It Happened on 5th Avenue - 1947

It Happened on 5th Avenue (1947) is a pleasant romantic comedy that tackles the problems of two couples of different generations, the post-World War II housing shortage, juggles tropes of the happy hobo, and the millionaire who needs to get back in touch with the common man, throw in a couple songs even though it’s not a musical – and Christmas.  This last element is not the focus of the movie, and that, as we have mentioned in the earlier movies of this series, is what makes this film an appealing adventure. 

We’re back in New York City, the location for Fitzwilly (1967), The Lemon Drop Kid (1951), and one of the fun points of this movie is several rear-screen projection scenes of New York.  I don’t know about you, but I like rear-screen projection. I wish it followed me around, too.  I could run a marathon without going anywhere. The setting here is a mansion on Fifth Avenue, which, in the seasonal absence of its owners, is occupied temporarily by hobo Victor Moore, who has sneaked inside for the past few years and knows the ropes of how to live well by being an undiscovered guest.

He meets newly homeless Don DeFore, who has been evicted from his rattrap boarding house that’s about to be torn down, and invites him to stay a while in the mansion until he gets back on his feet. Gale Storm sneaks into the mansion, too, but she is actually the daughter of the millionaire who owns it. Miss Storm is fresh-faced and sweet (but unfortunately, her singing here is dubbed).  She’s on the lam from her finishing school, just stopped back to pack some of her clothes—when the disapproving and ultra-moral Victor Moore catches her in the act.  He and DeFore decide to give the young reprobate another chance, since she pleads with them that she needed the nice clothes to apply for a job.  She doesn’t want them to know who she is, because her dad and the media are looking for her.  This is the start of the happy makeshift family.

Catch the sheet music “Oh, Susana!” where Gale applies for a job in a music store, which makes me think of her television series Oh, Susana! in the late 1950s.  We discussed David C. Tucker’s book on Gale Storm here and here in these previous posts.

Soon, they will be joined by a couple of DeFore’s old Army buddies and their wives and kids.  (Our hero Charles Lane has a brief role as a landlord who doesn’t allow children.) Alan Hale, Jr., is paired with Dorothea Kent.  Mr. Moore is a little nervous about inviting too many people in the house.  For one, he obviously does not want to risk discovery by the nightly patrol of police who check on the house, and also, he’s afraid his merry band does not respect the house as he does.  Moore is a pretentious hobo.  He dresses in the master’s clothes, smokes his cigars, and expects the people in “his” household to fall under his command.  They share the chores and the childrearing between them.

When Gale Storm’s father tracks her down, she persuades him to pose as a vagrant who needs a place to stay, and invites him into the house.  Charles Ruggles is the indignant, sputtering millionaire, who actually started life in poverty and worked his way up.  He is a self-made man, and his considerable pride in being so is shattered at every turn by the dismissive Victor Moore, who lords it over him and expects Mr. Ruggles to toe the line. 

Ruggles suffers the comic indignity for his daughter’s sake: she has fallen in love with Don DeFore but wants to know if he can love her for herself and not her father’s millions.  Gale Storm also invites her mother to join the “family” and introduces her as a likewise down-and-out soul.  Victor Moore puts her to work as the cook. 

Played by the lovely and ethereal Ann Harding, she and Charles Ruggles are divorced and have not seen each other in some years.  Her bemused expressions at seeing Charles set down time and again by Victor Moore are funny and darling, but we soon have tandem rocky love stories:  Gale Storm and Don DeFore who are just discovering each other, and the sadder-but-wiser reunion of Ann Harding and Ruggles.  It is touching that they must fall in love all over again.

Leon Belasco, who we discussed in this previous post, has a minor role as a musician in a restaurant. It's all about the character actors. Ask any old movie buff.

Ultimately, this is a tale about home and what makes a home.  Ruggles’ opulent mansion is empty half the year and when he’s in residence, it’s just him and probably a few servants.  His daughter lives at her finishing school, his ex-wife in a posh hotel in Florida.

DeFore and his pals are veterans looking for suitable housing, and they have a partnership in the works to bid on an Army camp the government is selling, hoping to renovate the barracks into two-room apartments for veterans like themselves without a place to live.  Little do they know that their rival bidder is property developer Charles Ruggles.

Victor Moore’s home is not necessarily anyplace he hangs his hat: he’s clearly choosy about his domicile and has expensive tastes.  Ruggles eventually reveals his true identity to the boys, but not to Mr. Moore.  His innocence is to be respected.

Christmas comes, and if the holiday is all about family, it is also all about home.  Home for the holidays.  The "family" decorates an enormous tree.  A few fun shots are of dialogue carried on between the branches, this and other whimsical touches by director Roy Del Ruth made this film quite charming.  Despite the Christmas scene, this classic film seems to have come late into the Christmas roster, possibly because it was not shown on TV for many years, but now, of course, is available on DVD and usually part of December programming on TCM.

