Honolulu

While Burns and Allen only appear together briefly in one scene, Gracie Allen holds her own quite well playing the "dumb dora" that Burns and Allen fans know and love. The most memorable scene is a musical number with Marx Brothers impersonators (with TWO Grouchos!)

This certainly is a diverse cast: dancer Eleanor Powell, dramatic actors Robert Young and Rita Johnson and comedians George Burns and Gracie Allen.

The storyline is anything but diverse: the standard "someone-pretending to be someone else-and then getting trouble because it" baloney. Man, you would think Hollywood would tire of that kind of story but those type of plots have running forever, it seems, and I guess they always will.

Usually, I get tired of that sort of thing quickly but this film made it tolerable because all the characters in this film were non-offensive people. Powell was also likable and her tap dancing was always great. She does three numbers in here. Young played two roles: an actor named "Brooks Mason" and a Honolulu pineapple grower "George Smith."

Most of the comedy is provided by Gracie Allen, who played her normal ditsy self with her husband as the straight man. All in all, a slightly better-than-average film for the sappy story but one look was enough.

I've read film buffs quoted as saying that Eleanor Powell's Hawaiian dance number in the movie "Honolulu" was the sexist dance ever filmed. Well, I've watched many musicals over the years, and I can't think of one that smoked like that one did. To the driving beat of drums, Miss Powell, barefoot and wearing a grass skirt, overpowered the stage with her athleticism and seductive movements. You gotta see it -- I can't describe it and do it justice!

All and all, it was an enjoyable film simply because of a good cast that was able to overcome a rather threadbare script. Robert Young delivered his usual fine performance playing two characters impersonating one another. The radio comedians George Burns and Gracie Allen were along for the ride: with Geacie fairly enjoyable in her usual role of the slightly daffy friend to Miss. Powell. As another poster here said, Eleanor Powell was best when dancing alone; however, that was enough.

Burns&Allen's last film as a team was Honolulu where they supported Robert Young and Eleanor Powell. Gracie did two more guest star appearances in film while George would wait over 30 years to go back in The Sunshine Boys which netted him an Oscar. Oddly enough their characters do not have any scenes together until the very end of the movie, almost as if they were trying their separate wings.

Honolulu was the start of a winding down of a vogue for south seas movies that started over at Paramount with Dorothy Lamour and her sarong and with Bing Crosby's Waikiki Wedding celebrating a trip to Hawaii Bing took in real life. MGM wasn't going to let Paramount get all the tropical box office.

Robert Young plays a dual role as both a movie star and a visiting planter from Hawaii. Young trying to escape the constant demands of his adoring public offers to switch places with his lookalike. But he gets into all kinds of complications on the ship to Hawaii when he meets Eleanor Powell on board. He falls for her, but the planter, now miserably cooped up in his hotel room because he can't get out in public is engaged to Rita Johnson, daughter of another planter Clarence Kolb back on Oahu.

Let's just say that with two Robert Youngs there was enough to go around by the time Honolulu was over with a few bumps along the way.

No memorable songs came out of Honolulu, but Eleanor Powell had some great numbers including a hula tap dance. She seems to have invented her own dance genre because I've never seen anything like it before or since. The production values are also a little skimpy for an MGM musical.

But with Eleanor dancing and George and Gracie doing their thing Honolulu holds up very nicely for over 70 years.

MGM musical with several unusual assets: For one thing, it's unpretentious, and for another, it has a genuinely diverting screenplay, co-written by Herb Fields, an old hand at musical comedy librettos (he wrote a number of Rodgers and Hart hits). The unremarkable but serviceable plot has Robert Young double-cast as a fan-harassed movie star and a pineapple farmer who trade places, and movie-star-posing-as-farmer falls for Eleanor Powell, who's starring in a Honolulu floor show and accompanied by sidekick Gracie Allen. Gracie's material isn't up to standard, and George has practically nothing to do, and Powell's charms seldom went far beyond the Terpsichorean. But she does have a couple of fine solos, and the Harry Warren-Gus Kahn songs are agreeable. It's typically racially insensitive, with Eleanor doing a blackface salute to Bill Robinson not unlike Astaire's in "Swing Time," and the standard giggling-Asian-servant thing going on. Nevertheless, it's so modest and entertaining, I was surprised how much I enjoyed it.