How to Be Very, Very Popular

Betty Grable's farewell film turned out to be a third and final version of She Loves Me Not. As She Loves Me Not and True To The Army were done at Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox must have shelled out a lot of money for the rights. It was not money well spent.

Even though Bob Cummings was supposed to be a college student even the youthful looking Cummings wasn't that young to carry it off. And that was using the fact that he was a perpetual student in the place, paid for with Grandpa's trust fund. Tommy Noonan and Orson Bean weren't convincing as college kids either.

The same plot gimmick was used, nightclub dancer witnesses murder and flees the scene. This time however it was two girls Betty Grable and Sheree North, a pair of strippers in a clip joint who see one of their own murdered while doing her bumps and grinds. They have a front row seat for the crime, but leave real quick and go as far as their money takes them.

Which is a small college town where the guys all go to school. Noonan fancies himself a hypnotist, but has no success with any other subject other than North and that was by accident. Then North goes into a Marilyn Monroe imitation for the rest of the film, climaxed when she does a striptease at the graduation ceremonies making that pretty unforgettable.

Monroe turned this one down and I think wisely. Her next film was Bus Stop one of her immortal successes. Sheree North did much better work in the future, this was not a film she would have liked to be remembered for.

As for Grable, according to a recent biography she liked working with Bob Cummings whom she had worked with in one of her big successes Moon Over Miami at her height. But while Cummings, pun intended gives it the old college try, Betty looks just plain bored throughout. No wonder she left Hollywood and concentrated on stage, television, and the nightclubs the rest of her life.

Nunnally Johnson wrote and directed this and with him at the helm and the cast he assembled with people like Rhys Williams, Fred Clark, Charles Coburn, and Alice Pearce you would have thought something better would have come forth.

How To Be Very Very Popular wasn't with me.

Stormy Tornado (Betty Grable) and Curly Flag (Sheree North) are a team of "interpretative dancers" (not "belly dancers" as incorrectly identified by a previous user comment) who witness the murder of Miss Cherry Blossom Wang and are the run from her killer. They pool their money to get on a bus and wind up in College City, still dressed in their stage costumes. They wind up in an all-boys college dorm and the film ensues with a series of not very funny events because of their situation, their lack of dress and Curly being accidentally hypnotized. This is one of Sheree North's first "big" roles (she was offered the part that Marilyn Monroe turned down, and at the time was viewed by Fox as their new "blonde" to replace their unwilling star Marilyn Monroe, who wanted more substantial roles). She delivers a very wooden performance. Betty Grable, on the other hand, made this her last film for Fox. While she delivers a typical sassy performance, she can not float the rest of the cast which is struggling with a really poorly written script. Orson Bean couldn't act his way out of a bag in this film. Tommy Noonan (Eddie) and Robert Cummings (Wedgewood) also deliver a zinger or two, but the film is really uneventful. A film only for die-hard fans of Grable or North.

The film starts off as if I was seeing "Some Like it Hot" years before. Two strip-tease dancers witness the shooting death of a Chinese stripper on stage and are pursued by police and the killer alike. Sounds funny and promising but the film soon falls into a trap of utter stupidity.

Bette Grable (too old for the part) and Sheree North are the two fleeing strippers who wind up in a college dormitory and cause mayhem there. North is accidentally hypnotized by Tommy Noonan and spends much of the picture in a hypnotic state. How fortunate for her.

There are two really good performances here by Charles Coburn, as the college dean, more interested in the college getting money than actually providing education and Alice Pearce, as a wacky housemother in the school.

Fred Clark, as the millionaire father, who doesn't know that his son, Orson Bean, has been expelled is given the part of the guy getting hit over the head as he is confused with the killer. Rhys Williams gets the same treatment as North's father.

Bette Grable plays Stormy Tornado. Stormy? This storm blew out to sea. Big-time.

Unlike the others who have commented on this film, I really enjoyed it. It is on my personal top-10 list of comedies. I like the fact that the two female stars (Grable and North) do not spend the whole movie prancing around in their skimpy dancing costumes--this is a comedy, not soft-core porn! I especially enjoyed the performance by Mr Coburn, who played the president of the college. His scenes, especially the one where he all-but-ignores the beautiful girl (North) on his lap while he fondly recalls an amorous episode from his own student days, make the movie for me. I did not know anything (before reading it here) about the Marilyn Monroe connection to this film, but I am glad she did not appear in it, as I have always thought her over-rated, both as a beauty queen and as an actress. Miss North was far better for the part. It has been at least 10 years since I last saw this, but I still remember much of it, and would gladly watch it again.

Anemic non-musical remake of 1934's "She Loves Me Not" stars Betty Grable and Sheree North as "hoochie koochie" dancers in San Francisco who take it on the lam after witnessing a shooting at their dive in Chinatown; seeking refuge in a college fraternity house, North is inadvertently hypnotized by an amateur psychology major. Written by producer-director Nunnally Johnson, who based his screenplay on Benjamin Glazer's '34 version, which was itself an adaptation of both Ed Hope's book and Howard Lindsay's play, later reworked in 1942 as "True to the Army" (!). With such a lopsided pedigree, it isn't any wonder why the finished results are so tepid. Terrible acting, ugly décor, poor cinematography (from the usually-reliable Milton Krasner), and lunkhead attempts at 'modern' humor cause this Twentieth Century Fox dud to look like hand-me-down goods. It also served as Grable's final bow--some actors just know when it's time to get out (and one can hardly keep from laughing when chorine Betty is described as a dancer in her twenties!). Unrelievedly noisy and dull. * from ****