Romance on the High Seas (Warner Bros., 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Interspersed with TCM’s “Soundies” tribute last night were three films either with the same personnel as had appeared in “Soundies” or showcasing the same sort of talent. The first feature was Romance on the High Seas (1948), produced at Warner Bros., directed by Michael curtiz from a script by some of the most sexually subversive writers in the hstory of classic Hollywood – Julius and Philip Epstein and I. A. L. Diamond, based on a story by Sixto Pondal Rios and Carlos A. Olivari, and starring Doris Day in her first film role. Actually, I’ve read some reports that Jack Warner actually wanted to borrow Judy Garland from MGM for the lead role of Georgia Garrett, a young office worker who dreams of travel and bugs the personnel of a travel agency planning trips she can never afford to take, but her home studio, MGM, wouldn’t loan her oot. Given Jack Warner’s legendary intolerance for troublesome actors like Garland – he once told director Don Siegel, “All actors are shits,” and Siegel took this personally since most of his closest friends were actors (and so were the two women he married) – it’s hard to believe that he wanted Garland for a nothing role which needed only a woman with a pretty face, a good body and a great voice – and Doris Day qualified on all three counts. Because she was still unknown to movie audiences, though, Day was actually billed fourth – under Janis Paige, Jack Carson and Don DeFore – even though she’s clearly playing the female lead.

The plot deals with the troubled marriage of Michael and Elvira Kent (Don DeFore and Janis Paige) and the fact that Mrs. Kent has been hoping for a honeymoon for at least three years but Mr. Kent always cancels at the last minute because he says he’s needed on “business.” After a while Elvira gets suspicious over what “business” really means, especially after Michael hires a new curvaceous blonde secretary, Miss Medwick (Leslie Brooks), even though she can only type with two fingers. So the next time Michael backs out on one of their planned vacations, Elvira runs into Georgia Garrett at the travel agency and offers her Elvira’s ticket as long as she agrees to travel incognito as “Mrs. Elvira Kent.” Meanwhile, Michael hires private detective Peter Virgil (Jack Carson) to follow “Mrs. Kent” on her cruise through Latin America in hopes of getting the goods on her and catching her pursuing extra-relational activities. Georgia is a singer in a cheap nightclub and her accompanist, Oscar Farrar (Oscar Levant, whose marvelously acerbic sense of humor really boosts this film), cashes in her last paychecks from the club to follow her. Naturally Georgia is worried that Oscar is going to “out” her as not being Mrs. Elvira Kent, and there are some nice French farce-style complications when it turns out toth Peter and Oscar have a date with Georgia at the same place and time. Eventually, like a good little Production Code-era boy he is, Peter Virgil realizes he’s fallen in love with Georgia and is mightily relieved to learn she is not Mrs. Elvira Kent, or Mrs. Anybody for that matter.

The plot comes to a head at the Hotel Atlantico in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – ironically the same establishment at which Flying Down to Rio ended 15 years earlier, and at least one cast member of Flying Down to Rio, Eric Blore, is in Romance on the High Seas as well. Indeed, this film is a great one for spotting character actors we don’t think of as having worked with Doris Day, including Franklin Pangborn as (what else?) a hotel desk clerk,. Grady Sutton as the ship’s radio operator (whose presence links the rest of this cast one degree of separation from both W. C. Fields and the Ramones), Sir Lancelot as a calypso street singer in Trinidad (Sir Lancelot was beautifully used in his two films for Val Lewton, I Walked with a Zombie and The Curse of the Cat People, but otherwise was saddled with the usual dreadful servant roles associated with Black actors then), Tito Guizar as the traveling busker who teaches Doris Day the song “It’s Magic” (one of the two big hits from this film, along with “It’s You or No One”) and helpfully supplies her a lyric sheet in English, and Avon Long (the original Sportin’ Life in the 1935 premiere of Porgy and Bess) as yet another guy singing for tips in a restaurant.

The main appeal of this film is seeing and hearing Doris Day in three big numbers – “It’s Magic,” “It’s You or No One,” and a proto-feminist anthem of sexual independence called “Put 'Em in a Box, Tie 'Em with a Ribbon (And Throw 'Em in the Deep Blue Sea).” There’s also a big number set in a Rio nightclub in which Busby Berkeley, who gets a credit for arranging and staging the dance numbers but this was the only dance number in the film that shows his influence, fills the screen with balloons and Elwood Bredell’s camera has to find Doris Day through the balloons. Romance on the High Seas was a huge hit, so much so that Jack Warner decided the future of his studio lay with big, splashy Technicolor musicals in general and Doris Day in particular – so he fired directors John Huston and Jean Negulesco even though they were both coming off huge hits, Huston with The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Key Largo and Negulesco with Johnny Belinda, because these were all quite dark movies and Jack Warner figured the postwar movie audience wanted sunshine, sweetness, light and Doris Day. And though Day sings stunningly throughout this movie, Sarah Vaughan so totally outsang her when she covered “It’s Magic” and “It’s You or No One” for Musicraft – so much so that I wish Jack Warner had followed up the (mostly) white version of Romance on the High Seas with a “race” version with Sassy Sarah Vaughan in Doris Day’s role.