Movie Review: With A Song In My Heart (1952)

A musical biography of wartime singer Jane Froman, With A Song In My Heart sprinkles a little bit of story with a whole lot of songs. Susan Hayward in the lead role and Froman's actual singing voice ensure a reasonable level of enjoyment.

In the late 1930s, unknown singer Jane Froman (Hayward) is discovered by small-time music writer Don Ross (David Wayne) when he helps her to prepare for a radio audition. With assistance from Ross, Froman's career takes off, and she is soon propelled to the front ranks of stage performers and recording artists. After a lot of prodding, she agrees to marry Ross. But his songwriting career is going nowhere, and the inevitable jealousies creep into the relationship.

With World War Two raging, Froman heads out on a tour to entertain the troops. Tragedy strikes when her plane crashes off the coast of Lisbon, with many of the passengers losing their life. Froman survives, but one of her legs is severely damaged. During a long recovery phase, Froman falls in love with Captain John Burn (Rory Calhoun), a fellow survivor of the crash. She also establishes a deep friendship with nurse Clancy (Thelma Ritter). Once she recovers sufficiently, and despite her mobility challenges, Froman heads back out on a triumphant tour to raise the morale of America's fighting men.

A solid two thirds of With A Song In My Heart is occupied with performances of Froman's songs. In various settings, the radiant Hayward is excellent at emoting, and Froman's deep and distinctive voice shines. The film carries around 17 songs, not counting another 10 that feature in a climactic medley celebrating the good old U.S. of A. For fans of Froman's voice and music, the film delivers.

As a dramatic experience, the remaining 40 minutes or so of narrative development are adequate at recounting the story of Froman's rise from obscurity to stardom, the struggle to overcome debilitating injuries, and her comeback as a performer who uniquely understood the scars of men wounded in the line of duty. The film is narrated by Wayne, Calhoun and Ritter, and therein lies its nagging weakness: this is Froman as superficially seen through the eyes of others, and director Walter Lang, working from a script by Lamar Trotti, never comes close to delving into her essence. The film offers nothing about Froman's background, motivation, values, or inner thoughts.

Wayne and Calhoun provide relatively low-key support as the two men in Froman's life, while Ritter offers some of the film's best moments, and crackles as the nurse who became a key friend and companion. Both Ritter and Hayward earned Academy Award nominations. Robert Wagner has a small but memorable role as a paratrooper entertained by Froman first in the United States, and then under very different circumstances in Europe.

With A Song In My Heart is first a celebration of music and then a sketched story of a life. More a concert show than a drama, it nevertheless soldiers on, powered by the fuel of good intentions.

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Movie Review: How To Marry A Millionaire (1953)

With three beautiful but broke women desperate to snag ultra rich husbands, How To Marry A Millionaire finds all the right kinds of comedic trouble. Betty Grable, Marilyn Monroe and Lauren Bacall are the devious but frantic instigators of the husband hunting game, and ultimately face the farcical consequences when the best laid plans go awry.

Schatze (Bacall) is a fashion model, Pola (Monroe) is a stunning blonde but blind as a bat without her glasses, and Loco (Grable) is true to her name and just a little nutty. Together they are close to penniless, but nevertheless they rent a swanky furnished New York apartment, pretending to be wealthy to attract rich men. The apartment actually belongs to Freddie (David Wayne), who is apparently on the run to avoid tax evasion charges. The three women survive by gradually selling off the apartment furniture, but the days pass without any of them finding suitably rich husbands. Schatze repeatedly fends off the advances of the persistent Tom Brookman (Cameron Mitchell) because she believes him to be a gas jockey.

But the ladies finally strike it lucky when they are invited to a cocktail party for out-of-town oil tycoons. Schatze is soon enjoying the company of the gentlemanly but much older J.D. Hanley (William Powell), Loco is accompanying a two-timing businessman to a lodge in Maine where she contracts the measles but also meets the hunky Eben (Rory Calhoun), and Pola falls for a one-eyed man who may be only pretending to be extremely wealthy. Although everything looks promising, nothing will proceed as anticipated on the way to finding the right match.

A mix of comedy, romance, and some farce, How To Marry A Millionaire is bright, cheerful, colourful and breezy. The trio of Bacall, Monroe, and Grable keep the screen filled with a bubbly froth of men-seeking hormones, and the three actresses quickly establish memorable and distinct characters.

