Vecchia America

I just happened across this one Sunday morning on Turner Classic Movies, and I loved it. What a cast: Doris, Gordon, Billy Gray (of "Father Knows Best"), Ellen Corby (Grandma of "The Waltons"), Mary Wicks (from the "Sister Act" movies) and others who made this a total trip down memory lane. I can hardly wait for the second movie, "By the Light of the Silvery Bay" (1953) to come on!

Here's a nice little piece of cheerful entertainment from Warner Bros. with their number one sweetheart, DORIS DAY, doing her best to be a believable tomboy who turns to dresses when she spots the boy next door, GORDON MacRAE. With some perky period songs (it's from a Booth Tarkington story of small-town life in rural America), an ingratiating cast (Rosemary DeCamp and Leon Ames are perfect as the put upon parents), and Billy Gray as a bratty little brother, it's a nice bit of Americana spruced up by picture postcard technicolor.

Doris Day and Gordon MacRae are clearly too old for the roles they play but here it doesn't seem to matter--their courtship scenes are charming and both display their unique vocal abilities in a number of songs. Especially good is Jack C. Smith as Hubert, Doris' persistent suitor who won't take no for an answer. And Ellen Corby is a delight as a schoolteacher intent on straightening out the misbehaving Billy Gray, who all but walks off with the film as the kid brother from hell.

Very pleasant family film, very much in the tradition of others like MARGIE, LIFE WITH FATHER and MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, with its own brand of charm. Good light entertainment, the kind of musical not made these days, unpretentious and sometimes wickedly funny. Mary Wickes, as a maid who is constantly dropping the silverware, gives zest to her role as a cook who can make her one-liners sound inspired.

Its not often I give a film 10 of out of 10 but Doris Day movies consistently rate that high for me. If you are in a depressed or foul mood, her smiles, her singing, and the cast members around her always can lift you to another place. This is much like a Technicolor Judy Garland film in a lot of ways, with homespun family values and courting. At first, I had a problem with the leads, who seemed too old, playing teenagers. The actors grow on you, especially Doris. The actor playing her annoying kid brother is terrific. The parents are well portrayed and protective. The housekeeper is a wiley classic. Even the family dog gets in the act in several scenes. I recommend the film heartily especially if you want to smile and sing along. Doris Day is and has always been a national treasure. I am very glad I got a chance to spend the afternoon with her in this film.

Though it doesn't match the captivating staging of Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St Louis as a nostalgic period musical, both this charmer and its sequel By the Light of the Silvery Moon, based on Booth Tarkington's delightful Penrod stories, are very much in the same mold as the Minnelli classic; both films provide ideal vehicles for the multi-talented Doris Day, seen here at her most fetchingly tomboyish with her frequent on-screen partner at the time, Gordon MacRae. Their combined vocal talents bring genuine class to the turn of the (last) century tunes, providing a veritable cornucopia of some of the era's most recognizable standards. The pair create an easy chemistry mercifully free of the self-conscious projection so prevalent in many contemporary "feel-good" movies. Billy Gray, as Day's younger brother in his pre-Father Knows Best days was a likable and unspoiled child performer, who brought terrific comic timing in the delivery of his misplaced energies. Mary Wickes as the no-nonsense maid who acts as a kind of chorus to the action, is another notable scene-stealer, in a film which like so many of the early Doris Day musicals leaves this viewer with a warm glow.

The decade which gave us the First World War seems an unlikely subject for nostalgia. On Moonlight Bay, however, is a film which approaches the 1910s in a sentimental, nostalgic way, trying to persuade us that, whatever was happening on the battlefields of Europe, it was a time of a kinder, gentler America. The film centres upon the Winfield family, prosperous citizens of an unnamed mid-western town, and especially on the romance between their daughter Marjorie and her boyfriend William Sherman.

William is something of a radical, with advanced views about politics and the institution of marriage, but as he is the sort of well-scrubbed middle-class radical who always wears an impeccably-tied bow-tie and calls his girlfriend's father `sir', we know that in the end he will turn out to be a thoroughly respectable young man, eager to do the right thing by Marjorie and his patriotic duty to his country. (The fact that he has the same name as a famous general is perhaps a giveaway). The film deals with America's involvement in World War One in the traditional flagwaving manner; it was made at a time when the Cold War had recently become a hot war in Korea, so there is an obvious political subtext.

Set against this romance is a series of sub-plots involving Marjorie's mischievous younger brother Wesley, a sort of American Just William. Wesley is very well played by a young actor named Billy Gray, and his antics provide the film with its most amusing moments.

The film is a musical, and the songs are pleasant enough, although the tunes are not particularly memorable and the lyrics are clichéd in the best `Moon-in-June' style. The film as a whole, although it has nothing of any depth to say and even the political themes are dealt with rather superficially, makes agreeable entertainment, especially on a wet Sunday afternoon (which is when I saw it on TV). 6/10.