by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Three nights ago Charles and I watched Moon Over Miami, a not very “special” but nonetheless entertaining
1941 20th Century-Fox musical reuniting the co-stars of Down
Argentine Way, Betty Grable and Don Ameche
(she had had an explosive success with Down Argentine Way but was still being billed below him!) in a
considerably less splashy but still tuneful and spectacular-looking Technicolor
extravaganza. The ostensible basis of the plot of Moon Over Miami was a British play by Stephen Powys that opened in
London in 1938 (the film credits future director George Seaton — who would make
Grable’s best film, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, five years later — and Lynn Starling with
“adaptation” and Vincent Lawrence and old Warners hand Brown Holmes with
“screenplay”), but the plot has more than a family resemblance to another play,
The Greeks Had a Word for It,
written and premiered by Zoë Akins (the quite interesting writer who was
responsible for the scripts of Katharine Hepburn’s second and third movies, Christopher
Strong and Morning Glory) in 1930 and first filmed by Sam Goldwyn in 1932 —
though the Production Code Administration (even in those so-called “pre-Code”
days!) forced him to change the title to The Greeks Had a Word for Them, and in the definitively post-Code era
of the later 1930’s Goldwyn had to do another title change — to Three
Broadway Girls — to be allowed to reissue
the film.
The imdb.com page on Moon Over Miami lists no fewer than four versions of this same basic
story besides Goldwyn’s Greeks
and this one: Three Blind Mice
(1938), Three Little Girls in Blue
(1946), an Asian film called Kuang Lian (1960) and the most famous of the remakes, How to Marry a
Millionaire (1953) — also a Fox production
and also starring Betty Grable!
(Grable quite frequently appeared in remakes of her old movies; she recalled
years later that some of the dialogue in her 1950 film Wabash Avenue sounded familiar and wondered if she’d seen a film
containing it. Later she found she had been in a film containing it; the writers of Wabash
Avenue had not only recycled the plot of
her 1940 movie Coney Island but
had ripped off some of the lines as well!) And just what about this plot made
it so appealing to generations of moviemakers? Well, Moon Over Miami starts with an unlikely trio — sisters Kay and
Barbara Latimer (Betty Grable and Carole Landis) and their aunt Susan
(Charlotte Greenwood, whose dry wit is a large part of this film’s appeal) —
working as waitresses at “Texas Tommy’s,” a drive-in supposedly famous for its
hamburgers and blue-plate specials (though no one seems to come in for anything
more than coffee, tomato juice and bicarb — obviously the place’s real reputation is as somewhere to go after you’ve been
drinking all night and want to recover from your hangover). The women are expecting
an inheritance of $55,000, but when they receive the check they find that
attorney’s fees and high taxes have reduced the award to $4,000 plus change —
whereupon they hit on the idea (possibly from having seen one of the previous
versions of this story) of using the residual amount they did get to rent a room at a fancy resort in Miami (the
establishment is called the Flamingo, which made me wonder if inveterate
movie-buff Bugsy Siegel had got the idea from it to call his pioneering resort on the Las Vegas Strip the
Flamingo) and see if they can snag rich husbands by posing as rich themselves
for as long as their bankroll holds out.
They run into bellboy and housekeeper
Jack O’Hara (Jack Haley), who hates gold-diggers with a passion and appoints himself
to make sure Kay in particular isn’t entrapped by one — which of course creates
a lot of comic suspense that leaves the girls worried that he’s going to “out”
them as gold-diggers themselves — and at least two of the young rich men who
they went there to target: Jeffrey Boulton (Robert Cummings), whose big party
is now in its third day (though his guests seem so exhausted by the ordeal all
they do is slump in chairs and wonder what they’re going to get to eat); and
his principal guest, Phil McLean (Don Ameche), who when we meet him has a
napkin or towel or something over
his head, reflecting the drunken stupor he’s in. Kay and Barbara go after these
unlikely pigeons and there’s a comic rivalry, sort of like the one in Holiday
Inn but considerably less nasty, in which
Jeffrey and Phil have a speedboat race (a lot of exciting stunt driving by
their doubles) and at one point Jeffrey takes Kay for a ride in a submarine and
Phil turns up staring at them under water (how did he hold his breath that
long?). The studio actually sent a second unit to real resorts in Winter Haven
and Ocala, Florida, and it boosts the entertainment value of the film
considerably, though we do get
the stars performing some not particularly interesting songs by Leo Robin and
Ralph Rainger (low point of the score is a big dance number in which the
principals and chorus are supposedly playing Seminole Indians — watching this
right after reading Steve Inskeep’s Jacksonland, which is mostly about the Cherokee removal in the
1830’s but touches on the Seminoles and their resistance as well, was weird,
and Charles found this more racially offensive than the minstrel numbers that
afflicted too many of the Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland films) and listening to an
undistinguished assemblage of 20th Century-Fox studio musicians
trying to imitate a swing band (the next year Grable would make Springtime
in the Rockies, not a particularly great
movie either, but at least that one had a real swing superstar, Harry James, and Grable was so
taken with him she married him for real) wearing blue suits as they play for a
crowd dressed mostly in blue who are dancing on a blue dance floor. (Remember
that the biggest improvement in three-strip Technicolor over the older
two-strip version was it could photograph blue, so filmmakers took advantage of
that and showed as much blue as they could; even the night skies in this film are a deep, rich blue.)
Eventually Kay gets as far with Boulton as a formal proposal and a chance to
meet his family, but in the end she realizes that it’s Phil she really loves
even though he’s broke — his family did own the McLean steelworks but their business has dwindled down to
nearly nothing (if this had been a Warner Bros. movie she’d have been shown
pushing him to take over the mills and build them back up to their former
repute, but at Fox they couldn’t have cared less about that sort of thing) —
and it’s Barbara who gets Jeffrey, who at the behest of his parents has agreed
to give up his playboy ways and take charge of their company’s operations in
Brazil. As for Aunt Susan, she ends up with Jack O’Hara — after having spent
most of the movie locking him in various bathrooms and closets (in one of the
bathroom there’s a solid wall of little square mirrors, and the door to the
medicine cabinet is concealed in the middle of the array) — given Jack Haley’s
most famous credit, I couldn’t help but joke, “The Wizard of Oz gave me a
heart, and all I could do with it was get Charlotte Greenwood?” Moon
Over Miami is a fun movie, all things
considered, not as entertaining as it could have been but still entertaining
(put Grable in a movie with a better director than Walter Lang — like George
Seaton in The Shocking Miss Pilgrim
or Preston Sturges in the underrated Western spoof The Beautiful
Blonde from Bashful Bend — and she could
rise to the occasion, but for the most part Fox gave her complaisant hacks who
knew how to put her through her paces but not to do much interesting with her),
though it hovers in the shadow of How to Marry a Millionaire, which took place in New York City but otherwise had
the same plot, with Grable repeating her role, Marilyn Monroe taking the Carole
Landis part (and, not surprisingly, bringing a lot more to it) and Lauren Bacall the Greenwood role —
and it also doesn’t help that, while it has some of the same elements as Down
Argentine Way, it doesn’t have Carmen
Miranda (though given how much Latino/a culture there is in Florida she
certainly could have been fit into it) and, instead of the Nicholas Brothers,
we get the Condos Brothers, a couple of white Nicholas Brothers wanna-bes who
are formidable tappers but lack the Nicholases’ incredible acrobatics and
athleticism.
