She Loves Me Not

Dancer Miriam Hopkins is doing her specialty in a night club when a gangster is shot right in front of her. An acquaintance of hers was jailed as a witness for six months, so she takes the first train out. This puts her in Princeton. There she barges in on senior Bing Crosby. With his pal, Edward Nugent, he hides her and tries to get her a job. Nugent's father is George Barbier, the head of a major movie studio, with a major flop on his hands. With his publicity man, Lynn Overman, they decide to sign Miss Hopkins to a contract and make her the most famous woman in America. Meanwhile, back at Princeton, Bing falls in love with Kitty Carlisle (in her screen debut), the daughter of dean Henry Stephenson. Bing, besides being pre-med, is a songwriter, and they croon "Love in Bloom." But Princeton can't have women in the boy's rooms.

There are a lot of moving parts in this musical comedy directed by Elliot Nugent. Miss Hopkins is slightly miscast as a nitwit -- they wanted Marion Davies for the role -- but she does a mean tap. It's more frantic than funny, but it seems to have done very well at the box office.

I thought this movie was going to be really cute, given the synopsis. Miriam Hopkins is a witness to a murder, so in order to hide herself from the mafia, she dresses in drag at a college fraternity. Looking back, maybe my synopsis-judgment skills weren't working very well.

She Loves Me Not isn't the cutest movie in the world, and it wasn't half as cute as I thought it was going to be. It's always fun to see Miriam Hopkins early in her career, prancing around in her underwear, but most of the plot and gags rely on the audience being too stunned by her near-nudity to pay attention to anything else. For example, she sits Bing Crosby down and gives him a 1934 version of a lap dance, and all he does is scold her and run out of the room. The screenwriters could have given him so many funny jokes during that scene!

Also, Miriam's character is very clearly written to be a nightclub floozie who has no shot at getting the guy. Bing serenades Kitty Carlisle with "Love in Bloom" and never really looks twice at Miriam; therefore, there's no tension in the plot. So, unless you want to see Miriam Hopkins in her underwear, you don't have to watch this one. There are plenty of other movies where you can catch her in her skivvies, or less.

Bing Crosby had done one previous film with a college setting in College Humor. In that one he was a music teacher. Now he's on the other side of the classroom as student/composer in She Loves Me Not.

He's about to graduate and get married when a complication in the form of Miriam Hopkins comes into his life. She's fleeing from gangsters who think she's seen a shooting. The doer, Warren Hymer, is hot on her trail. She's a dancer in a nightclub in Philadelphia and she flees abruptly, not even changing her costume. She has just enough money to get to Princeton where she tells her sad tale of woe to Bing. And of course Bing and pal Eddie Nugent take her in.

What follows is a lot of fast paced humor involving Crosby's fiancé, the college administration, a Hollywood publicity man, and the gangsters Hopkins is fleeing from. Along the way Bing makes the acquaintance of Kitty Carlisle who is the daughter of Princeton's Dean of Students played by Henry Stephenson. They sing beautifully together and would do so again in Crosby's next picture, Here Is My Heart.

Songwriting chores were split on this film. Mack Gordon and Harry Revel contributed two songs, Straight from the Shoulder and I'm Humming...I'm Whistling...I'm Singing which were good. But the hit song of the film comes from Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger, Love In Bloom.

1934 was the first year that the best song category was put in the Academy Awards sweepstakes. Bing Crosby with Love In Bloom had the first of 15 nominations, the most by far of any artist introducing an Oscar nominated song. Love In Bloom lost that year to the beautiful music and heavenly rhythm of The Continental.

Love In Bloom served also as the title tune of one of Dixie Lee Crosby's last films before she retired from the screen to raise Bing's first family. But the song finally got a home being heard as the squeaky violin introduction for Jack Benny for almost forty years on radio and television. It became identified with him so much that many people don't know Bing Crosby introduced it as a serious ballad.

Bing and Kitty sing Love In Bloom well together although the main weakness of the plot is that their romance gets a bit sappy at times. It does detract from the comedy.

Nevertheless She Loves Me Not is pretty funny and the inimitable Mr. Crosby is in excellent voice on some excellent tunes.

Did any movie idol have less sex appeal than Bing Crosby? (Okay, Robert Young comes close.) What a problem the studios had with Bing--that voice that drove the women mad, combined with an attitude toward women that could best be described as "courteous." Unlike Fred Astaire, the diffident Bing was not lucky enough to find a partner to give the act sex appeal--at least, not until he teamed up with Bob Hope, whose inept wolfishness made Bing's coldness look cool.

In this picture, as in Here Is My Heart the same year, the studio (why?) gave him Kitty Carlisle, the ponderous actress who acts comedy by making like a middle-aged good sport who's being good-naturedly informal with the kids. Even the number Bing adopted for his theme song, "Love in Bloom," doesn't whip up a romantic mood, even when Bing and Kitty, weirdly, sing it as two disembodied heads in a cloudy sky. But a youthful is rather foreclosed by a star who, more than ten years too old for his role, looks like a college professor rather than the undergrad he is supposed to be.

Kitty is further minimised by being sited outside the main plot, one that might have been the inspiration for Some Like It Hot. Miriam Hopkins, as a nightclub dancer (and can she shake a leg! who knew?), witnesses a gangland rubout and, fleeing the gangsters who want to do away with her, ends up at Princeton, where Bing helpfully cuts off her hair and gives her boys' clothes to hide in. Miriam turns out to be the most ungrateful damsel in distress ever rescued, constantly lying, mischief-making, and rather undermining the idea of hiding out by becoming a glutton for publicity. But her antics, rather than pepping up the show, fade away in this staid atmosphere.

Thirties character comedians Warren Hymer and Lynne Overman have some funny business, but the pace sags and the dialogue lacks invention. Fortunately, though, Bing ends up with Kitty without having to kiss her. How he must have been relieved!

There is not much by way of originality to this rather overlong comedy but it does give Bing Crosby a chance to croon his way through the charming "Love in Bloom" with his amiable co-star Kitty Carlisle. You see, "Curly" (Miriam Hopkins) is a dancehall gal who's gone and got herself mixed up in a murder. Having the sense not to want to get involved, she flees the scene and ends up in some rooms amidst the Ivy League's finest. She's quite an adaptable young woman, and surrounded in this all-male environment by pin-stripes galore, she decides that being a boy for the duration might be her best line of defence. Certainly from the pursuing "Mugg" (Warren Hymer) but also, she quickly realises, it might help her against the more hormonal students at the university. Fortunately she hooks up with "Paul" (Bing Crosby) and his pal "Buzz" (Edward J. Nugent) who give her a short back and sides before she becomes a bit of a bass-baritone. The question is: for how long can this not very cunning wheeze keep her safe? Things become a darned sight more awkward when the Hollywood producing dad of "Buzz" sends his minions to recruit her for a film, and then when the fiancée of "Paul" (that's Miss Carlisle) starts to put two and two together and get 22. Trying to keep this all out of the glaring eye of publicity is the dean (Henry Stephenson) who just happens to be the father of "Midge". Still with me? Well once we've established the rather slapstick-light credentials of this comedy, the thing rather stutters along mixing it's genres and showcasing some fairly mediocre writing and flat characterisations as "Curly" et al leap from comedic frying pan to fire just once too predictably often. If there is a star, then it has to be Hopkins as she looks like she is having fun throughout, but sadly it's not really contagious. It is watchable enough, and it doesn't hang about - but it's really only that song that stands out.