Babes on Swing Street, and Bowery to Broadway - 1944

Babes on Swing Street and Bowery to Broadway, both released in 1944, are examples of the old studio system as both an incubator for talent, and a factory assembly line devoted sometimes more to quantity than quality. They were the last two musicals Ann Blyth would appear in for many years as her career took a sharp dramatic turn with far more challenging roles. It is astounding to think after Bowery to Broadway, in which she appeared only a few minutes at the end of the film, that her next project would be Mildred Pierce for Warner Bros., and an Academy Award nomination.

We covered her first two films under her new Universal contract, Chip off the Old Block and The Merry Monahans, also released in 1944, here. Lightweight musical comedies featuring teen stars, they were a good start for the young Ann Blyth, new to pictures, though she was coming to Hollywood with the impressive pedigree of a prestigious Broadway show under her belt, Watch on the Rhine. It was likely this reputation as a serious child dramatic stage actress, the prestige of that show, her own prettiness and demure demeanor that caused the casting directors to launch her film career in the persona of a sophisticate, a rich girl, a nice girl, or all three. Another factor to her being cast as the all-American girl everyone wanted as a friend or daughter was her soprano singing voice.

Jack Ano, in his introduction to Hollywood Players: The Forties aptly puts it:

The Hollywood definition of “class” knew no boundaries and there was nothing ritzier at the time than a soprano. Gloria Jean, Mary Lee, Ann Blyth, Susanna Foster, Kathryn Grayson, and Gloria Warren, at various times, served as the junior league Deanna Durbins…

As mentioned in a previous post, though MGM grabbed the “lion’s” share of attention when it came to so-called “backyard musicals,” it was really Universal that produced more teenage talent. When Deanna Durbin abandoned ship, the void was filled not by a single replacement, but by a cadre of young adults. The ritzy sopranos listed above were joined by Grace MacDonald, Donald O’Connor, and Peggy Ryan, and The Jivin’ Jacks and Jills. We’ve noted in the post on Chip off the Old Block and The Merry Monahans that the dance/comedy team of O’Connor and Ryan was something special and couldn’t be beat.

By the time Ann Blyth arrived at Universal to make the duo a trio, several movies were put into production at once to use Donald O’Connor as much as possible before he entered the army. It was a quick splash into movie making for the newcomer, but Ann felt, “It was an incredible and enriching experience.”

Babes on Swing Street (a cheeky coincidence but no relation to MGM’s Babes in Arms, Babes on Broadway, etc.), starred Peggy Ryan and Ann (sans Donald). Except for the old one-reeler comedies with Zasu Pitts and Thelma Todd (or others), I can’t think of a female team given top billing together. To be sure, this was more B movie than A list, and the predominantly youthful cast and focus on ambitious teens “making good” (are young people encouraged to “make good” anymore or just make money?), the critics who bothered to review the film dismissed it as “one of those minor league musical affairs…”

Directed by Edward C. Lilley, the movie lasts just over an hour, and though brief, is stuffed with songs, gags, and a plot somewhere in there if you look hard enough. Peggy Ryan is the president of kids’ club at the local settlement house where teens meet to play ping pong and get off the streets.

They are also all very talented singers, musicians, and tap dancers, and want to “make good.” A music academy (headed by our old pal Ian Wolfe) will give ten of them partial scholarships if they can come up with the rest of the tuition.

Ann hangs out at the settlement house, too, but she’s a rich girl who lives with a domineering aunt, played by Alma Kruger, and befuddled uncle, played by Leon Erroll. Her attempts to help the kids are constantly rebuffed by the resident heartthrob played by Billy Dunn, who resents her for her wealth. Why she’s stuck on this unpleasant boy, and why he suddenly turns around and falls for her at the end is never really clear. He just does. Probably because she’s the soprano.

Ann uses the word, “solid” as a compliment to prove she is hep, as do others in the movie to remind us these teens are in the groove. They’re not groovy; they’re just in the groove.

The gang decides to open a nightclub for teens to raise the funds. Ann donates her aunt’s empty rental property, a hall, and the kids scramble getting tables, food, aided by swell grownups Kirby Grant, Ann Gwynne, and Andy Devine, who plays Peggy Ryan’s father. We mentioned in this previous post on Ann’s stage career that Mr. Devine played her pop, Cap’n Andy, in Showboat on tour in the 1970s.

