moonspinner55

Three sisters (June Haver, Vivian Blaine and Vera-Ellen), working on their aunt's chicken farm in 1902 New Jersey, dream of a big inheritance after she passes--followed by a man-hunting vacation in Atlantic City!--but receive just under $3000. They decide to go anyway, with one sister posing as a wealthy lady and the other two as her servants (this doesn't make much sense, but let it pass). By their second night at a fancy hotel on the boardwalk, the gals already have men serenading them from the street! Charming Fox musical had quite a show business history--from Stephen Powys' play to 1938's "Three Blind Mice" to the Betty Grable remake, "Moon Over Miami", from 1941. The film also had some trouble behind-the-scenes with Bruce Humberstone replacing John Brahm as director and George Montgomery as a potential suitor replacing Victor Mature. The results, however, are breezy and the three leads enchanting. Note: clean Technicolor prints are scarce, with online and home media versions instead displaying muddy or blurry colors and fuzz on the soundtrack due to age. **1/2 from ****

Fox musical cheekily begins (after a puzzling pre-credits sequence) on the 20th Century Fox lot, with George Jessel playing himself as the producer of a new biography on the life of Eva Tanguay, an early 1900s waitress-turned-entertainer and Ziegfeld Follies dancer who became known as "The Queen of Vaudeville". In the lead, Mitzi Gaynor has dimply-charm to spare, but why did this studio continually skimp on their leading men? David Wayne, Oscar Levant and moose-voiced Bob Graham haven't an iota of charisma between them: they're zipless. *1/2 from ****

Betty Grable in a forgettable role as saloon singer Winifred "Freddie" Jones, an Old West sharp-shooter raised by her grandpa to take care of herself; unfortunately, she's just used her gun to blast a judge in the backside when who she meant to shoot--"the little French omelet" running around with cheating beau Cesar Romero--got away clean. Preston Sturges directed this cheap-looking Fox comedy with music; he stages a riotous scene wherein Grable's Freddie manages to shoot the poor judge a second time (in the same place)--and her many colorful nouns for Romero's squeeze are funny--but this plot, a mistaken identity job, is pretty silly. Sturges gets nothing out of eternally-flat Don Juan Romero, but Betty's spunk rescues a few bits (as when she's impersonating a schoolteacher explaining geology). The best you can say about the picture is that it moves at a fast clip...but not fast enough to overlook some of the hams in the supporting cast. *1/2 from ****