by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was My Blue
Heaven, fourth and last in the 20th
Century-Fox boxed set of Betty Grable (it’s listed as “Volume 1,” which raises
the hope that there’s a Volume 2 out there that might have some of her more
interesting movies, including her best film, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, as well as the bizarre comedy Western The
Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend in which Preston Sturges directed her) along with Down Argentine Way (a great film, though it’s the contributions of
Carmen Miranda and the Nicholas Brothers more than Grable’s work that make it
so), Moon Over Miami and The
Dolly Sisters. I had thought My Blue
Heaven would have been made in
the 1940’s and would have been a biopic of songwriter Walter Donaldson, who
wrote the song after which it was named (and Gene Austin’s 1927 recording of
“My Blue Heaven” was the best-selling record of anything until Bing Crosby released Irving Berlin’s “White
Christmas” 15 years later) and whose harmonically interesting and quirky songs
were particularly good vehicles for Bix Beiderbecke (many of Bix’s best records
with Paul Whiteman — “Changes,” “What Are You Waiting For, Mary?,” “Reaching
for Someone,” “Out-of-Town Gal” — were of Donaldson songs, and Bix also
recorded Donaldson’s “Oh, Baby” with the Wolverines and “Borneo” with Frank
Trumbauer). Even a biopic that outrageously flouted or ignored the facts of
Donaldson’s life would have been fun given all the many wonderful songs he
wrote. Alas, that’s not what 20th
Century-Fox did; instead they bought just the title and the rights to that one
song, and based the film on a story called “Stork Don’t Bring Babies” by S. K.
Lauren, which was worked up into a script by Claude Binyon and old 20th
Century-Fox hand Lamar Trotti. They also assigned Henry Koster to direct;
Koster, a German expat who came to the U.S. less to flee Hitler than to keep
working after the German branch of Universal was shut down, signed on to
Universal’s parent company in the U.S. and almost immediately had a hit in Three
Smart Girls, the 1936 musical that
catapulted Deanna Durbin to overnight stardom. He mostly made sprightly
modern-dress musicals after that, both at Universal and at MGM (where fellow
expat Joe Pasternak, producer of Three Smart Girls and most of Universal’s Durbin hits, had relocated
in the early 1940’s), and got a major career boost when Sam Goldwyn hired him
to take over The Bishop’s Wife (1947) after the original director, hacky William Seiter, had bombed.
(Originally Cary Grant was cast as the bishop and David Niven as the angel who
came from heaven to help him out, but when Koster took over he insisted on
switching the roles.)
He ended up at Fox in 1950 and was on Grable’s
immediately preceding movie before this, Wabash Avenue — during the shooting Grable said her dialogue
sounded familiar, like it had come from a movie she’d seen, and later she
learned it was from a movie she’d been in: the writers had just recycled lines from Grable’s role in the 1940
film Coney Island — though later Fox
inexplicably assigned him historical and Biblical spectaculars like The
Robe, Désirée (about a paramour of
Napoleon, played by Jean Simmons — the Napoleon was Marlon Brando, who had to
do the film for free after Fox sued him for walking out on a previous movie, The
Egyptian, and he and Simmons both
spent much of their time joking about how bad it was), A Man Called Peter and The Virgin Queen (Bette Davis’ second “go” at playing Queen
Elizabeth I of England). The relatively light material of My Blue Heaven was far closer to what Koster did best, and the
film as a whole is a bizarre mixture of musical and soap opera that if it were
remade today would probably end up on Lifetime. Jack and Kitty Moran (Dan
Dailey and Betty Grable) are a married couple who appear together on a radio show
that’s supposedly loosely based on their own lives (sort of like George Burns
and Gracie Allen, though nowhere near as funny!) but is mostly an excuse for
them to sing and dance … yes, that’s right, they’re dancers on radio, but since this is a movie and we’d rather see
them move than just stand stock still in front of microphones, that’s not
especially bothersome. In the opening scene, Kitty visits her doctor, gets a
mysterious list of recommendations, then heads for the studio where her show is
broadcast and makes a few confusing ad libs to the script that send Jack into a state of
perplexity — until he realizes at last that what his wife is telling him is
that she’s pregnant and expects their baby to be born around Christmas. Only on
their way back from a pretty wild party to celebrate the news, hosted by their
show’s writers Walter and Janet Pringle (David Wayne and Jane Wyatt), Jack is
warned not to drive — he’s already several sheets to the wind — and Kitty takes
the wheel but is involved in a bad accident. She recovers O.K. but she loses
the baby she was carrying and is told by her doctor that in all likelihood
she’ll never be able to be pregnant again.