June Preisser has a flashy role as the eye-rolling junior vamp (which was her stock in trade, no matter what studio she roamed or what teen couple she tried to break up), and demonstrates astounding skill, as usual, in her ability as an acrobat and contortionist, with rolling flops on stage that seem to indicate she was without vertebrae. June was actually older than the other kids, something like 23, already a wife and mother when she made this film, some eight years older than Ann Blyth, but with her cute looks and cherubic grin, she played young. Her junior Mae West number: “I’ve Got a Way with the Boys.”

 

She is Ann’s rival for Billy Dunn’s affections, but, interestingly, nobody is paired with Peggy Ryan, despite her being the lead. A comedienne hardly catches a romantic break, though she could do much more than comedy. (I like her handling of the line, “Lay off the sarcastics.”

“You mean sarcasm.”

“I like sarcastics. It sounds more…sarcastic.”)

Peggy, with three dance numbers, is showcased more than the other kids. Her routines here are not quite as athletic as her slam-dunk partnerships with Donald O’Connor, but demonstrate her really fine versatility in balletic, tap and comic novelty dancing.

One number she sings and dances is a parody of a Russian folk dance, in deference perhaps to our wartime allies. Why critics seemed to write off this prodigious talent as mere clowning, or why Universal didn’t widen her range of roles, I don’t know, but Peggy Ryan was one of the most talented performers of the era.

Ann sings “Peg O’ My Heart” backed by a male chorus, demonstrating a pretty voice, but nowhere near the range or power she developed down the road. We don’t see much of the other acts, which are filler, except for Sidney Miller as a wise guy emcee who does imitations of Hollywood stars, including Katharine Hepburn, complete with calla lily.

The movie ends with the finale and everybody on a stage much too large to accommodate this rented hall, and this must mean the kids have “made good.”

You can see the entire movie free on the Vimeo site here. Below, the trailer.

Bowery to Broadway turns the reins over to the grownups, though Susanna Foster, Peggy Ryan, Donald O’Connor, and Ann Blyth all have brief roles in specialty acts. Jack Oakie and Donald Cook are the stars. They are competitors and later partners in producing shows from…the Bowery to Broadway. You’ll remember Donald Cook as Ann’s father in Our Very Own (1950), covered here.

It’s a passing parade of years story of vaudevillians and impresarios stealing acts from each other, spanning from about 1900 to about 1930. Everybody on the Universal lot showed up for a scene or two in this one: Maria Montez, Leo Carrillo, Andy Devine, Evelyn Ankers, Thomas Gomez (our old favorite, who appeared with Ann in Swell Guy here and who squires around Louise Allbritton as Lillian Russell), Snub Pollard, Walter Tetley—who, like Ann, performed on the Coast to Coast on a Bus radio show as achild in New York, see our intro post.

Most reviews were disparaging. Syndicated columnist Harold V. Cohen:

Universal has put a lot of people into Bowery to Broadway and virtually nothing else. In talent, or at least in the abundance of talent, it goes sky-high. In originality and imagination, it hits rock-bottom.

Buck Herzog of the Milwaukee Sentinel thought the movie:

…is a rambling musical…there can be little in the story that can termed refreshing, much of it being a rehash of shopworn cinema situations. But there is music, glittering production scenes…

It is a hodgepodge, and the material is familiar, but I think that is what makes the movie enjoyable. These are the good old days, even the sad times, and nostalgia works when parody is teasing, but not mean or condescending. Most of these theatrical show movies are really valentines to the art and era, and especially poignant when you know that many of the actors in such movies began in vaudeville. Or even, like Ann, had hit “the big time” on the legitimate Broadway stage. They are, in a sense, paying homage to their own roots.

A charming scene were Lillian Russell leads an impromptu sing-a-long with “Under the Bamboo Tree,” and another bright spot in the film is the comic patter between Ben Carter and Mantan Moreland, whose fortunes rise to become owners of a Harlem night club. In a really funny routine, their old vaudeville act really, they finish each other’s sentences with impeccable timing. At one point when Donald Cook and Jack Oakie are down and out, and Mr. Carter and Mr. Moreland offer to loan them money, flush with success and driving their own big convertible, a rare scene for African American performers in a movie from this era.

Susannah Foster was riding a crest of popularity from her best role as Christine opposite Claude Rains in the 1943 Phantom of the Opera, but her film career would be brief, and after taking time to study in Europe to improve her operatic voice, an expected and desired comeback never happened.

