Freckles Comes Home

"Freckles Comes Home" has B-movie written all over it. With a running time of under an hour and starring the likes of Johnny Downs (who?) and Mantan Moreland, it's a quickie from Monogram that is currently posted on YouTube.

When the film begins, there is a robbery. Next you see the personable 'Freckels' riding home from college. On the way, he makes an acquaintance with a mobster who is on the lam...and Freckles has no idea. When they arrive in his small Indiana town, Freckles is shocked to hear that his really stupid friend is in trouble and he decides the way to help the friend is to get a highway built (?). But to do this, he needs to get his father and Mr. Potter to make up because they both are on the highway commission. To help facilitate this, he kisses up to Potter's daughter, Jane (Gale Storm) and...well who cares?

The film crams too much plot into 59 minutes. You've got mobsters, a Romeo and Juliet-like feud, a gold machine and many other story elements jammed into the film...and none of which are really interesting or well developed. Overall, a pretty forgettable film...and that's being charitable.

The small town of Fairfield, Indiana welcomes home college boy Johnny Downs (as "Freckles" Winslow), due to "urgent business" involving his young scallywag pal Marvin Stephens (as Danny Doyle). The bus bringing Mr. Downs to town also heralds some gangsters, who want to fade away with Downs' freckles. Downs gets reacquainted with pretty girl singer Gale Storm (as Jane Potter). Porter Mantan Moreland (as Jeff) serves the white folks, and shares his bed with chauffeur Laurence Criner (as Roxbury B. Brown III). When a dead body is discovered, bumbling constable Irving Bacon (as Caleb Weaver) investigates.

** Freckles Comes Home (1/2/42) Jean Yarbrough ~ Johnny Downs, Mantan Moreland, Gale Storm, Marvin Stephens

To simply summarize this film is almost impossible, but I'll give it a shot.

A gangster on the lam takes a bus out of town. On the bus he meets Freckles, a young man, returning home to help out a friend. Freckles tells him his home town is a nice quiet place to get away so the man decides to stop there. In the town Freckles friend is in trouble with a machine that finds gold. He used the mortgage payment for the bank to buy a a plot of land because he thought he'd be rich, but machine that doesn't work. How to get enough money to save the hotel?

That's the first five minutes of the movie, which gets more complicated in an often needless way. More gangsters show up, there are murders, music, romance and family feuds, and a good chunk of it never fully gets sorted out, due to this being a one hour long adaptation of a novel.

The film smells of nostalgia. I think the film was probably nostalgic even in 1942, since the world was then at war and this is set in a simpler time.

The film is okay. Its certainly watchable for Mantan Moreland who plays the porter at the hotel, but who is really a just one of the guys. I love Moreland in anything simply because he rarely was anything other than an equal to the leads. Moreland's roles could always be played by someone other than a black man with out any change, or rarely a minimal change.

The trouble with the movie is that it has too much of everything for its brief running time. Too many characters, many of which are cartoons. There is too many plots, gangsters, feud, romance, gold machine, save the hotel, murder...so nothing is fully explored. Its a jumble, pleasant enough, but still a jumble.

If its on, see it, but you don't have to go out of your way for it.

Plot— a gangster escapes to a small mid-western town where he hopes to hole up. However, he soon gets involved with small town politics and feuding folks who want to invest in an access road.

I tuned in hoping to get some Gale Storm sparkle. Instead, she gets to just stand around and look pretty. I agree with the reviewer who thinks there's too much plot for the slender time frame. Then too, the extended comedy skits with Moreland and Criner don't blend in with the storyline; instead they interrupt it. Then again, maybe it's the other way around. Anyway, the storyline is mainly a mess. It doesn't help that director Yarbrough films in flat pedestrian style, the only bounce coming from Moreland. And get a load of the final scene. That may be the most seriously misjudged final scene of the entire decade. As another reviewer points out, it's more disturbing than funny. All in all, the movie's a mediocre showcase for the highly talented Moreland. Other than that, the 60-minutes is a near total loss.

This movie would probably have been better had I seen the previous Freckles movies or read the books on which the movies were based. Things such as Freckles relationship with Jane Potter and the family feud between the Potters and Freckles' family, the Winslows, would have made a little more sense. As it was, the movie was entertaining enough, if somewhat forgettable.

What killed me the most was Freckles' reputation as this wild trouble maker! Perhaps I would have had to have seen the previous movies but honestly, he was so boring I can't imagine him ever being anything other than perhaps a boy scout or choir boy! (That's not a diss on boy scouts by the way!) Not necessarily a movie I would recommend or watch again but by the end I wasn't pulling out my hair or falling asleep so I guess that's a good thing! The best part was definitely the banter between the hotel porter and Roxbury Brown(? I think that is the character I'm thinking of!) Although, the ending scene with the two of them left me seriously disturbed. The porter sells Roxbury a faulty gold finding machine so Roxbury demands his money back but the porter lost it gambling. The ending scene has Roxbury forcing pieces of the machine down the porter's throat... I don't even want to imagine machinery trying to go through the digestive system! Eeek!