This is another sailors-on-shore-looking-for-girls movie (like the Quine-directed So This is Paris), and not one of the better ones. Joe (Dick Haymes) and Skip (Ray McDonald) importune "buddy" Moby (Mickey Rooney) to stake them to an outing to Catalina. Joe and Skip behave so badly toward Moby -- at one point Joe even walks off with Moby's date -- that after awhile it becomes more depressing than funny. There are assorted misadventures, with Moby winding up in bed in the girls' apartment, and so on. The "girls" are Peggy Ryan, Barbara Bates, and Jody Lawrance [The Family Secret] and none of them make much of an impression. Haymes [Irish Eyes are Smiling] has a fine voice, McDonald is a swell dancer, the ladies are pretty, Rooney aims for pathos with a number about how he's a loser etc., but this is not very entertaining. Some of the Wells and Karger songs are okay.
Verdict: Even Mickey Rooney can't save this one. *1/2.
2 comments:
Never even heard of this one, Bill, poor Mickey had lost his box office mojo by now. I kind of like Dick Haymes, though, a great singing voice and unusual good looks, though in all the Rita Hayworth biographies he is painted as a horrible villain (He was Hayworth hubby number four)...so maybe this is worth checking out after all!
-Chris
Well... I found it rather boring but Dick Haymes isn't bad, and it's true that he's always portrayed as a kind of wife-beater in the books about Hayworth. This was a sorry period for Mickey, but he had a comeback -- and way too many wives what with all that alimony!
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