We get a little bit of everything here: the footlights, the neon, the headlines from Variety and Billboard, the Lambs Club, the star treatment, the bum’s rush, a tossed garter, a tragedy. Frank McHugh and Rosemary DeCamp are a pair of hoofers, who struggle for years to make “the big time.” They never make it. In one of the most poignant scenes, they overhear a producer for whom they’ve auditioned call them “old hat—they don’t belong here.” Dejectedly, they ponder the lights of Broadway out a window in an empty hallway, when an elevator operator asks them,

“Going up?”

Frank McHugh shakes his head, “Going down.”

We see them next struggling to run a children’s dance school in their apartment. One little girl is particularly terrible. She has no rhythm and does everything opposite to what the other kids do. She’s about as coordinated as an elephant. She’s their daughter.

You have to laugh. The one thing they want more than being on Broadway is seeing their kid succeed, but a pirate with a peg leg is a better dancer. But the husband-and-wife team of McHugh and DeCamp is really the spirit of the movie, the joy of performing and the broken hearts that result from rejection. At one point Jack Oakie, on the outs with his partner, is fed up with producing shows because he has been shoved into the position of bean counter, and the gloss of the modern shows has no heart like the old time variety. Rosemary DeCamp puts his misery succinctly, “It’s just business, not show business. Not the part that gets under your skin. The all-night rehearsal, the put it together, pull it apart.”

But the years pass, and finally Oakie and Cook decide to reunite and stage a new show, nothing high falutin’ or artsy, just good old fashioned entertainment, (I love the line, “It’ll make Blossom Time look like a one-night stand.” The Sigmund Romberg hit ran a year and a half in the early twenties.) They have a new singer they found in some theater amateur hour and give her a chance. She turns out to be McHugh and DeCamp’s ungainly daughter, now grown up and pretty as a picture—and not a dancer at all, but a singer. She is Ann Blyth.

Mom and Pop are fit to bust with pride to see their kid’s name in lights, even if still chagrined that she can’t dance. You’ll remember, by the way, that Rosemary DeCamp also played her mother in The Merry Monahans.

Also appearing in their great new show are Donald O’Connor and Peggy Ryan performing the parody of a Gay Nineties cad and the tragically duped woman lured by his promise of wealth, “He Took Her For a Sleigh Ride in the Good Old Summertime.” It’s a funny and fun number, but the dancing is merely just a gentle soft shoe here. O’Connor is especially humorous with his careful rolling R diction as a “mellerdramer” villain, complete with waxed handlebar mustache.

Ann is given the spotlight in the finale with the frothy production number, “Sing What’s in Your Heart.” She enters on a throne, with a chorus of springtime nymphs around her.

An interesting scene shows Jack Oakie and Donald Cook in the plush lobby of the Broadway theater in which their big show is going on, and as they head up a grand staircase, we see large portrait paintings of whom we might assume to be great theatrical headliners of the past.

Look closely. One is of Donald O’Connor, and one is Ann Blyth, which looks like a version of one of her publicity stills of the time.

Bowery to Broadway had been on YouTube for a time, and a possibly gray market DVD might be found, otherwise you’re out of luck.

Interestingly, Ann is billed with the stars and ahead of others in the cast with larger roles (she’s really only in this movie for a matter of minutes), which I think signals the fact that Universal, in disbanding their Jivin’ Jacks and Jills youth unit, were putting all their chips on Ann as someone who could grow beyond a teen performer. Three movies were released one after another in successive months: The Merry Monahans in September 1944, followed immediately by Babes on Swing Street in October, and the last, Bowery to Broadway in November.

Then she had a screen test over at Warner’s for a new Joan Crawford movie: Mildred Pierce. The leap from teen nice girl soprano to the glossy Noir and one of the screen’s most nasty characters is astounding, and we can attribute it to Ann’s tenacious and insightful agent named Al Rockett who got her a screen test; an indulgent star who offered to make the test with her: Joan Crawford; and that screen test.

According to an article in Photoplay, January 1956, Mr. Rockett fought for the test and told Warner’s “Throw the toughest scene you have at her.” It was the confrontation scene where Ann slaps Joan.

The director, Michael Curtiz, was convinced. Ann won an Academy Award nomination for the role of Veda Pierce, at seventeen years old, the youngest person to receive the honor up until that time.

Twelve years later, Ann did another screen test for Michael Curtiz, also for Warner Bros. She was not considered a likely candidate for this role, either, perceived as being too sweet, but agent Al Rockett came through again, and she was allowed to test. Lightning struck twice, and Ann blew everybody away with her screen test. She won the lead in The Helen Morgan Story. It would be her last movie.

We’ll talk about it next Thursday.

