Das blonde Glück

I found this movie on DVD at my local public library. I wanted to watch it for two stars of yesteryear, Doris Day and Martha Hyer.

The simple story involves four small time entertainers barely drawing audiences in Miami and wanting to hit it somewhat bigger. They find out famous songwriter Dick Carson is in town and make attempts to meet him. Quite by accident, a car accident that is, Candy (Doris Day) meets Carson (Robert Cummings) but assumes he is a mechanic for the loaner car he is driving from a prior accident. This goes on long enough that when she finds out who he really is, she vows that she will never talk to him again. But he is smitten with her and also wants her to play the lead in the show he is writing.

To complicate things Carson needs funding for his planned Broadway show and needs help from Ms Thayer's wealthy Texas oilman father. Ms Thayer (Martha Hyer) has a deep crush on Carson and threatens to sabotage the whole thing if he keeps pursuing Candy for the lead role.

It is a rather simple and silly rom-com but all the actors are in good form. Especially Cummings, the impact of the whole story depends on the way he plays Carson and he nails it. Phil Silvers has a role as Hap Schneider, very similar in style to the Sgt. Bilko character he started playing on TV shortly after this movie came out.

All in all a worthwhile 100 minutes to see some of the stars of yesteryear. Day and Hyer were about 30 and lovely. Day was quite a good singer, even better than I thought I remembered.

LUCKY ME is a prettily Technicolored musical outing from Warner Bros., one that DORIS DAY was obligated to make because of arrangements made by her producer hubby. She should have stuck to her guns and refused to do the film, which doesn't do much for anyone--including its talented supporting cast--ROBERT CUMMINGS, PHIL SILVERS, NANCY WALKER, MARTHA HYER and EDDIE FOY, JR.

Day is the singer in a team of stranded players working in the kitchen of a fancy Miami hotel because of a prank played by the obnoxious PHIL SILVERS, whose strident comedy technique is overworked here.

When ROBERT CUMMINGS needs a singer for his upcoming Broadway show, he discovers Doris can sing and from then on he and his girlfriend (MARTHA HYER) squabble over her dad's backing for the show and his interest in Doris. That's all there is to the plot.

Songs by Sammy Fain and Paul Webster have been tacked onto this slight story with less than impressive results. Only one ballad--done as a dream sequence--has any real worth and it's a beauty called "I Speak to the Stars" which is the only genuine first class song in the movie. A catchy first number, "The Superstition Song," at least gets some interest for the way Doris Day manages to sing it through a lengthy opening sequence.

If you're a Doris Day completist and must see all her films--well, that's the only reason for catching up with this one. It's a dud--a real dud. Trite and unfunny as can be.

I thought LUCKY ME from Warner Bros in 1954 was not the first Cinemascope musical as some comment says.. possibly the 1953 FOX musical ? HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE. Fox patented Cinemascope and hired the process to other studios. The first WBs musical was A STAR IS BORN. But I might be wrong... anyone?

On my Australian market DVD this really silly Doris Day musical has opening credits in cinemascope and the rest of he film in ..horror of horrors! pan and scan TV presentation. On the box it says hooray for Cinemascope but the film itself is not in Cinemascope if anyone from WB DVD office bothers to check. The color and art design is terrific, the musical numbers well staged (as I could tell, as I only saw half of the image), the 50s style and modernity snazzy and Doris Day was beautiful. Its trite script is embarrassing ... a bit like any of the Columbia musicals with Jack Lemmon or Betty Grable of the same year. I was keen to enjoy but the badly presented cropping, down to TV from cinemascope ruined the experience... so I took the DVD back to the store, complained to the bemused 19 year old goth chick behind the counter and got a refund. She seemed to spark to life when I pretended to be interested in a box set of BUFFY Vampire Slayer, but I tricked her and took the money instead.

Fairly expensive Warners musical, the then-novelties of which are a) CinemaScope and b) location filming in Miami, which does look '50s-luscious. These are tied to a very tired screenplay about superstitious Doris Day and her pals Phil Silvers, Nancy Walker, and Eddie Foy Jr. going from revue work to kitchen work to Broadway, courtesy of songwriter Robert Cummings, whose songs all sound like second-rate Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster. Much talent that had just turned out "Calamity Jane"--Day, Webster, Fain, choreographer (and here director) Jack Donohue, screenwriter James O'Hanlon--worked on this one, but it's nobody's best work, though Doris is as spirited and golden-voiced as ever, and you don't really want to see her end up romantically with someone as uninteresting as Robert Cummings. Silvers and Walker certainly deserved better material, and Donohue doesn't know how to pace a plot, even one as fragile as this. Martha Hyer is another casualty, overplaying Cummings' shrew of a girlfriend, and the other supporting players are no-name. It's worth sitting through once for a couple of nicely staged numbers (especially the opening) and some alluring glimpses of Florida, but it's the Warners musical at its most labored and uninspired.

For the film Lucky Me, Doris Day was reunited with composers Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster who wrote the score for Calamity Jane and gave Doris one of her biggest hits, Secret Love in one of her biggest film successes. Unfortunately none of the songs from Lucky Me was ever any kind of hit for Day and the film is a very ordinary backstage story.

With some establishing shots in Miami Beach done in Cinemascope, Lucky Me is also the name of the show composer Robert Cummings is writing the score for. Doris is part of a quartet act that consists of Phil Silvers, Eddie Foy, Jr., and Nancy Walker. Through some of the usual Phil Silvers shenanigans, the group has to work to pay off a debt to restaurant owner Marcel Dalio.

Cummings is staying at the hotel that Dalio's restaurant is at and again through shenanigans, Day and Cummings meet. Day thinks he's garage mechanic and Cummings keeps up the pretense as has been done in more movies I can remember. That's because he's romancing daughter of bankroll, Bill Goodwin in the person of Martha Hyer.

If you can't tell where this is all going you haven't seen too many films let alone musicals. It would have been nice if Doris and the gang had been given some hit songs from this film, but Fain and Webster who won Academy Awards for Secret Love and Love Is A Many Splendored Thing came up short in the score for Lucky Me.

Eddie Foy, Jr. and Nancy Walker came up short in footage as well. Especially Nancy Walker who is one of the funniest people around. I believe there is some moments for her in the Warner Brothers vaults if anyone wants to do a director's cut for Lucky Me. Oddly enough Phil Silvers and Nancy Walker within the next 10 years would co-star on Broadway in Do-Re-Mi which was a big success, but never made it to Hollywood.

Doris's fans will like Lucky Me, others can take or leave it and be considered lucky either way.