DOWN AMONG THE SHELTERING PALMS (1952)

Maybe you need to watch the occasional mediocre musical just to show how hard it is to make a great one.  Watching PALMS shows how hard it is even to hit mediocre!  Trying to mimic the lighthearted side of mega-hit SOUTH PACIFIC, still on B’way for the foreseeable future, we get a boatload of horny seamen on a little South Sea isle post-war.  Lots of native gals, too, but the strictest of non-fraternizing orders from the higher ups.  Let the songs and hilarity commence.  Poor Edmund Goulding, on the tail-end of a once stellar directing career, sits on his airless soundstage village while his cast tries too hard, especially normally likeable William Lundigan who hasn’t a clue how to play this stuff*, alternately hugging or pushing away from a trio of dishy dames: slow-to-warm Jane Greer; gossipy Gloria DeHaven; Polynesian princess Mitzi Gaynor . . . Mitzi Gaynor!?  Overplaying only slightly more than she does as the cornfed lead when Rodgers & Hammerstein finally got around to filming SOUTH PACIFIC/’58.  And that’s low-comic/sneeze specialist Billy Gilbert as her Polynesian pappy.  Yikes!  You do get a chance to see what second-in-command David Wayne might have been like as Ensign Pulver in the original stage production of MISTER ROBERTS, and B’way Musical mavens will spot an appalling lift by songsters Harold Arlen & Ralph Blaine in ‘the break’ of a ditty called ‘I’m A Ruler Of A South Sea Island,’ snatched from Rodgers & Hammerstein’s ALLEGRO (it’s the break from ‘You Are Never Alone’) a semi-flop written between CAROUSEL and SOUTH PACIFIC.*  Adding insult to injury, we get one of those Reprise Finales to bring back the refrain of every unmemorable song, including one from the cutting room floor.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: *An attractive player when given half a chance, Lundigan was already on the downside of his film career.  Yet, he’s at his considerable best just a year back, under Henry King’s patient, caring direction in one of King’s typically fine Americana pieces, I’D CLIMB THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN/’51, with Susan Hayward, also at her best.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/05/id-climb-highest-mountain-1951.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Two years on, Harold Arlen (with lyricist Ira Gershwin) covered himself in glory with A STAR IS BORN.  Begging the question: Do composers work just as hard when they know it’s a lost cause?  Might there be a ‘lost’ good tune in here?