©Jacqueline T. Lynch, 2007-2014. All rights reserved. If you're reading this on a site other than Another Old Movie Blog, please be aware that this post has been stolen and is used without permission.

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Ano, Jack, introduction to Hollywood Players: The Forties by James Robert Parish and Leonnard DeCarl (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1976), p. 14.

Dick, Bernard F. City of Dreams – The Making and Remaking of Universal Pictures (University Press of Kentucky, c. 1997) pp. x, 129

Milwaukee Sentinel, December 23, 1944, review by Buck Herzog, p. 6; February 16, 1945 review by Buck Herzog, p. 6.

Photoplay, January 1956, “Her Guardian Angel Kissed Her” by Maxine Arnold, p. 82.

Pittsburgh Post Gazette, December 25, 1944, review by Harold V. Cohen.

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THANK YOU....to the following folks whose aid in gathering material for this series has been invaluable:  EBH; Kevin Deany of Kevin's Movie Corner; Gerry Szymski of Westmont Movie Classics, Westmont, Illinois; Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. of Thrilling Days of Yesteryear; and actor/singer/author Bill Hayes.  And thanks to all those who signed on as backers to my recent Kickstarter campaign.  The effort failed to raise the funding needed, but I'll always remember your kind support.

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 HELP!!!!!!!!!!
Now that I've got your attention: I'm still on the lookout for a movie called Katie Did It (1951) for this year-long series on the career of Ann Blyth.  It seems to be a rare one.  Please contact me on this blog or at my email: JacquelineTLynch@gmail.com if you know where I can lay my hands on this film.  Am willing to buy or trade, or wash windows in exchange.  Maybe not the windows part.  But you know what I mean.


Also, if anybody has any of Ann's TV appearances, there's a few I'm missing from The Dennis Day Show (TV), The DuPont Show with June Allyson, This is Your Life, Lux Video Theatre.  Also any video clips of her Oscar appearances.  Release the hounds.  And let me know, please. 

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A new collection of essays, some old, some new, from this blog titled Movies in Our Time: Hollywood Mimics and Mirrors the 20th Century is now out in eBook, and in paperback here.

I’ll provide a free copy, either paperback or eBook or both if you wish, to bloggers in exchange for an honest review.  Just email me at JacquelineTLynch@gmail.com with your preference of format, your email address, and an address to mail the paperback (if that’s your preference).  Thanks.

Chip off the Old Block and The Merry Monahans - 1944

Chip off the Old Blockand The Merry Monahans, both released in 1944, were Ann Blyth’s first two films.  They are an intriguing view of a very young, still developing talent, but we can recognize the composure and maturity that carried her through her career and her life.  The camera loves her.  She seems, with ladylike reticence, to be waiting for a proper introduction to us, but with Donald O’Connor bringing her to the party, she’s in good hands.

B-movies to be sure, they are the tentative beginning of her thirteen-year film career that reaped a quick rise to stardom—but not just yet.  How much she took with her from her radio and stage training and applied it to her new screen career, and what she might have had to jettison to adapt makes interesting speculation—for this fresh-faced newcomer had been working since the age of six.  If she had learned anything by the age of fourteen-going-on-fifteen, when these films were made, it was that every new experience brought new wisdom, and a revelation, perhaps, that though one could not always create opportunity, one could still carve out a space on which to build the future.

She recalled this period for Modern Screen in 1955:

I guess everyone dreams about being in pictures.  I was no different.  I loved the stage.  But children’s parts, especially good ones, don’t come along too often, and pictures promised at least the chance of steady income.

A pragmatic approach for a young person, but perhaps entirely in character for a woman who would become known in Hollywood as much for her discretion, sense, and serenity as for her talent and beauty.

She and her mother had been several months touring with the road production of Watch On the Rhine(after having played Broadway for a year—see our intro post to this series here), and her seven-year movie contract with Universal meant she could unpack her suitcase for good, though far away from New York and Connecticut where family lived.  There would still be plenty of travel in her future, but from this point forward, California would be home.

The irony was that she came to Universal a dramatic actress—they discovered only in their interview with her that she could also sing.  Sufficiently impressed with this ability, they started her off in musicals.  The ink on the contract was still wet in December 1942 when an article by Harold V. Cohen in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette crowed, “Pretty little Ann Blyth…may be Universal’s new Deanna Durbin.”

After four B-musicals, Ann was loaned to Warner Bros. for Mildred Pierce (1945), see our post here, and when she returned to the Universal lot, never did another musical for them again.  She wanted to do musicals, but it would take a new studio—MGM—to give her that chance.

