Vivendo Sem Amor

Catherine Terris (Virginia Mayo) is fading from the Hollywood spotlight. She is willing to take bit parts, but her manager Mitchell Parks insists that she gets leads or nothing. Instead, he suggests going back to Broadway and director Rick Sommers (Steve Cochran) who got her a big break. Rick however still holds a grudge after she left him for Hollywood.

This tries to be a look behind the curtain on Broadway. Some of it is reasonable. Some of it is almost insightful. I can do with less song and dance. The actual musical is of no importance. It is the relationship and my personal taste is for them to go their separate ways. This ending is not my preference, but I'm not going to destroy it.

Warners, I guess, wanted this backstage musical to have a little more heft and gravitas than their Doris Day standard at the time. So along with the usual production numbers and leggy chorus girls and backstage wisecracks, they grafted a rather serious story of a chorus-cutie-turned-movie-star and her Pygmalion director and their rather somber and complicated history together. Virginia Mayo and Steve Cochran play it competently, but it's just not very interesting, and the outcome is never in doubt. He's billed below both Gene Nelson and Frank Lovejoy, but neither of them has much to do, and there's a great deal of footage of Cochran sulking, drinking, and vacillating between Mayo and Patrice Wymore, who actually seems a better fit. That's a problem: You don't really want to see Mayo and Cochran end up together, especially as it leaves Wymore and Larry Keating, as Mayo's lovestruck agent, with nobody. One appreciates the effort at wringing real emotion out of a backstager, but there's no denying, it doesn't really work. Insipid songs--did Bob Hilliard ever write a good lyric in his life?--and perfunctory direction by Gordon Douglas don't help.

Once upon a time a young director played by Steve Cochran took a young lady from the chorus and made her a Broadway star. The two fell in love and it should have been a storybook ending. But the new star left the play after six months and Virginia Mayo found success in Hollywood.

Now with her career slipping Mayo is thinking maybe Broadway will give her another vehicle to revive a now sagging career. At least producer Frank Lovejoy thinks it will if he can only get Cochran back as the director. In any event, She's Back On Broadway.

I counted 25 different songs in the score, some original, some from the considerable library at Warner Brothers, in any event they were kind of lucky to get the plot in. Helping with the musical numbers because God knows Frank Lovejoy and Steve Cochran had little talent in that direction was Gene Nelson who's singing and dancing complemented Mayo.

The story gets the short shrift here as the numbers are just piled in. A pity because Cochran and Mayo should have gotten more non- musical time in She's Back On Broadway.

Virginia Mayo is kaput in Hollywood. Agent and would-be husband Larry Keating persuades her to regain her magic by returning to the Great White Way. Unknown to her, he arranges the financing. But the director is the man who made her a star, and former lover Steve Cochran.

It's a putting-on-a-show musical with a great supporting cast, and choreography by Leroy Prinz. It's certainly engaging, and the songs are good, if not great. One of the problems is Miss Mayo's line readings; she's dull in the emotional speeches, although her legs certainly make up a lot for that. The highlight is the big set number near the end, "Behind the Mask", with Gene Nelson showing off his athleticism. With Frank Lovejoy and Patrice Wymore.

SHE'S BACK ON Broadway (1953), the sixth and final film to pair actors Virginia Mayo and Steve Cochran, is the first in which their romance takes center stage and the first in which Cochran is something of a good guy. For the record, the others are: WONDER MAN, THE KID FROM BROOKLYN, THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES, A SONG IS BORN and WHITE HEAT and they were romantically involved in all but the first two. This one doesn't quite have the lusty passion of their perilous, ill-fated fling in WHITE HEAT, but the outcome is much more pleasant for both of them (although not nearly as dramatically compelling). It's a different kind of character for Cochran, with a greater degree of emotional vulnerability than we're used to seeing in the tough guy actor. His lingering resentment of Mayo for leaving him six years earlier leads to some pretty obnoxious behavior on his part and I can't say I felt much sympathy for him. Get over it, dude, and get on with the show. In any event, Cochran just doesn't seem suited for the role of a celebrated director of Broadway musicals. He's much too rough-hewn for this rarefied setting. It's a safe bet his character wasn't modeled on George Abbott or Jerome Robbins.

The musical numbers tend to dominate the film, which doesn't leave much room for character development—on either of their parts. The numbers are generally lavish and well-staged and we get to see the two female leads, Mayo and Patrice Wymore, dance a lot, always a treat in my book. And we also get to see Gene Nelson perform in several numbers. However, we never get any sense of what the show they're rehearsing, "Breakfast in Bed," is about or how the numbers connect to each other. Each song seems like it came from a completely different show. There's a number about a New York working girl dreaming of getting rich and in the next one she's a dancer in New Orleans' Mardi Gras celebration. Contrast this with Vincente Minnelli's THE BANDWAGON, also 1953, in which the conception of the musical-within-the-movie is made very clear to us as are the reasons for its flopping, followed by a completely revamped show and a full explanation of why all the numbers are so different from each other. It all made sense there. This film has its pleasures, but it's no BANDWAGON. I must confess, though, that I did like the montage of singing and dancing auditions. It was clearly meant to be funny and the unrealistic, almost surreal quality of it was, I believe, intentional. I enjoyed the kid who keeps returning to audition in each category before they give him a job as a "gopher" to keep him from returning to the auditions. With his skinny frame, gray checked suit and bow tie, he reminded me of Pee Wee Herman and made me wonder if Herman had seen this film as a child. (I'm not sure I heard the character's name, but I'm guessing he's Mickey Zealand, played by Ray Kyle.) Also, the varied songs in the audition sequence, mostly taken from the Warner Bros. song library, look forward to the use of songs in Chuck Jones' classic 1956 cartoon, "One Froggy Evening," another Warner Bros. production.

Mayo is gorgeous in this and always an exciting, scintillating presence, but I was especially taken with Wymore, who was a little more demure and more clearly devoted to Cochran. I was kind of rooting for her and hoping he'd come to his senses. I was more than a little annoyed that Cochran was the third-billed of the male actors even though he has a bigger and more central part than either Nelson, who's billed right after Mayo, and Frank Lovejoy, who plays the producer. I mean, he IS the male lead and has as much screen time as Mayo. I'm posting this on May 25, 2017, which marks the centennial of Cochran's birth.