Mill Creek comedy classics #66: "The Stork Club" (1945)

Is Betty Hutton a "kept woman?" Don DeFore sure thinks so in 1945's The Stork Club.

The flick: The Stork Club (Paramount release of a B.G. DeSylva Productions Inc. film, 1945) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 6.3

Director: Hal Walker (Road to Bali)

Famed author and wit Robert Benchley

Actors of note:

• Betty Hutton (The Perils of Pauline)

• Barry Fitzgerald (Oscar winner for Going My Way; appeared in The Quiet Man, Bringing Up Baby, How Green Was My Valley, etc.)

• Don DeFore (best known for roles on TV's Hazel and The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet; movies include Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and Kid Galahad)

• Robert Benchley (famed newspaper columnist and humorist of the 1920s; member of the Algonquin Round Table; wrote for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker; movies include I Married a Witch and Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent; died the year this movie was released)

• Bill Goodwin (Hitchcock's Spellbound; better known as a TV and radio announcer)

• Iris Adrian (The Odd Couple; worked with Elvis, Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, and Abbot & Costello; appeared in many, many Disney comedies including Freaky Friday, The Love Bug, Herbie Goes Bananas, The Apple Dumpling Gang, etc.)

• Mikhail Rasumny (For Whom the Bell Tolls, This Gun For Hire, Road to Morocco)

• Mary Young (Billy Wilder's The Seven Year Itch and The Lost Weekend; Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent; frequent TV guest star of the '50s and '60s)

• Andy Russell (popular baritone crooner of the 1940s; real name was Andres Rabago; credits include Disney's Make Mine Music)

• Grady Sutton (The Bank Dick, Rock 'n' Roll High School, much more; MST3K fans may remember him from Last of the Wild Horses)

Other notables: The film's costumes are by Edith Head. The soundtrack includes contributions by Hoagy Carmichael (best known for "Stardust," "Georgia on My Mind," etc.), Sammy Cahn ("High Hopes," "Call me Irresponsible," etc.), Jay Livingston ("Que Sera Sera," the theme from Bonanza, etc.), and Paul Francis Webster ("Love is a Many Splendored Thing," the Spider-Man theme, etc.), all Songwriters Hall of Fame inductees. Between them, these guys wrote a good-sized chunk of 20th century American popular music, including countless songs for film and television. For this movie, Carmichael and Webster wrote "Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief," which was a #1 hit for star Betty Hutton in March 1946. It was the biggest hit of her career.

Another poster for 1945's The Stork Club.

The gist of it: Sweet-natured hatcheck girl and aspiring singer Judy Peabody (Hutton) saves wealthy J.B. Bates (Fitzgerald) from drowning after he falls in the ocean while chasing his hat. She mistakes him for an old bum, affectionately nicknames him "Pops," and decides to take pity on him. He doesn't need her charity, but he's so touched by her kindness that he arranges to help her out financially. Bates' somewhat shifty lawyer, Tom Curtis (Benchley), sends Judy a letter telling her that she has an expense account and can buy whatever she needs to make her happy.

Judy first uses the money to help "Pops" (not knowing that it's his money to begin with) and even tries to get him a job at her place of employment, a ritzy night spot called the Stork Club. Then, to Bates' horror, Judy starts spending the money on herself, buying dresses and furs and renting an expensive apartment. To make matters worse, Judy's boyfriend, Danny (DeFore), returns home from WWII and is awfully suspicious about where Judy's money is coming from. He's sure she has a sugar daddy, and his two main suspects are Mr. Bates, who's been staying in Judy's apartment to keep an eye on her, and Judy's good-hearted boss at the Stork Club, Sherman Billingsley (Goodwin). Bates tries to tell Judy the truth about the money, but she won't believe him. Meanwhile, Danny's swing band is about to desert him unless they can score a paying gig in the very near future. It's up to Judy to convince Danny she's on the level, get his band a job at the Stork Club, and reunite Mr. Bates with his estranged wife (Young)—all in the span of 24 hours!

The real Stork Club in its heyday.

My take: The Stork Club is a very charming, if incredibly contrived, musical comedy that mainly serves as a vehicle for singer-actress-comedienne Betty Hutton, as determined as ever to bludgeon us to death with her talent. These highly artificial events could never—and I mean never—happen in the world you and I inhabit. It's one of those stories that require the characters to say all the wrong things at all the wrong times and withhold vital information from one another for no good reason other than to keep the plot going when the whole mess could be easily cleared up in about 40 seconds.

