Sherry Chandler

Three Little Words

Three Little Words, the 1950 biopic of songwriters Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, is most remarkable for Debbie Reynold’s brief appearance, pantomiming a Betty Boop style “I Wanna Be Loved By You” (boop-oopy-doop). Helen Kane, the real-life model for Betty Boop who popularized the song in the 1928 musical “Good Boy,” did the actual singing.

I would not have recognized Debbie if we hadn’t just watched Singin’ in the Rain (1952), a film I’ve always loved for Donald O’Connor’s dancing.

Not Gene Kelly’s, you say?

Well, no one can resist “Singin’ in the Rain.” But . . .

In the shadowy years of my late 1940s, very early 1950s childhood, my brothers often got stuck with taking their quite-literally-baby sister to the Saturday matinee at the county seat while my parents did the weekly shopping. I could tolerate my brothers’ first love, The Bowery Boys, but I fell in love with Donald O’Connor in Francis the Talking Mule (1950). So it was a delight to discover that he had talents far beyond those of playing straight man to a jackass who talked like Chill Wills.

I’ve always thought O’Connor’s dancing was under-rated. Perhaps that’s because his style is so light and efficient, his grace so casual. Like Fred Astaire, Donald O’Connor makes dancing look easy. Now I know dancing is hard, and I think Gene Kelly wanted to make it look hard. He sacrificed grace for muscularity, and there’s a certain muscle-bound quality to his work. But Fred Astaire, and to an admittedly lesser degree, Donald O’Connor made it look like anybody could do it.

The dancing in Three Little Words is fine. What dancing wouldn’t be with Fred Astaire and Vera Allen. Still, I don’t find the choreography as interesting as in 1953’s The Band Wagon with Cyd Charisse. Nor is the dancing nearly as much fun as the 1930’s pictures with Ginger Rogers, whom somebody somewhere said had the rare quality of being able to act while dancing.

Red Skelton’s performance as Harry Ruby is remarkably subdued for Red, though in the genre of serious-acting-turned-in-by-a-comedian, I’d give it about a C.

I was a solemn child, often alone. Though I loved comedy, I was threatened by its more violent side and I didn’t often laugh. I found Charlie Chaplin movies intolerably sad, even in those jerky old television showings. I don’t remember whether I laughed at Francis and Donald O’Connor, but I do remember one Saturday afternoon when I was all alone in the house for some reason, guffawing and snorting all the way through an old Saturday afternoon re-run of The Fuller Brush Man (1948). For that, I will always love Red Skelton.

Oh yes, the Marx Brothers, I couldn’t watch their comedies either, until I got older and more capable of intellectual distance. (Sorry Lance Mannion, if you ever read this, but I’m with your mother on the Three Stooges.) Which reminds me to mention that Three Little Words is also remarkable for the fact that nobody ever performs more than a few bars of “Hooray for Captain Spaulding,” which Kalmar and Ruby wrote, along with “Hello I Must Be Going,” for the stage play of Animal Crackers.

Netflix adventures

I haven’t said much about movies lately. It isn’t that I’ve quit watching. Just that I haven’t had much to say about the movies I have watched.

Ghosts of Abu Ghraib is not a film I feel competent to review. It didn’t give me any new information but it gave me old information in a way that made me both sympathetic to the young soldiers involved and outraged at the lack of moral direction that seems to have marked the “War on Terror” from the very beginning. Is it a good documentary? I don’t know. It’s painful to watch but I think every citizen of the U.S. should watch it.

Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto del fauno) is also painful to watch but I do not hesitate to call it an excellent movie. It tells an edge-of-the-seat story of totalitarianism and resistance in Fascist Spain in 1944, remarkable perhaps because most of the resistance is in the hands of women and girls. It is visually gorgeous and, for once, computer animation is used imaginatively.

Ridicule is French, what can I say? It takes place in Versailles just before the Revolution, so there is plenty of decadence. But there is also sweet young love and idealism. Like I said, it’s French.

The Three Penny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper) is a black and white film of Bertoldt Brecht’s stage play of the same name, with music by Kurt Weil. It was filmed in Germany in 1931. It is dark and cynical and brooding. A masterpiece.

To understand why audiences didn’t like Gene Kelly and Judy Garland in 1948’s The Pirate, you probably have to watch the pair in 1942’s For Me and My Gal, which audiences loved.

For Me and My Gal is Busby Burkeley’s recruiting poster, complete with vaudeville romance and hummable tunes. Garland’s voice lends strength to Kelly’s somewhat reedy tenor and the two harmonize oh so sweetly. Sweet being the key word. Nothing here to push either star. Garland is the dewy-eyed, stage-struck girl next door, her stock part. And Kelly obviously isn’t challenged by any of the dance routines.

The Pirate, on the other hand, is one long Hollywood injoke. Once again Kelly is a travelling performer but he mugs and rolls his eyes and does take-offs on those great swashbucklers Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn. Garland is once again wide-eyed and stage-struck but she is also lusty and smart, revealed to be more torch singer than girl next door. (She would have been even torchier but the censors said no.) Vincente Minnelli let Kelly have a free hand with lavish choreography, including one long pirate ballet with leaping flames that he parodies a few years later in The Bandwagon. Kelly’s costume in this dance is patterned on the one Fairbanks wore in The Black Pirate. The film is deemed a failure but it fails in an interesting way.

Butterfield 8 just fails. Its moral seems to be: If you bring a woman of easy virtue into your home and sleep with her in the marital bed, it is of course your wife’s fault for being rich and giving you a cushy job. It’s one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen on several levels. Performances wooden. Not a spark between Liz and Laurence Harvey and Eddie Fisher’s chubby cheeks are just too dull. The story is silly. And of course any woman living wild and free has to be punished.