DVD Review: The Doris Day Collection, Vol. 2

By Frankie Dees Apr 11, 2007, 14:52 GMT

Romance on the High Seas (1948)Doris Day’s film debut in this romantic musical was a lucky break, stepping into the lead role as a replacement when Betty Hutton withdrew due to pregnancy. The film’s composer Jule Styne (who collaborated with famed lyricist Sammy Cahn) heard Doris sing at a party, and immediately arranged for her to have a screen test at Warner Bros. for Director Michael Curtiz. The rest is ...more

Warner Bros. presents the six-disc ‘The Doris Day Collection: Volume 2’ which includes the first two films of Day’s film career along with four other films from early in her filmography: ‘Romance on the High Seas’, ‘My Dream is Yours’, ‘I’ll See You in My Dreams’, ‘By Moonlight Bay’, ‘By the Light of the Silvery Moon’ and ‘Lucky Me’.

One of the most consistently popular movie stars of the 50s and 60s due to an all-American, girl next door quality with a cherub-like face that was pretty enough to keep the guys attention but not so pretty as to make the ladies jealous. Her virginal film image kept her popular on the big screen up to the debut of her TV show in the late sixties when the tide had begun to change in film where audiences started to demand a little more realism from their movie stars.

That her squeaky clean public image was far removed from her real life, where she got married and had a child at 17 (not so much a big deal now but in 1941?) and was involved in five failed marriages, to this day remains mostly unknown and rather moot. It’s what is burned into celluloid that matters and there’s no denying that Doris Day remains a highly influential actress of an era in film when fluffy, innocuous entertainment was the name of the game. She had a natural affinity for being in front of the camera and combining that with her pleasant (if unremarkable) singing voice was more than enough for her film career to get kick-started in 1948 with Michael Curtiz’s ‘Romance on the High Seas’.

Curtiz, who seems to have settled into a more comfortable point in his career, after directing some of the best films ever made with ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’ and ‘Casablanca’ directs Day in three films included in this set (not to slight his Day efforts but it does seem like an odd turn…). As the story goes, Day was recruited by composer and lyricist Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn, respectively, for an audition for their latest musical ‘Romance on the High Seas’ after they saw her perform at a party. Fate would have Judy Garland pass and then Betty Hutton back out due to a pregnancy and the rest they say is history.

Day is, of course, only fourth-billed but her performance so impressed Curtiz that he started preproduction on his next film while still shooting ‘Romance…’ with Day in the lead. Janis Paige plays Elvira Kent, a woman married to perpetually busy businessman Michael Kent (Don Defore). Their marriage is under constant scrutiny by each other who constantly suspect the other of cheating. Opening scenes of the film take place at their wedding where he accuses her of staring at some guy as she’s walking down the aisle and her accusing him of staring at a bridesmaid (heh, I think we all can relate to the stupidity of jealousy at some point in our life).

After years of postponement, Elvira finally thinks Michael is able to take her on their honeymoon cruise so she makes her way to a travel agency where she meets Georgia Garrett (Doris Day), a local singer who frequents the agency much to the chagrin of the agency’s employees, where she extensively plans trips that she never has the money to pay for.

When Michael cancels their honeymoon cruise yet again and attempts to have Elvira go alone, Elvira comes up with a ruse to catch her philandering husband once and for all! Convinced he’s staying behind to spend time with his new hottie secretary, Elvira comes up with the idea of sending Georgia under her name on the cruise, where Georgia will pretend to be Elvira, while Elvira stays behind to spy on Michael.

What Elvira didn’t plan on was Michael coming up with a ruse of his own when he suspects Elvira of cheating on him during the cruise – so he hires a private eye Peter Virgil (Jack Carson) to go on the cruise with Elvira and keep an eye on her. Peter never sees the real Elvira so, of course, assumes that Georgia is the real Elvira where numerous comedic and romantic hijinks ensue.

A funny little premise and script by screenwriters Julius and Philip Epstein with additional dialogue by Billy Wilder’s writing partner I.A.L. Diamond. It’s all a bit of silliness, but its effective silliness. Janis Paige and Don Defore play their suspicious roles well and Jack Carson proves to be just slightly more effectual than, say, Randolph Scott in the same type of stiff romantic lead role. Day is the eye-opener here, though, who was allowed a bit more randiness with this role (where her mannerisms and singing, even, was no doubt a result of the character being set up for Betty Hutton) than the studio allowed her later when she became the ‘wholesome’ label for them.

Fans of Days music will find much to like here with the Busby Berkeley staging of notable numbers ‘It’s Magic’ and ‘It’s You or No One’ among others where Day stops the proceedings to sing directly to the audience. I could have done without Carson’s ‘Run, Run, Run’ number (keep your day job, buddy) but the music is a nice compliment to the film and not an excuse to pick up the remote control to find the fast forward button. A pleasant enough start for Day and it’s clear why she was signed to a seven year contract with WB after they saw some of her screen tests.

