
and one aches for what Busby Berkeley could have done with Betty Grable and
these songs) just sort of spirals on and gets more pretentious and less
entertaining as it continues interminably.
Coney Island ends with Johnson and Kate together despite one
final curve ball thrown by Rocco — Kate is about to marry Johnson when a man
shows up from the bank Johnson has applied for a loan for his startup capital
and “accidentally” lets slip to Kate that Johnson’s backing for his new club is
dependent on her turning down Hammerstein’s offer and signing a long-term
contract as Johnson’s star attraction, but later it’s revealed that the “banker”
was an actor Rocco hired to keep Kate from marrying Johnson — and by this time
both Charles and I were convinced Grable’s character would be better off
without either of these creeps
and I joked, “Girl, why don’t you dump them both and marry a jazz trumpeter?”
(Later in 1943 Grable did exactly that in real life; she married Harry James.)
Overall it’s a film that’s entertaining enough but could have been worlds
better if Seaton and the journeyman director, Walter Lang, could have made the
romantic rivalry less nasty and given Grable songs that showed her off better
instead of being either too raucous or too pretentious to suit her. Not that
that mattered; Coney Island was a
mega-hit and Betty Grable renegotiated her 20th Century-Fox contract
and became the highest-paid female entertainer in the world (replacing the
previous record-holder, Bette Davis!); it also got remade as Wabash
Avenue in 1950. Turner Classic Movies host
Robert Osborne told a bizarre anecdote about the two films in his outro: he
said that during the filming of Wabash Avenue Grable told Victor Mature (playing the George
Montgomery role) that the story seemed vaguely familiar, like it was a remake
of a movie she had dim memories of having seen — and Mature had to remind her
that she’d not only seen but had been in the original version!