The Morans get an offer to do a TV
show and seek out the Pringles to write it — even though the Pringles are
living in semi-retirement in a farm community — and when the Morans get to
their home they’re confronted by four Pringle kids doing a Hallowe’en show and
lamenting that, with all the other holidays Irving Berlin wrote songs about, he
never did one about Hallowe’en. (The Hallowe’en number, though derivative of
the even better one in Meet Me in St. Louis, is still one of the best parts of the movie.) They
learn that only two of the Pringle children are theirs biologically; the others
were adopted — the oldest when the Pringles got tired of waiting for the
biological lottery, and the youngest when a girl of their acquaintance got “in
trouble” and the Pringles agreed to take her baby off her hands. Accordingly
the Morans decide they, too, will adopt — and first they try to do so through a
legal agency, only Mrs. Johnston (Laura Pierpont), the agency’s head, doesn’t
trust actors with her children. She lets the Morans have a baby boy on a
probationary basis, but then takes the kid away when the Pringles throw another
drunken party (one would have thought they’d have learned their lesson!) to
celebrate the new arrival right when Mrs. Johnston and her helpers, Miss
Gilbert (Una Merkel) and … no, not Miss Sullivan but another woman, are
dropping by for a visit with the child. Mrs. Johnston steadfastly and
implacably tells the Morans that they have broken her trust in them, and
repossesses the boy. Then the Pringles get a lead on a baby girl who’s
available for illegal underground adoption; they arrange for the Morans to go
to a roadhouse where they meet a slimy lawyer (John Burton) who’s willing to
arrange for them to adopt the girl, since the mother consents and the father
abandoned her anyway. The Morans do their TV show and it’s an instant hit, but
the pressures of child-rearing and Kitty’s decision to fire their
hatchet-faced, imperious nurse, Mrs. Bates (Minerva Urecal) on the eve of a
show force her to give up her co-starring TV role to fellow dancer Gloria Adams
(Mitzi Gaynor in her first feature-length film (her only previous credit was as
Peggy Hendricks, billed as “Mitzi Gerber,” in a 1949 short called It’s Your
Health). Alas, Gloria has in mind
not only temporarily replacing Kitty Moran on the show but permanently replacing her in Jack’s life, and she gets him as
far as a deep kiss (deep enough to leave lipstick) before Kitty arrives at the
studio and goes into a jealous fury. Kitty returns to performing but gets a
panicky phone call during the program, right after she and Jack have done a
pretty strange spoof of South Pacific that required him to sing in a deep bass voice to sound like Ezio
Pinza, from her all-wise Black maid Selma (Louise Beavers).
It seems that the
baby girl’s biological father, who never signed away his parental rights, has returned and wants “their”
child back. The Morans are told by an attorney that in general courts bend over
backward to reunite children with their birth parents in cases like this, and
they end up childless again until [spoiler alert! — not that you couldn’t guess at the ending if
you’d seen more than about eight movies in your life], first Mrs. Johnston
reappears, decides she misjudged the Morans and presents them with the boy they
were going to adopt in the first place. Then that sleazy lawyer drops the case
against the Morans over the girl Kitty had been shown raising through much of
the second half of the film, and the Morans get to keep her. And finally, Kitty
and Jack do a number for their TV show which is supposed to feature them on a
rocking platform, representing an ocean liner at sea, only Kitty looks even
queasier and more nauseous than she’s supposed to and after the show she goes
to her doctor, who tells her — you guessed it — that she is once again pregnant
au naturel. (This is one of those
movies that makes you wonder when the protagonists, who’ve been shown either
performing together or fighting with each other, carved out enough time to have
sex.) My Blue Heaven is
enjoyable as it stands but it’s the sort of movie that could have been much
better. One of Betty Grable’s great professional frustrations was that she
never got to work with Fred Astaire, and at one point Fox offered the part of
Jack Moran to him and also to James Cagney, either of whom would have vastly
surpassed Dan Dailey in star power and charisma. Though one of the things l
like about older movies is their economy of running time — this lasts 96
minutes and tells a story for which a modern filmmaker would probably take an
hour more than that — this one suffers from it in that the writers bring up
major plot issues and then suddenly drop them. During the brief times we see
Mitzi Gaynor off-stage there are hints that she’s a manipulative Eve
Harrington-esque bitch determined to do Kitty out of both her stardom and her husband — but that pretty much disappears in
the final third. (All About Eve was being made at the same studio, 20th Century-Fox, in the
same year, 1950.)
