It’s In the Stars (MGM, 1938)

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

After Alien Turner Classic Movies showed an odd short film from MGM in 1938 called It’s In the Stars, about a college whose leading fraternity and sorority both hold simultaneous meetings at which they decide that partying and dating members of the opposite sex are only distracting them from their studies. So they decide to impose an outright ban on social contacts with class members of the opposite gender – which in our age of growing acceptance of Queer people (I use the term all-inclusively because I can’t stand the ludicrous and ever-growing set of initials, “LGBTQQIAA+” or whatever it’s up to this week, that in the same sort of perversion of language that gave us the equally bizarre “Latinx” has somehow become the standard designation for us) plays quite differently than it no doubt did in 1938. The most interesting aspect of this movie is its behind-the-camera personnel, who would quickly graduate to major films: director David Miller, writers Robert Lees and Fred Rinaldo (who would end up at Universal in the early 1940’s writing the star-making vehicles for Abbott and Costello), musical director David Snell and cinematographer Alfred Gilks. Gilks would later win a shared Academy Award for color cinematography for the 1951 MGM musical An American in Paris, for which he shot all but the last 20 minutes – but I suspect those last 20 minutes, a ballet staged to George Gershwin’s tone poem of the same title and stunningly directed by Vincente Minnelli and photographed by John Alton, really won the film its cinematography award.

Anyway, It’s In the Stars features dancer Johnny Downs (who was briefly under contract to Paramount, where they paired him with an even more forgotten talent, Eleanore Whitney, in an attempt to create their own competition to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) and singer-dancer Eleanor Lynn, who are so attracted to each other they end up violating the no-dating rule and are caught when the school’s astronomy professor, Mr. Jones (Roger Converse) – who also seems to be moonlighting in psychology on the side – when he wants to show the class a projection of a lunar eclipse and there are Downs and Lynn making out in front of the telescope and casting their silhouettes on the screen on which Mr. Jones is projecting his image. The other students ostracize them and literally push them into the water at the base of the school’s fountain, but Mr. Jones is determined to break their silly no-dating rule. He tricks them into sponsoring a dance to raise money to renovate the school’s gym, only the dance is a bust at first: the students attend but just stand around the bandstand while the band plays a lackluster easy-listening version of “My Melancholy Baby.” The professor asks some of the students who know the terminology of swing what he should tell the bandleader to play hotter music, and the band members start to go to town on the same song. Downs and Lynn start patting their feet in time and ultimately end up dancing, and as the band starts running through swing standards of the period like “Stompin’ at the Savoy” and “Running Wild” the other students get the idea and soon the gym floor is a hopping dance venue. I kept expecting some prankster to pull the switch that would open the floor and dunk everybody in the swimming pool underneath – the same gag done so beautifully by Frank Capra in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) – but they didn’t. Instead the film ends with all the newly coupled college students join Downs and Lynn for a reprise of the title song, with Downs and Lynn had previously performed as a dancing couple; it’s an O.K. piece of material (by Michael Cleary with lyrics by Max and Nathaniel Leaf) but, like the film itself, nothing special.