And yet, this very fanciful film is rooted in reality. Sort of. There really was a Stork Club in New York City (1929-1965), and it really was owned by a man named Sherman Billngsley! And Billingsley (whose nephew, Glenn, married Barbara Billingsley) really was a pal of influential newspaper columnist Walter Winchell, which explains why, in this film, Judy pretends to be Winchell in order to trick Billingsley into watching Danny's band perform. Sherman's not fooled by this ploy, but he's so nice that he goes along with the gag anyway.

In fact, the movie consistently goes out of its way to depict Billingsley as an all-around swell guy: a devoted family man and a generous employer who shows an incredible amount of patience with the irksome antics of Judy, Danny, and Pops. The real Billingsley was a convicted bootlegger who had done time in federal prison and who kept Ethel Merman as a mistress in the late 1930s, and his famed Stork Club attained infamy just a few years after this movie when it refused entrance to legendary African-American dancer Josephine Baker. In this film, the only thing banned from Billingsley's place is waltz music... and even that mild taboo is broken by the story's end.

Speaking of the film's soundtrack, these big band-style tunes seem quaint by today's standards but Barry Fitzgerald reacts to this music the way you probably did to dubstep a few years ago. "I"ll never understand it!" he mutters. (The Stork Club is such a deeply nice movie, though, that even this curmudgeonly character comes around eventually.)

Overall, The Stork Club is an ingratiating little flick I enjoyed more than I had expected. Betty Hutton is not a subtle performer, but she's more nuanced and less desperate than she seemed in The Perils of Pauline (1947). In that movie, she was operating at an 11 out of 10. Here, she's dialed it back to a 7 or 8, and that helps quite a bit. If I can remember correctly, The Stork Club has only one scene in which she's reduced to whimpering and blubbering when things don't go her way, and even that is brief.

Don DeFore, the wacky neighbor on Ozzie and Harriet and the standard-issue sitcom dad on Hazel, is a bit of a washout as her leading man, I'm sorry to report. His character, Danny, is paranoid and possessive and treats Judy pretty badly until the last five minutes or so. Yet this is a romantic comedy, so we have a vested interest in seeing Danny and Judy wind up together at the end of the movie. Again, though, Danny's less of a mean-spirited jerk than John Lund's Michael Farrington character in The Perils of Pauline, so The Stork Club still feels like a step up from that. This film had "inessential" stamped on its forehead at birth, but it's a pleasant enough diversion.

Is it funny: Yes, and I laughed out loud more than once, even though not too many individual jokes or scenes stuck with me after the end credits. Mikhail Rasumny gets some laughs as the long-suffering headwaiter Mr. Coretti, who maintains his equilibrium to an almost heroic extent in situations most of us would find intolerable. I also enjoyed the witty, half-soused repartee between Barry Fitzgerald and Robert Benchley, as well as Fitzgerald's scenes with Betty Hutton, who treats the old man like a stray puppy. Iris Adrian was a tad on-the-nose for me as blonde bombshell Judy's wisecracking brunette sidekick, Gwen, but the two gals have a fairly funny little sequence in which they insist on wearing their newly-purchased mink coats on a sweltering day and end up positively drenched in perspiration.

Perhaps in a subtle way, the film's funniest character is Sherman Billingsley himself, who demonstrates Herculean endurance when coping with the misguided, scatterbrained characters who surround him. As ridiculously as these people behave, Billingsley never loses his cool. Not that he's a pushover, mind you. He's firm but fair. Here, for instance, is how Billingsley deals with Danny's jealous nonsense.

Danny: (worriedly) Mr. Billingsley, what would you do if you were in my spot? 

Billingsley: (calmly) I'd stop bothering me.

I'll drink to that... which reminds me of another thing I liked about this movie: the near-constant drinking by most of the main characters. Ah, the '40s! By the way, I award this movie some bonus points for giving us a scene with the eternally blank, clueless Grady Sutton, a character actor whose presence is always welcome in stories of this nature.

