That Certain Feeling (Hope Enterprises, P&P, Paramount, 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I ran a George Sanders double bill consisting of his 1941 film A Date with the Falcon – a movie I screened for us three years ago from a poor-quality DVD dub of an old VHS tape (my comments are on https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-date-with-falcon-rko-1942.html) and I wanted a chance to see again on the commercial DVD set I got of all the Falcon movies; and That Certain Feeling, a film I just got a copy of from a grey-label source that wouldn’t play on my standard Blu-Ray player, though I got it to work on my old secondary DVD player/recorder. The copy was poor, with a hissy soundtrack and badly faded color, but it was good enough to enjoy the movie for what it was, which was a Bob Hope vehicle (written and directed by his long-term collaborators, Melvin Frank and Norman Panama, with contributions to the script by William Altman and future Billy Wilder collaborator I. A. L. Diamond, based on a play called The King of Hearts by Eleanor Brooke and Jean Kerr, the latter being wife of theatre critic Walter Kerr and author of Please Don’t Eat the Daisies) that was reasonably amusing if not drop-dead funny.

The plot features Hope as cartoonist Francis X. Dignan, who’s wisecracked his way out of several jobs “ghosting” for other, more famous writers on newspaper comic strips. (Ya remember newspaper comic strips?) Now he’s reduced to making novelty toys for pocket change until his ex-wife Elsie Jankowski (Eva Marie Saint), who now goes by “Dunreath Henry,” offers him a job ghosting for Larry Larkin (George Sanders) on a strip called Snips and Runty. Snips is a tow-headed blond boy and Runty is his dog, who is drawn to make it look like he’s wearing eye shadow. Larkin has been writing and drawing the script pretty much on autopilot as he cultivates rich and powerful friends, including Senator Winston (Florenz Ames). He’s also launched a career as a public speaker, mouthing platitudes about the “sick society” (a phrase I thought had originated in the 1960’s, but here it is in a movie from a decade earlier) and what we can do to prevent juvenile delinquency. Larry is angling for an appointment to a presidential commission – though just what the commission is supposed to do is left unclear – and in a way he comes off as a sort of beta version of Bono, the U2 singer who used his success as a musician to try to launch himself as a global ambassador to end world hunger, defeat apartheid, curb the AIDS crisis and whatever other do-gooder project that caught his fancy.

To make things even more complicated, Dunreath née Elsie has become engaged to marry Larry, and their wedding is supposed to take place within a few days – that Saturday, to be exact – because that’s when Larry can fit it into his complicated schedule of lectures, receptions with the rich and powerful, and an appearance on Edward R. Murriow’s Person to Person program. Larry has also decided to adopt a young boy named Norman Taylor (Jerry Mathers, just in the first flush of his popularity on the TV series Leave It to Beaver) who’s apparently the son of a now-deceased cousin of Larry’s. Only when Norman shows up he takes an instant dislike to Larry and bonds with Dignan instead. At one point Larry sends Dignan out with Norman to buy the boy a dog, and Larry wants him to get one that looks just like Runty in the strip – but instead the boy wants a huge dog that looks like a giant ambulatory mop (this sounds like Jean Kerr, since she wrote a similarly large, formless dog into Please Don’t Eat the Daisies). There’s also a cameo appearance by L’il Abner cartoonist Al Capp, and a nice role for Pearl Bailey as Larkin’s maid – playing in the tradition of voice-of-wisdom Black characters from Hattie McDaniel in Gone With the Wind to Vivica A. Fox in modern-day Lifetime movies who try to talk the white characters out of the stupid things they try to do.

Pearlie Mae gets to sing three songs in the movie – the George and Ira Gershwini piece from the 1920’s that gave the film its title (and is also used as an instrumental theme throughout), “Hit the Road to Dreamland” and “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart,” which along with a novelty called “The Solid Gold Cadillac” appeared on various cheap-jack LP’s from a company called Premier Sales that put out ultra-cheap LP records on a plethora of labels (Coronet, Baronet, Design, Grand Prix, Sutton, Strand, Spin-O-Rama) and would frequently grab the early work on independent labels from someone who became a major-label star later (like Nat “King” Cole, Ray Charles and Sarah Vaughan). If they weren’t able to score enough sides by a subsequently famous artist to fill out an entire LP, they would add songs by other artists (one Design release with two songs by Jim Reeves, who was on his way to country-music superstardom when he died in an accident, contained fillers by several other artists, including one who’d later become a huge star in his own right: Willie Nelson). These four recordings by Pearl Bailey ended up in the Premier Sales meatgrinder and I’ve long wondered where they came from – Pearl Bailey started her career on major labels (she began on Columbia and then switched to Decca) and it was a mystery how anything by her ended up on Premier’s labels. This offers a clue: I suspect these were transcription recordings (special records sold to and played on radio stations but not offered to the general public) made by Paramount studios to promote this movie. Sonically, they’re quite good, and the brassy accompaniments suggest to me that the arrangements and bandleading were by Bailey’s (white) husband, drummer Louis Bellson.

Bailey’s presence in this movie is a breath of fresh air, and there’s one quite beautiful scene with her, Dignan and the boy Norman that suggested (at least to me) that Dignan should have left his ex in Larkin’s un-tender embrace and paired up with Bailey’s character – but of course no major studio was about to go there in 1956 (even though Bailey was married to a white guy in real life!). Instead there’s a chaotic scene at the end in which Larry’s carefully crafted appearances collapse on Person to Person in front of a TV audience of millions (though Edward R. Murrow is depicted only from the back, with his famous hair and even more famous cigarette – the real Murrow died in 1965, still relatively young, of lung cancer – I suspect the producers tried to get him to play himself on camera but he declined) and, of course, Dignan and Elsie pair up together and forsake New York City for their mutual home town, Port Huron, Michigan. (Six years later Port Huron would become famous as the locale of the meeting at which the Students for a Democratic Society were formed and they created a manifesto, the “Port Huron Statement,” articulating the principles of the 1960’s New Left.)

That Certain Feeling is the sort of movie that’s entertaining as it stands but could have been a good deal better. Part of the problem is the rather indifferent direction; Bob Hope never really had a truly great director guiding him through a film (one aches to think what he and Leo McCarey could have accomplished – or, even more tantalizing, Hope and Preston Sturges!). He was the sort of entertainer who worked hard at maintaining his niche but wasn’t inclined to push himself into new territory, and That Certain Feeling shows some of the wear in Hope’s movie formula that would start to look really threadbare in his 1960’s and 1970’s films. George Sanders also was starting to look rather threadbare; the boredom with life and acting that would lead him to take his own life in 1970 were already starting to creep into his performance. Charles suggested he might have been handicapped by the limitations of the Production Code Administration, which among other things didn’t like to see itself satirized on screen: he argued that the kinds of people who ran the Production Code Administration were exactly the sort of supercilious moralists Sanders was playing, so the script’s barbs against them couldn’t sting very hard. (Sanders also made Death of a Scoundrel in 1956, and that movie epitomized the caddish villainy for which he was best known and, for all its own flaws, offered him a far better showcase than he got in That Certain Feeling.) This film no doubt gave the Bob Hope fans what they were expecting – some funny lines (including one that name-checks Erich von Stroheim, of all people) and a romantic triumph over not particularly tough odds – and it holds up decently enough even though it’s hardly a great film.