Mes six amours et mon chien

Wonderful little flick, with family values, warm fuzzies galore, pleasant moments, and real meaning. Funny and touching, with an outstanding performance by the ever cute Debbie Reynolds. Would never be produced today.

A romantic domestic comedy with songs, in glossy Technicolor (mainly set in Connecticut but which plainly never leaves the studio, even for the church fete or the bus ride), with surprisingly liberal lashings of God and rugged hunks David Janssen and Cliff Robertson both looking decidedly out of place amidst all this sweetness & light.

The rest of the adults include the voices of several cartoon characters, including Sterling Holloway (later Winnie the Pooh and and Kaa the snake) in an ironic unbilled cameo as a local who has lost his voice. It would all have worked much better with Doris Day, but fortunately there is also a quartet of cynical females, two of whom (Alices Ghostley and Pearce) later featured in 'Bewitched; which this rather resembles, minus the magic.

I saw this movie at a drive-in theatre with my family when I was 4 years old. I remembered parts of it, most notably the six orphans living in the woods behind Debbie Reynolds' house. Those memories have stayed with me my entire life, but couldn't remember the name of it, or its stars.

While channel surfing the other night, it was just beginning, and I didn't recognize it (I'd completely forgotten the beginning of the film). Within minutes the hair was standing on the back of my neck as I recognized this as "that movie" I saw almost 40 years ago! I stayed up half the night watching it, and remembering my childhood.

Hopefully this will make it onto DVD. As a jaded 40 something year old, I was surprised how moved I was by this little movie, and I can't get the song "It's a Darn Good Thing" outta my head!

Wonderful family viewing.

Debbie Reynolds gets a pair of co-stars and a batch of kids to share the screen with in My Six Loves. She plays a prominent stage actress who out of fatigue and doctor's orders retreats to her house in Connecticut before embarking on any new projects.

Her co-stars are theatrical producer David Janssen who's produced a couple of her shows and the Reverend Cliff Robertson who ministers a church in her Connecticut neighborhood. But her real problem is a family of six kids who have squatted on her land, left there by their parents.

Of course she and girl Friday Eileen Heckart take the kids in and before long the idea of a family kind of grows on her and it conflicts with her career. Robertson helps out quite willingly and even Janssen as gruff as his character is also pitches in.

There are a couple of beautiful performances by Max Showalter and Mary McCarty who come back to claim the kids. As it turns out they were dumped on them by her sister and they keep them around for those six welfare checks that come in. Showalter and McCarty are a true pair of white trash bottom feeders who get quite a lesson in justice by Judge John McGiver.

This was a perfect film for Debbie Reynolds. I think only Doris Day could have handled it maybe as well had she been cast. It holds up well today and I highly recommend it for family audiences.

For some reason, My Six Loves seems to have slipped between the cracks and just doesn't get shown on TV, at least not these days. In brief, it's the story of a show business star who takes a break due to exhaustion - and finds six basically abandoned kids living in her garden shed. Of course the story is going to be about her developing a relationship (or more) with them, I don't have to tell anyone that, it's a given.

There are some rather odd things about this movie that I'd like to point out, concerning one of the kids - a youngster named Billy Hughes Jr. who plays the eldest child and sort of the 'head' of the detached sibling family. Billy Hughes was becoming known in Hollywood for being able to play darker or more intense roles, and while parts of his role here fit him - being able to carry that chip on his shoulder towards God for instance - other parts are such a bad fit that it's painful to watch. There is a musical number where the kids each have to act out something that goes with the song, and young Hughes was clearly not comfortable doing this. As I said, it's painful to watch. It would be like asking someone like Humphrey Bogart to appear in the Do Re Mi song from 'Sound of Music'.

One rather ironic flaw to the movie is that the six kids Reynolds finds in her garden shed have been dumped and are penniless, wearing shabby old clothes... yet young Billy Hughes is sporting a dandy gold ring in 2/3 of his scenes! How that got past the director I can't guess but someone must have been kicking themselves big time when they realized the huge boo-boo of an impoverished kid wearing bling.

Debbie Reynolds was great, she always is. The story is pleasant enough and there have been far worse movies made (and better too). This is a real Hollywood oddity that somehow doesn't get shown anymore. Worth watching just to see it as part of Reynolds' body of work, and for Billy Hughes in his good and not so good moments of the film.