My grade: B+

P.S.  - While not overtly racist or stereotypical (other than, I suppose, Fitzgerald's hard-drinking Irishman), The Stork Club has a few moments that now seem culturally insensitive. "Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief" is a terrifically catchy song, but the song's lyrics—and the choreography that goes with them—may offend Native Americans. And DeFore's character, a WWII vet, makes a disparaging reference to a "Jap" soldier he apparently killed in a cave.

Mill Creek comedy classics #37: "The Perils of Pauline" (1947)

Perils of Pauline: You know you've made it when you get your own funnybook! Congrats, Betty Hutton!

The flick: The Perils of Pauline (Paramount, 1947) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 6.6

Director: George Marshall (Destry Rides Again; directed "Railroad" segment of How the West Was Won; episodes of TV's Daniel Boone and The Odd Couple)

Billy De Wolfe

Actors of note:

• Betty Hutton (brassy, oft-divorced "blond bombshell" singer/actress of the 1940s and '50s; The Greatest Show on Earth; title role in Annie Get Your Gun; had own TV show in 1959-1960)

• John Lund (High Society, A Foreign Affair)

• Billy De Wolfe (popular vaudeville and burlesque clown; voiced the Professor in TV's Frosty the Snowman)

• William Demarest (again?!? really?!?)

• Constance Collier (Hitchcock's Rope, D.W. Griffith's Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages)

• Frank Faylen (Dobie's dad on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis; appeared in It's a Wonderful Life, Gone with the Wind, The Grapes of Wrath, and more)

• Chester Conklin (a Keystone Kop; appeared in Chaplin's Modern Times and The Great Dictator; considered himself one of the four greatest pioneers of movie comedy alongside Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle, and Mabel Normand)

• James Finlayson (the "d'oh!" guy from All Over Town)

• "Slapsie Maxie" Rosenbloom (Nothing Sacred)

• Ray Walker (Goodbye Love)

• Tom Dugan (Palooka)

Other notables: 

• The gowns were designed by Edith Head, the most famous and honored costume designer in film history (eight Oscars, 400+ credits). Edith inspired the "Edna Mode" character in The Incredibles and the song "She Thinks She's Edith Head" by They Might Be Giants.

• The songs for this movie were written by Frank Loesser, the tunesmith behind Guys & Dolls, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and "Baby, It's Cold Outside."

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Perils of Pauline sheet music.

The gist of it: Early 1900s, New York. Plucky, talented Pearl White (Hutton) works as a seamstress in a sweatshop for pervy cheapskate Mr. Gurt (Faylen), but she'd rather be in show business. One day, she delivers a costume to a theater and ends up joining the theatrical troupe of handsome, conceited Michael Farrington (Lund). She travels with the troupe from town to town and is befriended by two of her fellow actors: matronly Julia Gbbs (Collier) and shamelessly hammy Timmy Timmons (De Wolfe). The newcomer also falls in love with her boss, Michael, who keeps her at arm's length. Pearl works her way up from bit parts to leading roles in the company, but one night she suffers a cold and flubs her lines onstage, causing the audience to become riled. Michael berates Pearl after the show, so she quits the troupe, taking Julia with her.

Some time later, Julia gets an undignified walk-on part in the newfangled "moving pictures," but it's tagalong Pearl who becomes the star when her fearlessness and natural charisma are noticed by director "Mac" McGuire (Demarest). Pearl becomes the heroine of a serialized adventure story called The Perils of Pauline, doing her own dangerous stunts, and finds jobs for old friends Julia and Timmy in the cast. Michael, meanwhile, has been reduced to a carnival barker. Pearl invites him to become her leading man in the Pauline movies. He accepts, though he considers the movies beneath him and longs to return to the stage. Eventually, after a misadventure in a runaway hot air balloon, Pearl and Michael admit their love for each other and are engaged. But Michael can't stand being a second banana in such a lowly enterprise, and he leaves a heartbroken Pearl to return to acting. His theatrical career soars, while Pearl's popularity wanes as the old-fashioned "serials" fall out of favor with the American public.

Pearl moves to Paris, where they love her stage act and her films, too. Michael follows her, but mere hours before they are supposed to reunite, Pearl is gravely injured during a performance and is seemingly paralyzed from the waist down. Ignoring the orders of her doctors, she meets up with Michael, and they reaffirm their love for one another and agree to marry.

