Washington Melodrama

This has some cheery trappings but it's a brutal little movie. Dan Dailey could be a mean villain. He certainly is here.

Frank Morgan is framed, but the real noir heroes -- heroines --are the two pretty dancing girls.

This movie has a lot of bite, despite its having been directed by a workaday director and its starring the generally affable -- always, always likeable Morgan

Frank Morgan (the Wizard of Oz) usually played to perfection the utterly likable fraud, or the erring aging playboy. But around 1940, MGM began to give him the opportunity to play different types of roles in a series of pleasant but not too demanding pictures. In this one, Frank is a steel tycoon who is the head of a relief organization who gets mixed up in the murder of a showgirl. Frank, as always, is absolutely likable, but has one scene where he gets to utterly lose his temper. It's a revelation of a side one almost never sees in his pictures.

Rest of the movie isn't bad, except for a really dull production number early on. (The choreography is surprisingly ragged for MGM.) The acting besides Frank is only fair, the comic interludes painful, but the plot is actually pretty good, and the political debate that provides much of the conflict is eerily reminiscent of the debates about providing food aid to Iraq in Saddam's era. All in all, worth your time, but you might want to fast forward through the "funny" bits.

The awesome Frank Morgan (the WIZARD, of course!) is Calvin Claymore, in a pretty calm, low-key role, compared to how we usually see him! Here, he's taking a senator out to try to work up support for his Europe war-children aid group. Takes a whole long time to get the plot going here... the usual song and dance numbers, some with Busby Berkely-type water-unison performances. All of a sudden, about half way through, the action really kicks into high gear; Claymore, who is married, is caught up in a scandal that may or may not be his fault. This one takes some strange turns, with blackmail, politics, and pitting friends and family against each other. Claymore's "wife" and "daughter" play pretty significant roles as well (Fay Holden and Ann Rutherford). Regular film viewers will recognize character actor Douglass Dumbrille as Prosecutor Donnelly; Dumbrille had appeared in films with the Marx Brothers and Bob Hope, usually as the shady, shifty foil. This one kind of goes all around the mulberry bush, as they used to say, but it's certainly entertaining. Director Sylvan Simon died quite young, at 41, about ten years after making this film. Frank Morgan himself would die quite young, at 59, about eight years after this film. Showing on Turner Classics, but with only 131 votes, they must not show this one very frequently. Pretty Good. I always enjoy anything with Frank Morgan.

Calvin Claymore (Frank Morgan) is a tycoon trying to pass a humanitarian bill for Nazi occupied Europe. He is opposed for helping the enemy. He gets drawn to a nightclub and becomes attached to showgirl Mary Morgan. Their encounter was set up by a blackmailer. When she turns up murdered, the blackmailer frames him for it.

Morgan's politics is naive at best and wrong at worst. The audience would know it soon enough. His political position actually bugs me a lot and the other side isn't that helpful either. They are debating about the effects without trying to fix the root cause. In the end, that part isn't necessary to the blackmail. He would still be after his money with or without the issue. As for Calvin, he is still the cause of his own problem no matter how much of a gentleman he tries to be. He willingly gets hooked. He has no one to blame but himself. Well, it's in the title. It's all melodrama.

Frank Morgan gets mixed up in a "Washington Melodrama" in this 1941 film also starring Dan Dailey, Kent Taylor, and Ann Rutherford.

Morgan plays steel tycoon Calvin Claymore, who is preparing to go before Congress to champion his relief organization, which wants the U.S. to help the children who are starving overseas as a result of World War II. Since this film was released in 1941, we hadn't yet entered the war. He's got some opposition, including his daughter's fiancé, newspaper editor Hal (Kent Taylor). Calvin's family, daughter Laurie (Ann Rutherford) and wife (Fay Holden) are away for the summer, and he's terribly lonely.

He and a friend go to a nightclub, where he meets a showgirl, Mary (Anne Gwynne) whom he takes sightseeing and escorts around town. I think that's all there was to it - you know these old films, it's sometimes pretty obscure as to what's going on.

Anyway, when his family returns, Mary understands that he won't be seeing her. She then reveals something he's known all along: the whole meeting was a set-up by an entertainer at the club, Whit (Dan Dailey) but though she went out with Calvin, she didn't soak him for money as planned. After Calvin leaves, Mary finds an envelope from him with a letter and a bunch of money. She starts to run after him but is stopped by Whit. He wants the money; she wants to return it. The two fight and she is killed. This is going to cause some problems for poor Calvin.

When all is revealed, Laurie goes to work trying to find out the identity of the killer with the help of a reporter (Lee Bowman).

Solid movie, with a delightful performance by Ann Rutherford, who dons a French accent for part of the film, and an excellent one by Frank Morgan, in a different kind of role for him. Actors in those days were typecast by their studios and it's difficult to see them in other roles, and when you do, it's often a revelation. Morgan here shows he can hold down a lead and do serious roles - something he did early in his career before getting noticed in his usual type of part.

Lee Bowman is terrific as reporter Ronnie Colton - funny, smooth, and charming. A leading man type with the soul of a character actor - good combo.

Entertaining.