1937 - ONE HUNDRED MEN AND A GIRL aka 100 MEN AND A GIRL

Deanna Durbin one of the big three child stars of the 30's and 40's the other two being Shirley Temple and Judy Garland, was a popular star of family friendly films.  She frequently played a little miss fix it up as she went about righting wrongs and solving problems for clueless adults.  One Hundred Men And A Girl was one of her most popular features. 

Durbin plays the daughter of out of work trombone player father Adolph Menjou.  Durbin also befriends famous conductor Leopold Stokowski playing himself.  She schemes to get her father and his out of work musician friends work.  After the musicians form an ad hoc symphony orchestra Durbin tricks Stokowki into conducting them.  Not much plot in this movie.  Stokowski was a fairly well known symphony conductor and is best remembered for appearing in Disney's Fantasia.  For a musician who wasn't a trained actor he actually gives a decent performance. 

 

Anyway Durbin races around town good deed doing and more importantly singing, singing singing.  Durbin was a lyrical soprano and her films have her warbling lots of audience friendly musical selections.  In this film she sings Mozart's "Alleluia", "A Heart That's Free", "It's Raining Sunbeams", and for good measure,  "For He's A Jolly Good Fellow." 

 

This film was made during the Depression and if it has one theme to it, it's don't give up hope.  When things are the darkest hope is personified by the perennially chipper Deanna.  This is the kind of take the family to a movie that won't remotely offend anyone.

This fluff of a film was written amazingly by three writers Charles Kenyon, Bruce Manning, and James Mulhauser.  The running time is a painless 85 minutes.    

1949 - COME TO THE STABLE, a film with Nuns in it.

A couple of very pushy nuns arrive in New England with plans to build a hospital.  During World War II their hospital in France was saved by the American Army although many soldiers died defending it. To atone for that tragedy they are now committed to building a hospital in a small New England town.  The trouble is that the land that they want is owned by a godless songwriter who would prefer the nuns would just go away.  So begins a battle of wills.

Come to the Stable could have been one sentimental mess of religious garbage but the writers and the director of this film seemed to have enough self control to spare the viewer from the worst.

 

Let's take a quick look at the cast.  Actor Loretta Young a "super catholic" in real life plays one of the nuns.  Young had an affair with Clark Gable on the set of The Call of the Wild which resulted in her giving birth to Gable's child.  Young had the baby placed in an orphanage and later adopted the baby even though she was the birth mother. Yes this is one of the subplots in the Coen Brothers film Hail Caesar

Celeste Holm plays the other nun, scene stealer Elsa Lancester is a painter of religious pictures and character actor Thomas Gomez is the bookie who helps Young raise the money to build the hospital, it's a decent cast.

Also in the film is Hugh Marlowe as the godless songwriter.  Marlowe was one of those working actors who turned up in a lot of films and TV shows.  I'm most familiar with Marlowe as  Dr. Russell Marvin the scientist who battles the space aliens in Ray Harryhausen's science fiction classic Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers.  A final casting note is the appearance of Dooley Wilson in a not insubstantial part.  Wilson is best known as Sam the pianist in Casablanca. 

 

 The director Henry Koster was an expert at this family entertainment stuff for most of his career. At the end of his career, he directed The Singing Nun, but that Nun movie turned out to be pretty terrible.

This film runs 94 and although I enjoyed it for the most part I certainly didn't want it to be a minute longer.  Come to the Stable was written by Oscar Millard and Sally Benson.

1951 - NO HIGHWAY IN THE SKY, an excellent aviation drama

James Stewart is an "absent minded professor" type working at a British aviation company.  He discovers that the company's latest model plane has a tail that will literally fall off of the plane after 1400 hours of flight.   While flying to investigate a plane crash in Labrador, Stewart realizes that the plane they are on is probably close to crashing due to stress and fatigue that flying has placed on the plane's tale.  The film involves Stewart's attempts to avoid disaster.

 No Highway In The Sky with the exception of James Stewart, the producer Lewis Leighton, the director Henry Koster and Marlene Dietrich is basically a British film.  It was shot entirely by British technicians in England and features an outstanding cast of British actors such as Glynis Johns, Kenneth More, Jack Hawkins,  Niall MacGinnis and Felix Aylmer.   James Stewart does his usual "aw shucks" acting thing but even if he's played this type of character before he does it very well.  Stewart had been a pilot during World War II so he definitely knew a thing about airplanes.   