The real Pearl White.

My take: Nobody expects Hollywood biopics to be accurate or realistic, and true to form, The Perils of Pauline bears little resemblance to the sad, abbreviated, and fascinating existence of actress Pearl White (1889-1938). This is a glossy, cotton-candy musical that heavily fictionalizes and romanticizes her eventful life.

A great deal of the melodrama is wholly manufactured for the screenplay. There were no real-world counterparts of the characters played by Billy De Wolfe or Constance Collier, and the original Perils of Pauline was directed not by a brash American like the one William Demarest portrays here, but by Frenchman Louis J. Gasnier, the auteur behind Reefer Madness. Pearl White's second husband, Wallace McCutcheon, Jr., was an actor and a war hero like John Lund's "Michael Farrington" character in this film. But Pearl and Wallace's marriage lasted only two years, and the despondent man killed himself after their divorce. Pearl did move to Paris after her screen career cooled off, but there she suffered a nervous breakdown and cirrhosis of the liver, not the spectacular on-stage accident we see in this film. She'd been dead of alcoholism less than a decade when this fanciful screen biography appeared. Some of my favorite films, including Amadeus and Ed Wood, are based on real people but take enormous liberties with the facts.

I suppose my main problem with this film is that it betrays Pearl White but doesn't come up with a better, more satisfying narrative of her life. Flawed as she was, Pearl was quite the pioneer when it comes to women in film, and it took a lot of guts to do the stunts she did. (The injuries she suffered led to the fatal alcoholism later in life.) But the whole point of this movie is that Pearl ultimately learns to be dependent upon a man, Michael, who has treated her shabbily for years. And we're supposed to feel good about that? By the end, Michael is literally carrying the helpless Pearl in his arms, while she agrees with him what a lousy actress she's always been. Does her character ever recover and learn to walk again? Who knows? Who cares? She's got a man to haul her around, so I guess she doesn't need working legs.

To be blunt, both Michael and Pearl are silly, unsympathetic characters. He's a pretentious, peevish, jealous snob with all the charm of a pile of wet laundry. What does Pearl see in this guy? Why do her supposed "friends" keep nudging her toward him? Pearl has major problems of her own. Whenever she's given any kind of criticism, she immediately wilts, crumples her face all up, and becomes weepy and whiny. But she has the attention span of a mayfly and can go from "completely despondent" to "absolutely elated" in mere seconds. Her naive "golly gee willikers" enthusiasm was a bit much, too. I didn't buy it. Meanwhile, Frank Loesser's songs are clever and pleasant, but they're not on a par with his best work. By the way, Pearl White's first husband was an actor, too. His name was Victor Sutherland, and he lived to the age of 79. His last recorded role? Guest starring on (I should have known) The Betty Hutton Show.

Billy De Wolfe as Professor Hinkle.

Is it funny: Sometimes it is, but The Perils of Pauline isn't strictly a comedy. It's a biopic, a musical, and a love story, too. There are long stretches of the film that are dramatic or melodramatic rather than comedic. Betty Hutton struck me as a female equivalent of Danny Kaye in that she uses every atom of her being to entertain the audience and is kind of overwhelming and hard to take in large doses. If she's in a humorous scene, she bludgeons you half to death with zaniness. Picture Lucille Ball on steroids.

Similarly, Billy De Wolfe was a familiar comic actor for decades but never quite made it in movies because his voice and mannerisms were simply too "big" for the screen. Little wonder that his most famous role was in an animated special. Hutton and De Wolfe have some nice moments together, as when Timmy gives Pearl lessons in diction like a downmarket Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle. However, I can't honestly say I laughed all that much at their antics. The one character, surprisingly, who made me laugh a few times was "Mac," the reckless, self-centered film director who seems to feed on chaos and calamity. All this guy cares about is movies. When World War I breaks out, all "Mac" cares about is how it's going to affect the plot of his next picture. That made me chuckle.

My grade: B

P.S. - Oh, golly, is this film rife with racial stereotypes. For one production with the Farrington Players, Pearl portrays a mammy, complete with blackface and "Negro" dialect, while "Dixie" plays on the soundtrack . This goes on for several minutes of screen time. The only actual black people in The Perils of Pauline are either extras in a cheap "jungle" flick or maids. The world was very different just a few decades ago, folks.