I only saw the first half of this film so can't comment on it as a whole, but do not be deceived into thinking that this is some uncute story about cute babies, mother love, and sacrifice. The only two directors who shot successful sequences involving babies are Howard Hawks and Sergei Eisenstein. Well, Charlie Chaplin in "The Kid", if you want to stretch the definition.
Burgess Meredith wakes up one morning with his wife Paulette Goddard -- sleeping in THE SAME BED. Already, you can envision how disgusting and vulgar this movie will be. Not really, of course. The same-bed business broke one of the movie code's rules in 1948 but the stories are innocent. At any rate, this introduction is frenzied and excessively chipper. Meredith and Goddard constantly run, shout loudly, and sing during a shower. It's exhausting to watch.
Meredith, a reporter pursued by bookies, imitates one of those inquiring photographers of the period. This is Los Angeles at a time when newspapers were the chief source of news, and they were ubiquitous. I was interviewed by a representative of the New York Daily News while I was eating a knish on the sidewalks of Springfield Avenue in Irvington, New Jersey. The question had to do with the transfer of the Dodgers' franchise from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. I didn't know the meaning of the word "franchise." When it showed up in print I sounded like the financial manager of a professional ball team.
Where was I? Yes, the movie. Meredith dreams up his question of the day: "In what way has a baby influenced your life?" The first story that Meredith gets from ordinary people is about the song "Melancholy Baby." The episode features Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart as itinerant musicians who've been force into staging a musical contest on a pier and rigging it so that the mayor's son wins, though he can't play anything on the trumpet but clinkers. The plan is for trumpeter Fonda to play the song from a rowboat under the pier while the mayor's son just tries to finger the valves. It works until the boat begins to bob up and down. Fonda's playing is increasingly erratic. The judge, Harry James, winces. The scenes is hilarious, with Stewart trying to lead the band and help the phony candidate. He winds up with a lemon stuffed into his mouth.
It's good to see Fonda and Stewart together. They work perfectly off one another and were pals in real life despite their opposing political positions, Stewart conservative, Fonda liberal. They shared quarters early in their careers in Provincetown and were plagued by stray cats. They painted one of the cats purple, hoping it would scare off the rest. Instead they wound up with the same dozen cats, only now one of them was purple.
Meredith gets the story in his notebook and takes off, still pursued. He stumbles into the house of a movie star, Dorothy Lamour, and asks her if she's ever had a baby. "It's not true," she replies spiritedly, "I only met him twice."
The baby in this story is a Shirley Temple figure who is petty and demanding while a movie is shooting. Lamour gets to sing two song in a sarong. One of them echoes her personal history -- born in New Orleans, elevator operator in Chicago, and so forth. This episode, too, is funny, especially the climax, a parody of Lamour's 1937 movie, "The Hurricane."
That's about as far as I got. It's a light-hearted and fast-paced comedy. You'll probably enjoy it.
Burgess Meredith wakes up one morning with his wife Paulette Goddard -- sleeping in THE SAME BED. Already, you can envision how disgusting and vulgar this movie will be. Not really, of course. The same-bed business broke one of the movie code's rules in 1948 but the stories are innocent. At any rate, this introduction is frenzied and excessively chipper. Meredith and Goddard constantly run, shout loudly, and sing during a shower. It's exhausting to watch.
Meredith, a reporter pursued by bookies, imitates one of those inquiring photographers of the period. This is Los Angeles at a time when newspapers were the chief source of news, and they were ubiquitous. I was interviewed by a representative of the New York Daily News while I was eating a knish on the sidewalks of Springfield Avenue in Irvington, New Jersey. The question had to do with the transfer of the Dodgers' franchise from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. I didn't know the meaning of the word "franchise." When it showed up in print I sounded like the financial manager of a professional ball team.
Where was I? Yes, the movie. Meredith dreams up his question of the day: "In what way has a baby influenced your life?" The first story that Meredith gets from ordinary people is about the song "Melancholy Baby." The episode features Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart as itinerant musicians who've been force into staging a musical contest on a pier and rigging it so that the mayor's son wins, though he can't play anything on the trumpet but clinkers. The plan is for trumpeter Fonda to play the song from a rowboat under the pier while the mayor's son just tries to finger the valves. It works until the boat begins to bob up and down. Fonda's playing is increasingly erratic. The judge, Harry James, winces. The scenes is hilarious, with Stewart trying to lead the band and help the phony candidate. He winds up with a lemon stuffed into his mouth.
It's good to see Fonda and Stewart together. They work perfectly off one another and were pals in real life despite their opposing political positions, Stewart conservative, Fonda liberal. They shared quarters early in their careers in Provincetown and were plagued by stray cats. They painted one of the cats purple, hoping it would scare off the rest. Instead they wound up with the same dozen cats, only now one of them was purple.
Meredith gets the story in his notebook and takes off, still pursued. He stumbles into the house of a movie star, Dorothy Lamour, and asks her if she's ever had a baby. "It's not true," she replies spiritedly, "I only met him twice."
The baby in this story is a Shirley Temple figure who is petty and demanding while a movie is shooting. Lamour gets to sing two song in a sarong. One of them echoes her personal history -- born in New Orleans, elevator operator in Chicago, and so forth. This episode, too, is funny, especially the climax, a parody of Lamour's 1937 movie, "The Hurricane."
That's about as far as I got. It's a light-hearted and fast-paced comedy. You'll probably enjoy it.