After two decades, including a six-year wartime layoff, motherhood came to fluttery soprano ingenue Jeanette MacDonald. Three times! Teenage girls, all fluttery sopranos, especially eldest Jane Powell, and all raised to believe that Mom’s ex, a skunk who went south, never to return, is really a swell guy who’s always loved them. So when mom comes home from a vacation/rest-cure secretly married to pianist José Iturbi, the reception is chilly. Can this marriage be saved . . . or even announced? Can the family be saved? Can anyone hold intonation above the staff? Of course, it’s just an excuse for a musical potpourri of middlebrow Pop & Classical ‘Pops’ excerpts in the brain-dead manner of family-friendly producer Joe Pasternak who had a real knack for this tripe. Director Fred Wilcox no more than a functionary. But worth Fast-Fowarding thru some screechy coloratura for the goofy charm of José, and sister Amparo, in a wild two-piano, orchestral arrangement (with guitar & chorus!) of Manuel de Falla’s Ritual Fire Dance; and later, an even weirder arrangement, with harmonica whiz Larry Adler fronting, on George Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsody #1. Who did these crazy charts? Music director George Stoll? Iturbi? Adler? Whoever it is, they could justify an even more ridiculous movie.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Powell, who somehow always looks just out-of-focus, made her bones co-starring with Fred Astaire in ROYAL WEDDING/’51 and all those In-Laws in SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS/’54. But with musicals on their way out, she got one decade to MacDonald’s two.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: M-G-M found lots of specialty spots for classical musicians like José Iturbi. But it’s rare to find them playing romantic lead as fictionalized versions of themselves! Pirandello might have thought it up. (Violin great Jascha Heifetz played a fictional character under his own name in THEY SHALL HAVE MUSIC/’39, but not the romantic lead!)
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