Also the songs were by Harold Arlen, with lyrics by Ralph
Blane (Hugh Martin’s collaborator on the dazzling songs for Meet Me in St.
Louis), only this was Arlen the
craftsman rather than Arlen the master; the songs are serviceable vehicles for
the dancing and singing of the leads (in that order because both Grable and
Dailey were considerably better dancers than they were singers) but none are
particularly memorable and they have the burden of competing with the Walter
Donaldson standard after which the film was named. There’s an hilarious montage
of all the different ways Jack and Kitty Moran perform “My Blue Heaven” on
their program — which led me to joke they should have had Betty Grable turn to
the camera and say, “Tune in next week and see how we do ‘My Blue Heaven’ then.” There’s also a marvelous number in which Grable,
at home, is watching Dailey and Gaynor do the big number that had been written
for her, “Live Hard, Work Hard,
Love Hard” (which anticipates by three years the “Girl Hunt” ballet sequence in
The Band Wagon by casting Dailey as a
private eye and Gaynor as one of the two women in his life), and as Grable
watches she casts nasty looks at the screen and turns the lyrics into her own
determination to keep her husband and not let this obnoxious woman vamp him.
Interestingly, all the TV’s shown in this film are color even though color TV
(except for a few experimental systems) hadn’t been invented yet; CBS had a
color system in the early 1950’s but it was incompatible — you couldn’t see the
broadcasts, even in black-and-white, if you didn’t have a CBS color set — and
NBC successfully got the FCC to delay implementing color until 1957, when they
introduced a compatible-color system (which meant if you didn’t have a color
set you could still watch the programs — you just couldn’t see them in color).
I’m old enough to remember when color TV was still an exotic rarity and getting
to see it was a special event, and one of my favorite old-Hollywood stories was
the one about Roy Disney, Walt Disney’s brother and the financial manager of
the Disney companies, telling him, “Why’d you waste all that money shooting the
Davy Crockett TV shows in color? TV
isn’t in color!” — to which Walt just smiled and said, “It will be.”
Interestingly, the best aspect of My Blue Heaven is Betty Grable’s acting; though she wasn’t a great actress this script stretched her more than most
of her films did, and when she’s called upon to portray grief over losing her
various chances to give birth and to adopt, she’s quite good, her restraint getting the point over far
more than the overacting most actresses would have done in scenes like that in
1950 (or probably now). The idea of Astaire or Cagney in this film (even though
both of them would have been too old by 1950) is haunting, though to my mind
the real cast change 20th
Century-Fox should have done is put Marilyn Monroe in the Mitzi Gaynor part.
(Monroe would take over a part
originally intended for Gaynor in the 1959 Billy Wilder classic Some Like It
Hot.) When your leads are
people like Betty Grable and Dan Dailey — first-rate performers but relatively
uncharismatic ones — you need some star power in your supporting cast. But Fox had surprisingly
little confidence in Monroe (in 1950 she’d just re-signed with them after being
dropped both at Fox and Columbia) and even when they put her in a great film
like All About Eve, they gave her a nothing
bimbo role (remember George Sanders’ prissy dismissal of her as “Miss Caswell,
a graduate of the Copacabaña School of the Dramatic Arts”?). Aside from Bus
Stop, virtually all the truly
memorable Monroe roles — The Asphalt Jungle, Clash by Night, The Prince and
the Showgirl, Some Like It Hot, The Misfits — were made elsewhere. Grable and Monroe would work together in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) — where movie journalists, expecting
off-screen fireworks between the old Fox Blonde and the new, were disappointed
when Grable took it philosophically and said things like, “I’ve had my run. Let
her have her turn.” Dan Dailey and Mitzi Gaynor also reunited for a film
containing Monroe, There’s No Business Like Show Business, but in that one, instead of his lover, Gaynor
played Dailey’s daughter!
