Honolulu

It's the kind of fluffy production big-budget MGM excelled at. Actor Young gets dual parts, one as a heart-throb celebrity, the other as an average Smith living in Hawaii. To escape pressures, each is anxious to trade places with his look-alike twin. So heart-throb Mason goes to Honolulu while Smith goes to New York. Trouble is this reciprocal move pairs each with his look-alike's girl, so complications ensue.

Actually, the plot line is heavier than usual for a musical. Nonetheless, director Buzzell keeps things moving. As expected, Powell shows off her flying feet, while I especially like that first number on shipboard that's quite beguiling. However, it's Gracie Allen who steals the show with her shrill comic antics. However, she's got only one skit with under-used husband George Burns that comes at movie's end almost like it's an add-on for George's sake. Also. don't look for popular tunes among the musical selections, after all it's the dancing feet here that's central. There's some flavor of tropical Hawaii with two hula-type dance numbers, otherwise there's not much location scenery. Typical of the time period is the racially stereotyped humor from Willie Fung and Rochchester Anderson, who, whatever else, are adept comedians. All in all, the movie's a crisply done, well-mounted showcase for Powell, Allen, and Young, but nothing special.

(In passing- for old movie fans, especially of the noir classic Detour {1947}, look for notorious Hollywood bad boy Tom Neal as an ambulance attendant with one brief line.)

Robert Young plays a movie star who meets his lookalike, a rich Hawaiian plantation owner. So the two decide to swap places for awhile Parent Trap-style. The rich guy finds out to his chagrin what life is like for a big celebrity. The movie star meanwhile meets and falls in love with a pretty dancer (Eleanor Powell). All of the expected chaos ensues. It seems to me this plot would have been more interesting had both guys not been rich, successful types. The non-celebrity guy should have been a regular Joe, not some rich plantation owner. As it is, this part of the film is not that fun.

Robert Young does fine but Eleanor Powell, with her million-dollar smile and awesome dance routines, is the best part of the film. Her jump rope number will make an instant fan out of anybody. The sexy hula dance is justifiably a classic. Those hips! Those legs! George Burns and Gracie Allen are the comic relief but, as was often the case, Gracie is an acquired taste. She's funny but is a little bit much at times.

Cameo at the start of the film from Ruth Hussey. One of Gracie's musical numbers bizarrely features Marx Bros. imitators and ends with Powell in blackface! If you're a big fan of Young's, I'm sure you will appreciate his performance. Everybody else should check it out for Eleanor Powell's dancing.

(Spoilers, sort of) Why do I use the word enigma? Because MGM never seemed to know exactly what to do with the great Eleanor Powell. Not unlike the swimming Esther Williams, Powell's films were a kind of specialized musical entertainment where the most uncanny situations had to be dreamed up to show off her tap-dancing skills. And while she was a premier tap dancer- and a better dancer than an actress, she usually danced alone- unlike her male counterparts (Astaire, Kelly, et al) who were usually given dancing partners who doubled as their love interests. In this film, Powell's co-star is the non-dancing Robert Young, who's given a rather foolish subplot in a dual role as a movie star and his double who create havoc when they switch identities. And that's all there is to it. George Burns and Gracie Allen, billed as the second leads, play more apart than they do together. Powell's dance numbers, of course, are sensational: A stair-step routine paying homage to Bill Robinson (while the blackface makeup is startling, the dancing itself is terrific); a shipboard dance with a skipping rope as a prop; and the piece-de-resistance: an all-out grass skirt hula done in two parts: first as a barefoot native dance, then as an ultra-smooth tap sequence done with silver tap shoes. Powell may have been the only woman dancer to dance with her whole body: lots of arm movements, knee bends, splits, high kicks, and puree-speed turns. It's a fun film to watch just for this incredible number.

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.

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.