The film is presented in its original aspect ratio of 4:3 full frame. Special Features include a vintage musical short ‘Let’s Sing a Song from the Movies’, a classic cartoon ‘I Taw a Putty Tat’ and the film’s theatrical trailer.

Day teams up with Carson and Michael Curtiz again the following year for ‘My Dream is Yours’. Curtiz had started preproduction on this film while still shooting ‘Romance…’ and bumped up Day to second-billing under Jack Carson. More of the same silliness but this time the songs production numbers get most of the acclaim over the less intriguing narrative.

Jack Carson plays Doug Blake, a fast-talking, go-getting talent agent who comes to odds with his haughty radio star Gary Mitchell (Lee Bowman) who feels he doesn’t need an agent anymore. With a falling out of his main star, Blake is forced to find another one where he enlists the help of his loyal pal Vivian Martin (Eve Arden) who was working at the talent agency he worked for (I was strangely reminded of ‘Jerry Maguire’ here). He needs to find somebody to take over the ‘Hour of Enchantment’ radio program where Mitchell currently hosts and who also should please the owner, the old-fashioned businessman Felix Hofer (S.Z. Sakall).

Running out of time and luck, he stumbles into a bar with his problems in which the bartender promptly calls up his niece Martha Gibson (Doris Day), who is essentially the 40s equivalent of a D.J., playing records for a piped-in music company. The bartender has her sing directly into the mic where her singing gets fed into the bar where Blake can hear her. Impressed, Blake takes to finding her at work but finds she was fired for singing into the mic, yet again, and not playing the records.

He likes it but he’s too stuffy to make a transition so he turns her down. Gary Mitchell sees her perform, though, and lays on the charm causing Martha to fall for him. When Blake finds that Martha has much more success with slower music, she becomes a star as Gary’s star drops. A love triangle forms when Blake confesses his love for Martha, who still carries a torch for the fallen Mitchell. Oh, sweet, sweet irony!

The film is pretty much more of the same with the exception that Day is given a chance to show off a few thespian skills here like the tearful farewell sequence between her and her son. It was written that this film somewhat mirrored Day’s own life at the time where she had to leave her young son to follow a career after her second marriage ended – so the acting wasn’t so much acting but playing off her own emotions felt at the time.

Knowing this, it certainly gives some poignancy to these scenes highlighted by the fact that Richardson who plays her son is actually quite good and avoids a lot of the faux goofiness that comes with child performances of this time.

Carson is much better here than in ‘Romance…’ where he is handed a role that suits him much better and who develops a nice rapport with Day (although nothing approaching her signature partner in rom-com, Rock Hudson or even James Garner). The music is only competent with the title song ‘My Dream is Yours’ being the stand-out. Most notable, though, is a scene animation buffs should look out for – Friz Freleng inserts Bugs Bunny into a strange, dream sequence of Richardson’s where Day and Carson sing and dance to ‘Freddy, Get Ready’ alongside Bugs Bunny in Bunny suits - A cool sequence but completely out of place in the context of the film. 

The film is presented in its original aspect ratio of 4:3 full frame. Special Features include a vintage Joe McDoakes comedy short ‘So You Want to be an Actor’, an Oscar-nominated drama short ‘The Grass is always Greener’, a classic cartoon “A Ham in a Role’ and the films theatrical trailer.

Next is ‘I’ll See You in my Dreams’, yet another Michael Curtiz pic but a complete departure from our first two films. After ‘My Dream is Yours’, Curtiz allowed Day to show off her dramatic chops in that same year’s ‘Young Man with a Horn’ with Kirk Douglas where she was well-received so Curtiz recruited her to play off of Danny Thomas in the biopic of prolific songwriter Gus Kahn who was responsible for close to 800 songs including ‘Makin’ Whoopee’, ‘Love Me or Leave Me’, It Had to Be You’, ‘Ain’t We Got Fun?’, ‘Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby’ among countless others.

There’s no doubt that Kahn was a great songwriter but his life, for me anyway, doesn’t prove quite interesting enough to justify a film. Yes, he had a shaky professional and personal life (who doesn’t at one point in their life?) but the film plays out with a ho-hum, slightly dull undercurrent that never captured my interest especially considering Danny Thomas’s more than lacking portrayal of Kahn.

Danny Thomas plays Gus Kahn as an unconfident schlub, a meager salesman whose downtime was monopolized by writing songs. Trying to get his foot into the music industry door, he’s able to buy some empathy with a music publisher employee Grace LeBoy (Doris Day) who convinces him to support a song he is able to get published by Fred Thompson (James Gleason). Apparently the success of a songwriter back in the day was dependent on the sales of their sheet music and when his first song takes off, so starts the numerous ups and downs of his life.

Without going into too much detail, the usual setbacks occur where Gus comes to resent Grace for constantly bailing him out of trouble, refuses to ask Grace to marry him for eight years because of this resentment, the threat of infidelity and a testy relationship with his lyricists Walter (Frank Lovejoy) and Egbert (Dick Simmons). Ho-hum.