The first four movies, all musicals, that Ann made for Universal were Chip off the Old Block, The Merry Monahans, Babes on Swing Street, and Bowery to Broadway, and were all released in 1944.  We’ll discuss the other two films later in the year.  It’s difficult to say if they were made in order of their release, as Donald O’Connor was in most of them and the studio was in a race to crank out as many films with him as possible before he entered the Army Air Corps late in 1943.

Donald O’Connor is quoted in Dick Moore’s book Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star—But Don’t Have Sex or Take the Car:

They tried to finish all those pictures before I went into the service.  We worked three pictures at one time: the one coming up, the one we were doing, and we dubbed the one we’d just finished.  That’s all we did: work.  It’s amazing we had as much fun as we did, grinding them out like that.

Despite MGM’s glossier and more famous “Andy Hardy” series, according to author Bernard F. Dick in City of Dreams-The Making and Remaking of Universal Pictures:

Universal movies featured more teenagers and young adults than any other studio—Deanna Durbin, Donald O’Connor, Peggy Ryan, Susanna Foster, Grace MacDonald, Ann Blyth…Gloria Jean…

Hedda Hopper noted in her column in February 1943:

Children on the upbeat at Universal.  Since Deanna Durbin and Gloria Jean made so much money for them, Henry Koster has little Ann Blyth…who was so good in Watch on the Rhine…while talking to her, he discovered she could sing.

Universal already had its youth unit, The Jivin’ Jacks and Jills, and the young dramatic stage actress, who it was discovered could also sing, was plunked into this energetic world of home front teens just shy of draft age.  Ann would recall these films as “good learning experiences.”

Later on in the year, we’re going to talk a little about Ann’s teen years in Hollywood.

Chip off the Old Block, released February 1944, in her very first film, gives her third billing after Donald O’Connor and Peggy Ryan--above the title.  This also, along with the uneven quality of the first four films, makes it difficult to really understand what might have been in the can first.  At some point in the frenetic assembly line, the studio decided she was worth featuring.

She is, not for the first time, playing older, a young woman of college age who, having been raised by an uncle and aunt in Hawaii, is now coming to New York City to live with her mother. (Played by Helen Vinson.  Her grandmother is Helen Broderick.)  “My mother and grandmother are famous actresses, and I guess you can’t be that and raise children too.”

She’d have a chance to prove that one wrong some years later.

Donald O’Connor is a campus cut-up at a military academy who performs in the school show.  His father is a career naval officer.  We don’t know what kind of career Donald has mapped out for himself—he laments that he’d be in the war already if his eyesight were better, but he’s so good at performing that his pal, young theater hoofer Peggy Ryan, enlists his help to get an audition.  

She is the comedienne of the piece, no real rival for Ann Blyth for Donald’s affections, though there are some misunderstandings that push the plot along like kids playing kick-the-can until the final number, where all three are on stage performing for war relief.

Our introduction to Ann Blyth is, serendipitously for us train fans, on a train.  Donald sits apart from her, doing eye exercises for his lousy vision, and she misinterprets it as somewhat grotesque flirting.  After a spat and reconciliation, they are cozily ensconced on the rear train platform (which, sadly, nobody can do anymore), and sing a duet.  Her voice is a pleasing soprano, but nowhere near the range, control and richness of what it would become with more training in the next decade. 

Like Donald, she is also a teen with a conscience and wants to do her bit for the war effort, and intends to divide her time between China Relief, the Red Cross, and the canteen, but is dragged into the theater because she sings so swell, and she agrees to do it if the producers give all the money to the war effort.

There is a subplot about Donald mistakenly thinking his naval father is selling plans to a Nazi spy, and a back story that his father and Ann’s mother were once engaged, and where his grandfather and Ann’s grandmother also had a broken-off relationship.  At first, mom and grandma don’t want Ann to have anything to do with Donald, fearing she will be hurt as they were, and they try to scuttle the friendship.  That’s all probably too much for one movie, but Ann shares her first screen kiss with Donald—she goes after him—so this little lightweight movie manages to accomplish a lot for her debut. 

There’s also Joel Kupperman, the seven-year-old math genius from the Quiz Kids radio program.  I’m not sure how he wandered in, but he’s cute as a bug, even if his recitation of math equations makes my head hurt.

Some favorite moments:

Arthur Treacher and Minna Gombell as the former vaudevillians, now turned butler and maid of Ann’s mother and grandmother.  He liked playing a butler so much on stage, he decided to become one.  He still dances up stairs.