 

The film re teamed Stewart with Marlene Dietrich.  They had first worked together in Destry Rides Again, but this time Dietrich's part as a glamorous Hollywood star seems more a supporting role.  Glynis Johns is really the female lead.

 

This is commercial film making at it's very best.  A good story, a great cast and a top notch production team.

The film was written by three talented writers, R. C. Sherriff, Oscar Millard and Alec Coppel.  The running time is 98 minutes. Again,  an excellent drama.

1952 - STARS AND STRIPES FOREVER, the long awaited musical biography on the life of John Phillip Sousa

The movie ads used to say "Sean Connery IS James Bond" in the 1960's.  So I imagine they might have said "Clifton Webb IS John Phillip Sousa," in the 1950's.

Clifton Webb plays Sousa in the same style he played his other famous characters Mr. Belvedere in Sitting Pretty and Frank Gilbreth in Cheaper By the Dozen, sort of a prissy guy who has a heart of gold.

 

Recognizing the story of John Philip Sousa would have a very limited appeal to a younger audience, the filmmakers added Robert Wagner and Debra Paget as a couple of young lovers touring in Sousa's band. They have to keep their marriage a secret from Sousa, because he disapproves of wives accompanying their husbands on tour.  That's pretty much the central conflict of the movie.  Oh, Robert Wagner is also the inventor of the Sousaphone, a musical instrument he names after his mentor.  Whenever Wagner and Paget get in an argument she kicks him in the ankles to show her anger at him,  this is an important plot point.

At one point in the movie, before a concert performance, Sousa tells his band that they are about to perform a controversial piece of music which will probably get them run out of town.  The music turns out to be a conventional Broadway dance number with Paget tap dancing up a storm.   The filmmakers must have realized that there was only so many marching band songs the audience could listen to so they fell back on plan B, this silly musical dance number.

The film takes a strange turn towards the end, Wagner enlists in the army to fight in Cuba during the Spanish/American war.  He loses his leg to friendly fire, which means that Paget can't kick him in the ankle anymore when they fight.

The movie ends with Sousa performing the "Stars and Stripes Forever" for the first time, as the audience gets a montage of soldiers marching around the country.

90 minutes, written by Lamar Trotti who really should have known better.

1966 - THE SINGING NUN

I have a few movies to write about, but this week's entry will be about The Singing Nun a movie about a nun who sings.  Released in 1966, this is supposedly based on the life of an actual nun who was known as Soeur Sourire (Sister Smile). She had a hit song called "Dominique" and appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. Hollywood will be Hollywood, and it was decided to make a movie out of her life. Being that she was a Belgium nun living in Europe they put together an eclectic cast to say the least.

The perky Debbie Reynolds played Soeur Sourire zipping around Europe on her motor scooter with a guitar strapped to her back. The amazing supporting cast included Ricardo Montalban, Agnes Moorehead, Greer Garson, Chad Everett, Tom Drake, Ed Sullivan and Katherine Ross, probably not a group you would think of as particularly Belgium.

The movie was directed by Henry Koster and written by Sally Benson, two people who should have been good at presenting tripe like this. The plot had something to do with Sister Debbie having to decide between being a nun or taking up with a hunky old boyfriend, Chad Everett. This is the traditional trauma faced by every nun in the movies, pledging one's self to God or Chad Everett. It's not hard to guess who wins. By the end of the movie, Sister Debbie is in fantasy Africa inoculating little black babies while being surrounded by lots of black people. In her superhero nun outfit she looks very white. This struck me as a particularly tasteless white person's fantasy about another culture.

The climatic scene in The Singing Nun has Sister Debbie  appearing on a TV show where her song will be broadcast throughout the world. As she sings we see scenes of the various cultures grooving out to her song. It's an interesting scene because it's hard to believe that by the mid 1960's this kind of stuff could still be filmed with a straight face.

It's easy to sneer at junk like this 30 plus years later, but the real singing nun Jeannine Deckers' committed suicide with her lover Annie Pecher in 1985 which kind of takes the camp fun out of it.

97 minutes.