The ideal Christmas is centered around home.  The holiday, ideally, solidifies a family, and then as suddenly as it came, it leaves.  The family leaves.  Both the home and the family can be temporary Christmas endeavors, attached to the holiday that attracts us every year like homing pigeons.  Charles Ruggles leaves us with a last line to infer that he fully expects Victor Moore to return next year, and he will be welcome.  We don't know if Ruggles means he will pretend to be a homeless man again for Moore's sake, once more suffering his largesse.  That is the biggest conundrum for us: we want our nostalgic family Christmases to never change and we try to replicate the rituals every year, but eventually, that becomes impossible.

Except in home movies and classic films, where the universe we loved is still there, unchanged, waiting for us. 

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.  Her new book, a collection of posts from this blog - Hollywood Fights Fascism - is available here on Amazon.

More Than a Secretary - 1936

“More Than a Secretary” (1936) is like a time travel adventure.  It is impossible to watch this movie about the editor of a fitness magazine without being reminded of the all-pervasive diet industry and social consciousness about health today.  The setting is1930s screwball patter, and man-crazy dumb blondes who connive to marry (or be kept by) their bosses. We travel back and forth through time in every scene, reevaluating our perspective, old and new.

Today’s post is part of the Comedy Classics Blogathon sponsored by the Classic Movie Blog Association. Have a look here for a schedule of the other participating blogs.

January, typically a month for resolutions about changing one’s life, and being deluged with diet and fitness ads and infomercials, is an especially fitting time to watch Jean Arthur try to change herself.  She runs up against the extremely high standards of George Brent.

Mr. Brent plays the editor of “Body and Brain” magazine, who runs his office and his personal life with the discipline of a professional health guru. In 1936, however, when this movie was made, he is seen as a freak. Much of the comedy is derived by sensible Jean Arthur’s bewildered reactions to his diet and exercise regimen.  He pulls raw carrots out of his desk drawer and chomps on them like Bugs Bunny.

Jean is the co-owner (along with reliable sidekick Ruth Donnelly) of a secretarial school. We first see them in their classrooms droning repetitious typing dictation for their students, who pound away at clunky black manual typewriters the size of Buicks. I must confess, I view this scene with some fondness. It is how I learned to type. That quick brown fox and lazy dog are old pals of mine.

In fact, considering how much I type and have typed through the decades since, that one semester of Typing 101 in high school was probably the most beneficial and practical class I ever took.

And working for so many years (ago) on a manual typewriter, I have fingers like Hercules. I continually wear out flimsy plastic computer keyboards. I run through them like Kleenex. I could crush you like a bug.

But Jean’s and Ruth’s students, or at least some of them, do not envision decades of typing, or any career at all. They are there to learn the skills that will get them jobs as executive secretaries to rich businessmen, and then marry them. Or be kept as mistresses.

This is student Dorothea Kent’s objective.

Dorothea Kent comes pretty close to stealing this movie.

She had a less than stellar career in B-movies as the dumb friend, but here her “Maisie” character, despite the high-pitched whine and clueless attitude, is really quite street-smart and self-sufficient. She knows what she wants, and she goes out and gets it. Also, coloring her dumb blonde act is a biting nastiness that makes her fascinating, even as you want to club her for her blatant rudeness to Jean. Her supposedly obtuse double entendres are perfectly executed. She blithely but with a spin of sophistication talks of the corporate head to whom she finally becomes…indispensible. “You’ll never know how he leans on me.”

Charles Halton plays the head man who eventually gets Miss Kent on a rent-to-own basis. He had a long career on screen as a fussy, humorless, officious type, but he began on the New York stage and had trained at the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts.

Ruth Donnelly, too, had spent her earlier years on Broadway, but came west as did so many when the Depression hit and movies became less demeaning to those on the “legitimate” stage. The two of them would spend their careers as bit players in a studio system which would guarantee them work as “types” but rarely challenge them.

For Jean Arthur, 1936 was a busy year. In this one year she did five movies. Along with this one there was “The Plainsman” (see our previous post here), “The Ex-Mrs. Bradford”, “Adventure in Manhattan” and “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town”. Each role was different, and we see that though the studio system could be something like a conveyor belt of sameness in roles for many actors and actresses, Jean refused to cooperate with studio head Harry Cohn enough times to forge her own mark on her career.

Here her portrayal is of the career businesswoman who falls for the boss -- exactly what she cautions her students against, preferring that they take the honorable tack of learning proper business skills.  She seems a more somber character than what we are used to seeing in her screwball roles.

It is as if she is still working through the transition of so many earlier roles where she played the sad but forthright heroine seeking love (“Danger Signals” 1930) or justice (“Party Wire” - 1935) to the working girl whose delightful sense of irony is her self-preservation (“Public Hero #1” - 1935) and (“If You Could Only Cook” - 1935).

The further along in her career she got, the more of the world’s troubles she took on her shoulders and she became the moral compass of screwball comedies. “Mr. Deeds” and “Mr. Smith” were ahead of her, but by then she would be ready for them.