The drugstore reconciliation scene (see our previous post on romance in drugstores here) and the endearing soda jerk listening to their tiff as if engrossed in a soap opera.

The sarcastic line, when Ann is fighting with Donald, “What train did you take this morning, the subway from Times Square to 49^thStreet?”  It’s only one stop, and Ann lived on East 49^th Street before she came to Hollywood.

The way nobody makes a joke out of the lady cabdriver.  She’s doing war work.

Peggy Ryan.  My gosh, that girl was talented.  More on that below.  But though Donald O’Connor and Peggy Ryan eclipsed the other “Jacks and Jills” in popularity and became a team, the addition of Ann Blyth made them a triangle, with Ryan relegated to the pal or sister parts.  From a review in The Windsor (Ontario) Daily Star, May 1944:

The studio seems to have decided that Miss Ryan is a comedienne, and not glamorous enough for the junior romancing required.

So to share feminine honors opposite O’Connor, Universal has introduced Ann Blyth.  She’s a very junior miss who was in the stage version of Watch on the Rhine and looks 14 if she’s a day.

Trying to keep both Miss Blyth and Miss Ryan sympathetic cuts down conflict there, so they drag in the family rivalry.

O’Connor is his bright and brashful self and Miss Ryan again the angular dynamo, matching her partner in mugging. Miss Blyth is a shrinking violet in comparison and so put in the shade.

I get a kick out of the “looks 14 if she’s a day” line, but I have to disagree.  With the regulation upsweep hairdo, she’s quite grown up here, and looks the same age as Peggy Ryan, who in real life was actually some four years older.  It’s funny, and a little sickening, that aging was such a dark cloud over the heads of young performers.  Our old obtuse friend Bosley Crowther of The New York Times deigned to discuss the shenanigans:

The juvenile precocity of Donald O’Connor is wearing off as age is creeping up—the young man is now all of 18 and looks it…

He describes the film as “lackluster” and singles out Ann as only “a pretty newcomer.”  Peggy Ryan gets the mud slung: “Peggy Ryan is a clowning annoyance.”

According to Ann’s interview in the above-mentioned Modern Screen article, the preview for Chip off the Old Block took place out in Glendale.  “It took forever to get there by streetcar and bus.”

Ann’s mother accompanied her, and Ann recalled:

She probably realized that I had a lot to learn, but there for the first time on the screen was her daughter.  Her daughter made little impression on anyone else.  Nobody recognized me outside.  Nobody asked me for an autograph.

The next movie, The Merry Monahans was released seven months later, in September 1944, followed immediately by the third, Babes on Swing Street in October, and the last, Bowery to Broadway in November.

In December, Mildred Pierce went into production.  Nothing would be the same after that.

The Merry Monahansis one of those fun “passing parade of years” movies, where a decade and more fans through our eyes in a flurry of newspaper headlines and the ups and downs of a vaudeville family.  Jack Oakie teams with lovely Rosemary DeCamp at the turn of the twentieth century on stage, and proposes marriage, but his problems with alcohol have him helplessly entangled with another woman, who drags him to the altar first.  Oakie is likeable in the role, and poignant when he nobly faces heartbreak. 

It is a loveless marriage, and his wife leaves him.  Nobody misses her.  Oakie continues the act with their two kids: Donald O’Connor and Peggy Ryan.  Catch the scene where the kids are shown much younger using some sort of camera perspective trickery to make them appear much shorter than Oakie.

We’re taken up to the World War I era, where the act is traveling by train, and we have another train meet cute between Donald and Ann Blyth.  He is bored, wanders around the train, eventually decides to climb onto the train roof and stroll around up there.  Shades of his later role as Buster Keaton (see our post on Donald and Ann’s matchup in The Buster Keaton Story 1957, here).  In a later scene, he takes her up there with him.

When he climbs down, covered in soot, he lands on the rear train platform, and who is sitting there?  Ann Blyth, of course.  She thinks he is a hobo, feels sorry for him, and gives him a dollar.

Ann is also in vaudeville, traveling with her mother and the lead in the act, a distinguished dramatic actor played by John Miljan, who has eyes for her mother, and who takes a Svengali-type interest in Ann’s career. 

Here, Ann is not the breezy and self-confident sophisticate she was in Chip off the Old Block.  She’s playing closer to her own age, looks younger with the World War I-era long ringlets and old-fashioned clothing, and she immediately draws our sympathy for her anxiety over performing, of not being good enough and not pleasing her mother and Mr. Miljan, who coaches her.  She has to make good because they have to eat, otherwise, she’s not sure she belongs in this world of theatre.  A sad, sweet girl, doing her best to keep up, though she is overwhelmed.

