The next movie in the Chicago Outdoor Film Festival was truly hilarious and not just cause it meant to be either! 24 hours in New York for 3 sailors on leave can be quite daunting but these guys seem more than up to the task.....all they want is to see everything and find girls to canoodle with along the way.....Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Jules Munshin are quite distictive and energetic in their roles and are so adorable in an 'aw-shucks' kind of way that you can't help but like them despite the cheesy sterilized-ness of what sailors are really like! Jules Munshin stood out in my mind especially because of a previous role of his......the maitre'd Francois in "Easter Parade". His bit with the making of the salad is brilliant and impeccible......expressive and humorous and conveying wit and charm that just reels a person in and makes the most of the short screen time he has.
The ladies on the other hand gave performances with varying degrees of success.....Vera Ellen, more famous for her role in "White Christmas" is unbelievable in the role of a shy small town girl pretending to be a sophisticated urbanite for Gene Kelly's Gabey. She was better as the mischievous-but-well-intentioned sister in "White Christmas"......here her eyes are too knowing to convey a person who is trying to hide their small-town-girl bashful-ness and innocence.....she's supposed to be this girl trying to be cute and endearing in her naivete but comes off stiff and forced in the attempt and completely unbelievable. I even read somewhere afterward that she didn't do her own singing for parts of the movie....how appalling!!!
Then there's Ann Miller who is quite the famous actress because of all her roles as a secondary lead.....she often steals the scenes she's in with her vacuous mega-watt smile and unbelievable dancing. Unfortunately she can't seem to hold the scenes once speaking is required.....which works to her advantage when she played petty, diva-like women...emoting is NOT her strong suit and that comes across in this movie. She might as well have been a sterotypical blond for all her airheaded-ness even though her character was supposed to be an anthropologist...which i didn't buy for a second....it sounded like she memorized sections of a textbook to convince unsuspecting men that she is witty and intelligent when really she's quite the boy chaser......but nobody can argue that she's quite unmatched in her dancing ability......she really lucked out in being at the right place at the right times during the musical-era of Hollywood.....
The ladies I really liked where Betty Garrett as Hildy, the lady cab driver looking to score with Frank Sinatra's Chip and Alice Pearce as Lucy Smeeler, Hildy's room mate. Hildy comes off exactly the way her character is meant to.....smart, street-wise and unwilling to play games when it comes to her attraction for Chip. Her honesty and warmth conveys so vividly across the screen that I don't understand why I haven't seen her in more films before now.....that is until I read a short bio on her saying that she was black-listed for being married to a man who admitted having an affliation with the Communist party during the McCarthy era. Stupid politics! Luckily she had a come-back of sorts as Laverne's aunt Edna on the tv show "Laverne and Shirley" and deservedly so.....I really liked her alot!
Finally there's Alice Pearce as Lucy Smeeler and I must say that she is truly an under-rated female comedic talent.....she had me laughing my head off everytime she came on screen and wished her role had been even bigger just so she could make me laugh some more! She struck me as being familiar and my friends later filled me in as to why......she went on to be the notorious next-door neighbor Mrs. Gladys Kravitz on the tv show "Bewitched" Talk about memorable.....who could forget that chin-less face with the nose that entered a room before any other body part! Or the nasally voice that conveyed bitterness and skeptism with nothing more than a grunt or an audible expelling of air. In my mind she typifies the cranky and gossipy but on the whole-goodhearted and well-meaning old women that alot of actresses have tried to convey but never completely perfected. As Lucy Smeeler she's not an old woman but a young one that knows she's not attractive and instead of being completely self-pitying about it she just accepts what she is and works with what she has. For that she's endearing and wins my heart as somebody who'se felt the same way but haven't acted the same. Lucy comes off as nerdy and geeky but genuinely nice and funny with moments of wit that makes me think "loyal best friend" automatically. Her character is the kind of person you'd want in real life cause you know once you have their loyality it's undying.....betray them and you lose something irreplaceble....
The movie on the whole is fairly cheesey and and eye-roll-er all the way through but the campy-ness and the unabashed "we're in it for the fun of it" attitude makes it bearable to watch and laugh along with. And let's not forget Frank Sinatra's "empty face" or Vera Ellen's "cooch girl".......those lines alone were worth it for me!