Bacall's Schatze holds the group together and appears the most mature, but she is catastrophically error-prone in her assessment of men's qualities. Monroe goes to town as Pola in a role full of understated comedy. Pola refuses to wear her glasses, believing they make her ugly, and as a result Monroe gets to walk slowly into walls and carries on conversations with people she does not recognize. Monroe demonstrates excellent timing and self-control, Pola fighting against herself to place beauty ahead of elegance and basic functionality.

Loco is perhaps none too bight but has an uncanny talent to pick up men while shopping, getting them to pay for whatever she was buying, and then bringing them home for a look-over by Schatze and Pola. Grable mixes adorable naivete with a lust for riches, a combination that misfires with a spectacular bang when she meets Eben and his trees in the wilderness of a Maine park.

How To Marry A Millionaire was the first film shot in CinemaScope. Director Jean Negulesco demonstrates the breadth of all that the technology has to offer, the movie opening with wide-screen shots of the 20th Century Fox Orchestra performing Street Scene, followed by a sparkling montage of New York landmarks. Negulesco then keeps his ladies bathed in glamour regardless of their declining financial fortunes. The Nunnally Johnson script even finds its way to a private fashion show scene with Schatze, Pola and Loco among a bevy of beauties modelling for Tom Brookman as he insists on a private showing of the latest fashions simply to get close to Schatze.

How To Marry A Millionaire is of course useless as a how-to guide, but rather than helping to find millionaire husbands, the film offers priceless fun.

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Movie Review: River Of No Return (1954)

River Of No Return overcomes a forgettable plot thanks to stunning natural scenery and a vibrantly grounded Marilyn Monroe performance. The action is worse than routine and the conflicts fully contrived, but the story fades into the background against the massive mountains and roaring rivers, and Monroe's spirited tussle with frontier survival.

Mild mannered farmer Matt Calder (Robert Mitchum), who has just finished serving a prison sentence, reunites with his ten-year-old son Mark (Tommy Rettig) at a sprawling rough-and-tumble tent city supporting the latest gold rush. Kay (Monroe) is providing the sultry singing entertainment in the saloon tent, but she is convinced by the conniving Harry Weston (Rory Calhoun) to join him on a dangerous raft journey to Council City, where Harry wants to file a gold claim he won in a poker game.

Along the way they float by Matt's cabin, and Harry's evil tendencies take over: he steals Matt's horse and rifle, knocks him out and rides away. With violent Indians threatening to overrun the farm, Matt, Mark and Kay take to the raft and make their escape, with Matt bent on revenge against Harry, Kay hoping to prevent further violence, and Mark about to learn about the figurative and literal difficult waters that adults need to navigate.

River Of No Return is one of Monroe's less celebrated but perhaps most pragmatic roles. Despite an apparently strained relationship with director Otto Preminger, Monroe delivers a performance that is at once down-to-earth, physical and alluring. Whether entertaining gold prospectors in a ramshackle tent or navigating down the river, she projects a combination of resolve and resignation to fate, and her song numbers are staged with panache and performed with commitment.

With Mitchum doing just enough to step above sleepwalking through the movie, and a clumsy story tripping over itself to place characters on a raft, Monroe has little to compete with other than the scenery. And the Canadian vistas are spectacular, with the areas around Jasper and Banff providing a dramatic backdrop to the river journey. Filming in CinemaScope, Preminger realizes that his landscape is much more impressive than the plebian script by Frank Fenton. Along with cinematographer Joseph LaShelle, Preminger fills the screen with nature's grandeur, often reducing the characters to specks on a raft, all the better to conceal the faces of the stunt doubles risking the spray.

River Of No Return comprehensively shoots itself in the foot on a couple of occasions. The treatment of the Indians as both mindlessly vicious and plain stupid is difficult to digest, while Matt's attack and clumsy attempted rape of Kay is out of character for him and implausibly dismissed by her.

But at least there is genuine warmth in the performance of Tommy Rettig as Mark, and the young boy not only becomes central to the story with his journey into the world of manhood, but also develops palpable rapport with both Monroe and Mitchum. Rory Calhoun's villain insists on digging ever deeper until he solidly strikes his comeuppance.

With a star shining in the rough and gorgeous scenery dominating with overwhelming presence, River Of No Return floats past the jagged rocks and makes it to shore, a bit wet but otherwise functional.

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