We see at once that Ann Blyth has, in her second film, already established her ability to appear completely different to her previous movie role.  Her versatility, as we’ve seen in this year-long series on Ann Blyth, was the most striking and notable feature of her acting career, and is a quality she came in with from day one. Also, as we’ve seen, this very talent of simply being versatile could be useful in exploiting new opportunities; but it could also hold one back in an industry that seemed always to hire based on type.

Consider Donald O’Connor and Peggy Ryan, a very successful team as teens and both enormously talented.  They are the same in every film, because that was what clicked with the audiences.  Miss Ryan’s film career would not last much longer, and Mr. O’Connor would have a struggle to re-establish himself after his military service.  Francis the Talking Mule came to his rescue, and eventually, of course, there would be his exceptional performance in Singin’ In the Rain (1952) and a few other big musicals in the 1950s, and his own TV show.  Peggy Ryan and Donald O’Connor were seen as a sort of B-movie Mickey and Judy.  As a team, they were equally talented to the better known, more glossily produced Mickey and Judy team.  As individual performers—I would suggest they were even better.

O’Connor and Ryan were impressive dancers.  There are comic numbers that include amazing acrobatics and athleticism.  There are explosive tap numbers, and there are sweeping, elegant ballroom dances that surpass anything done by Mickey and Judy, and are the equal to any performance of Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire and their partners. 

In a lavish solo number, Peggy Ryan, who though she may have not been allowed to display a great acting range in her teaming with Donald O’Connor, and whose singing was only fair, here displays remarkable versatility as a dancer.  She is exquisite in ballet, ballroom, elegantly dropping the mugging comic persona for an enchanting presence as one of the great screen dancers.  I think this is too little acknowledged today, and maybe she has become forgotten by all but her fans, but we need to rectify that.  I hope to discuss more of her work in the future.  The Ryan-O’Connor dance team couldn’t be beat.

The Merry Monahansis mostly music, and some of the numbers staged as theatre shows are fantastic, especially the quite long “Manhattan Follies” sequence at the end, which leaves not a lot of time for plot.  Just as in Chip off the Old Block, there’s a lot happening here and it could almost be divided up into two or three movies.  First, there is the surprise when Ann’s mother comes to fetch her off the back train platform and…gasp!  It’s Rosemary DeCamp!  Jack Oakie’s former love!  And Jack Oakie is Donald O’Connor’s dad!  The coincidence is all too remarkable!

You can see where this is going.  However, there’s a whole lot to wade through before we get one big happy family.  John Miljan’s controlling influence over Ann and her mother is sinister, and where Ann is concerned, really quite creepy.  That could have been a whole movie by itself.

Then there is the recurrence of Jack Oakie’s drinking problem and how he messes up the act and Donald and Peggy have to go it alone.

Ann gets a nice variety of scenes in this movie that showcase her abilities.  Her first solo is sweet rendition of “If You Wore a Tulip” performed as part of a vaudeville act rehearsal.  Her dramatic abilities shine in the tension over John Miljan’s harsh influence over her, especially when she is moved to tears under his criticism, and her final standoff with him.  She even gets a nice comic scene when she has run away (“I can’t stand him anymore.”) and she and Donald are mulling over their problems on a park bench where an Irish cop played by Robert Homans (Hollywood Stereotype #412), on the lookout for the reported runaway, has discovered them. 

Ann, innocent as you please, launches into her Irish accent (possibly borrowed from her Irish-born mother, but I’m sure she put it back when she done using it), and berates “my fine policeman” for thinking she was anything but the proud daughter of another Irish cop.

They attempt to be married at a town hall, but the clerk rats on them.  He’s played by Ian Wolfe, who years later showed up as Ann’s butler in Wagon Train’s “The Jenny Tannen Story” (see this previous post here).

Gavin Muir, who we’ll later see as the dogged inspector plaguing Ann’s life in Thunder on the Hill (1951-which we discussed here) is the Broadway impresario who gives them all their big break.

Problems get resolved a little too quickly at the end, but then, we have to move fast because we’re running out of film.  The Merry Monahans is, for all its weaknesses, a really delightful movie with an unassuming cast so incredibly talented that we need to dismiss the sum total of the movie parts and just focus on the individuals who rise above the movie-making assembly line and prove themselves to be real troupers.