Here she has George Brent, who might not seem like the answer to this frustrated businesswoman’s prayers.  We last saw Mr. Brent here in "My Reputation".   I think I really prefer him in light comedy to drama.  He has nice touch with slightly absurd characters.  Here, his delightfully serious naiveté, despite the science of his health beliefs, both maddens and appeals to her.

She visits his office because he has fired so many of her graduates. He is very demanding. He is pleased by her business suit and spectacles, thinking she is brainy and serious.  People who wear glasses are usually very brainy and also quite glamorous. 

What was I talking about?  Oh, yeah.   George.  Jean.  He mistakes her for another applicant, and brusquely runs her through a quick job interview. Intrigued, she decides to play along and take the job, and see what this weirdo is all about.

Much to the consternation of her business partner, Ruth Donnelly, who wonders why she would leave her business to take a lousy $25 a week job.

We see, before Ruth does, before Jean does, that she is smitten with George Brent.

He has a good role here, and plays it most charmingly. He is intelligent and disciplined, two qualities which Jean admires, being both herself, but he is also a little out of touch with the real world, and this is what mystifies and intrigues her. Soon, he grows dependent on her capability in the office, which compliments his own need for order.  It is not until very late in the movie that he realizes he loves her.

Jean has to jump through a lot of hoops before that happens. First, there is his confounding health regimen which he imposes on his staff. His right-hand man, Lionel Stander, a body builder straight from the gym, puts the office workers through morning calisthenics. Brent opens the windows and breathes deeply, ordering Jean to follow along with deep knee bends and provocative lunges.

He treats to her a lunch of a bran muffin, and a vegetarian supper. I think my favorite line is when, half-starved she buys groceries on the way home and, tired about hearing how her regular diet is bad for her, plucks an enormous raw steak out of her shopping bag. Just before dropping it in the frying pan, gives it an enthusiastic kiss,

“Steak, come kill mama!”

Much of George Brent’s health regimen is used for comic effect, too ridiculous in 1936 to be taken seriously. Today, in a US where obesity has become common, many people watching this film now probably are on diet restrictions for various medical concerns. What was once freakish became fad, and now has become a matter of life or death for a lot of people.

Another facet of George Brent’s rigid outlook is his refusal to use images in his magazine that are sexual. He is a proponent of bodily grace and physical perfection, but the idea of using cheesecake to illustrate his articles is abhorrent to him. Jean has to turn him around on this one and convince him that a little glamour will sell more magazines.

Today, our magazines images (as well as articles) are examples as to how sex sells. Poor George would be aghast.

But George’s modern ideas on health and Victorian ideas on how to sell it are only the least of Jean’s problems. Dorothea Kent comes back into her life with a vengeance.

Her boss, whose wife is returning from Europe, must get rid of her for a while, and palms her off on the unwitting George Brent.  Mr. Brent hasn’t the sophistication to deal with so avid a man-chaser and so inept a secretary as our Dorothea. He is overwhelmed by her, and hasn’t the mettle to send her packing.

He succumbs to her…charms.

He makes Jean his assistant editor to keep both ladies happy, and Jean makes good at this new challenge, but is crushed that he now spends his days, and nights, with Dorothea. Dorothea has another good scene where she insults Jean through the sheerest gauze of innocence, “And you actually thinking you had a chance with him,” she laughs. You want to sock her.

Jean is more angry at herself for not being able to compete with such fluff. In her way, she is very much like George Brent, a lover of order and routine, a hard worker, and a social misfit. She quits, and there are layers to her disgusted remark to Brent, “You’re such a fool.”

Here George finally figures out he loves her and wants her back. He pushes the ambitious Dorothea Kent onto the big boss, Charles Halton.

A couple of fun period items in this movie - Brent’s Art Deco office furniture, and the trailer or “land yacht” Jean and Ruth buy to travel and start over.

Ruth exclaims, “If I’d known how much fun it was to quick work, I wouldn’t have slaved the last 18 years without a vacation.”

Jean shows us how not to park a car with a land yacht attached to the back of it.

I love George Brent’s look when Dorothea Kent returns unexpectedly just as Jean is about to come back into his life. It is a priceless expression of horror and dread. All he needs is one of Curly’s “Nyah, Nyah, Nyah” groans of anxiety to complete it.

The scene where, brooking no more nonsense, Jean (“The time has come.”) spanks Dorothea like the naughty child she is, and tells her that, “I can’t bear looking at you!” -- is a resounding moment of screwball retribution.

A cute ending, and one in which Jean finally gets to shed her somber mood, is when she’s about to explode and cut into Brent, but the morning calisthenics interrupt her. Like the other office automatons, when given the order by Lionel Stander to inhale and begin the stretching exercises, she unthinkingly extends her arms. Brent grabs her in a cuddle, and her “exhale” position is to wrap her arms around him.

See? Exercise is good for you. It makes you feel better.

Don’t forget to check out the other great posts in the Comedy Classics Blogathon.