Before the movie was released to the general public, it was previewed at Camp Pendleton, whose proximity to Hollywood made it the lucky beneficiary of many visits from Hollywood stars donating their time to entertain.  A newspaper article from July 1944, probably a not a little beefed up by the studio publicity department, quote one “rugged Marine” back from battle on Tarawa and the Marshalls as admiring newcomer Ann Blyth, “She not only sings like an angel—she looks like one.”  Ann the “young singing and acting sensation of Universal’s The Merry Monahans had been made sweetheart of the regiment.”

She sang at the camp, and was lauded by other marines as “another Deanna Durbin.”  The article also mentions the “as yet unreleased” Bowery to Broadway, so here again, we don’t really know if these first four films were actually made all at the same time. 

Now she is on the threshold of film greatness while only in her middle teens.

This, despite the crackling sound of hyperbole, proved to be true, but not yet for her singing.  She was unexpectedly loaned to Warner Bros. for Mildred Pierce and her searing performance as the evil Veda broke the cycle of light teen musicals and would earn her a reputation as a promising dramatic actress.  Though she kept hoping for another musical from her home studio, it was not until she was loaned to MGM for The Great Caruso (1951) that Ann appeared in another screen musical.  It took some campaigning to get that role, and that role finally launched her string of big 1950s musicals, to the point where some may have forgotten what a tremendous dramatic actress she was.

If that meant she did not enjoy the firmly cemented screen persona that made Peggy Ryan and Donald O’Connor so easily identifiable to the public and so easily marketable by Universal, nevertheless it made for a longer lasting career with what must have been a satisfying degree of variety.

For the rest of this month, we’re going to cover that progression of screen musicals in the 1950s.  Come back next Thursday, when we start off with The Great Caruso with Mario Lanza.

To my knowledge, neither Chip off the Old Block or The Merry Monahans has been released in VHS or DVD (please correct me if I'm wrong), but bits can be found on YouTube.

To American readers: Wishing you a very happy Independence Day tomorrow.

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Classic Images, February 1995, “Ann Blyth: Ann of a thousand Smiles” by Lance Erickson Ghulam, p.18.

Deseret News (Salt Lake City), July 19, 1944, p. 7 “Ann Sings, Looks Like Angel.”

Dick, Bernard F.  City of Dreams-The Making and Remaking of Universal Pictures (University of Kentucky Press, 1997), p. x

Modern Screen, October 1955, “High Road to Happiness” by Ida Zeitlin, p. 82.

Moore, Dick. Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star—But Don’t Have Sex or Take the Car (NY: Harper & Row Publishers, c. 1984), p. 124.

The New York Times, March 17, 1944, review by Bosley Crowther.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 3, 1942, article by Harold V. Cohen, p. 22.

St. Petersburg (Florida) Times, February 18, 1943, syndicated column by Hedda Hopper, p. 15.

The Windsor(Ontario) Daily Star – article by Annie Oakley, May 8, 1944.

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THANK YOU....to the following folks whose aid in gathering material for this series has been invaluable:  EBH; Kevin Deany of Kevin's Movie Corner; Gerry Szymski of Westmont Movie Classics, Westmont, Illinois; and Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. of Thrilling Days of Yesteryear.

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TRIVIA QUESTION:  I've recently been contacted by someone who wants to know if the piano player in Dillinger (1945-see post here) is the boogie-woogie artist Albert Ammons. Please leave comment or drop me a line if you know.

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 HELP!!!!!!!!!!

Now that I've got your attention: I'm still on the lookout for a movie called Katie Did It (1951) for this year-long series on the career of Ann Blyth.  It seems to be a rare one.  Please contact me on this blog or at my email: JacquelineTLynch@gmail.com if you know where I can lay my hands on this film.  Am willing to buy or trade, or wash windows in exchange.  Maybe not the windows part.  But you know what I mean.

Also, if anybody has any of Ann's TV appearances, there's a few I'm missing from Switch, The Dick Powell Show, the Dennis Day Show (TV), the DuPont Show with June Allyson, This is Your Life, Lux Video Theatre.  Also any video clips of her Oscar appearances.  Release the hounds.  And let me know, please. 

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A new collection of essays, some old, some new, from this blog titled Movies in Our Time: Hollywood Mimics and Mirrors the 20th Century is now out eBook, and will soon be issued in paperback.

I’ll provide a free copy, either paperback or eBook or both if you wish, to bloggers in exchange for an honest review.  Just email me at JacquelineTLynch@gmail.com with your preference of format, your email address, and an address to mail the paperback (if that’s your preference).  Thanks.