The one nice thing about the film is the use of 23 of Kahn’s songs that play throughout the film. The problem with this being that, usually, only excerpts of the songs are used which can be annoying when one gets jiving with a particular song. I also kind of wish I never saw the creation of these songs as their beginnings are kind of mired in a depressive atmosphere that’s the direct opposite of the tone of the songs. This goofball wrote ‘Makin’ Whoopee’? Still there’s no denying the addictiveness of these songs where they have been used to successfully punctuate a scene in over 200 films ranging from ‘Casablanca’ to ‘Con-Air’.

Day is good in the role but the dramatics required aren’t much. She mostly plays the be trodden wife character who constantly gets abused by Gus after she does all she can to support him. If Gus was able to get some comeuppance or repercussions for his actions at the end of the film, then maybe the film would have played a bit better but as it stands where the wife and children are only so happy to embrace their father and his success after some of his deplorable actions…ehh, even if there was some truth to this, it seems a bit to much to ask for contemporary audiences, women especially. It doesn’t help that I’ve never been a big fan of Danny Thomas in film, he fares better on the small screen and later television show, but he’s clearly out of his league with this character which needed more nuance to make his character have even a shred of charisma and sympathy. The one downer in the set, fans of biopics might find these routine scenes comfy, I just found the film depressing.

The film is presented in its original aspect ratio of 4:3 full frame. Special Features include a short ‘The Screen Director’ which gives an interesting glimpse at directors such as John Ford, John Huston and Frank Capra. There’s also a Merrie Melodies cartoon ‘Lovelorn Foghorn’ and the film’s theatrical trailer.

I’ll be reviewing the next two films together as one is a direct sequel and plays out very much the same as the original – almost a borderline remake. The two films in question are ‘On Moonlight Bay’ and its sequel ‘By the Light of the Silvery Moon’ both based on Booth Tarkington’s ‘Penrod’ stories which tell the story of an idolized, innocent Saturday Evening Post slice of Middle-America life in the years leading up to WWI where smacking on gum, playing a friendly game of baseball, hitting the dance floor at the local dance hall and enjoying a canoe trip under the moon with your honey where one knows that the threat of hanky-panky is almost nil, are common actions.

Doris Day plays Marjorie Winfield, a gal in her late teens who has yet to grow up. A tomboy of sorts, she’s more comfortable in her baseball outfit and a sideways cap playing baseball with the local boys more than dressing up and hanging out the local diner looking for fellas, much to her tolerant, family’s chagrin. Her doting father George Winfield (Leon Ames) is the vice president of the local bank, her mother Alice (Rosemary DeCamp), her Dennis the Menaceish younger brother Wesley (Billy Gray) and the requisite smart-alecky family maid Stella (Mary Wickes) all surround her in a nice, new Victorian house (so perfect one expects to see the Hollywood Hills in the background) where they moved to from a mile and a half away hoping that this upper-scale neighborhood will help in getting Marjorie away from her boyish tomfoolery and prompt her to become a real lady with a legitimate suitor.

A suitor comes in the form of Bill Sherman (Gordon MacRae), a neighbor, whose first encounter with Marjorie culminates in him spanking her (unfortunately not nearly as dirty as it sounds…). They fall in love quickly, as any good canoe trip under the moon will do but problems arise when Bill clashes with Marjories father George. Bill is a radical-thinking windbag who is quick to jump on his soapbox at the drop of a hat. Besides not believing in marriage, he also thinks bankers are “parasites” and banks are unnecessary which he lets slip to George, not knowing George is a banker. George is quick to boot him out of the house, but true love can never be dissuaded so Marjorie agrees to wait on Bill when he returns to college.

When Bill is in college, Marjorie is set up with a nerdy bank clerk Hubert Wakely (Jack Smith) who George is quick to approve of for a suitable husband. On the dawn of WWI, a predicament comes when Bill decides to enlist in the army once he graduates from college. With this rash decision also comes a marriage proposal where he decides marriage isn’t so bad after all…now we just have to wait on George coming around and making some small personal sacrifices for his daughter’s happiness. Gee, you think it will all turn out?

Day has never been more lovable than with this role where her charisma and vibrancy practically bleeds off the screen (although she does seem a bit too old to play this character) and is perfectly matched with the freshly-scrubbed vitality of MacRae. They both have fine singing voices which gel well together.

Her younger brother Wesley (played nicely by Billy Gray) has an effective, humorous line of subplots all to himself along with some more comic relief in the form of the exasperated maid Stella. Leon Ames and Rosemary DeCamp play the perfect doting parents right out of sitcom-lore with a lot of nice scenes together. Time, place and atmosphere are all an ideal fantasy recreation of the times complete with county fairs and snowball fights. This film would get my money for the quaintest movie ever made. I’m sure audiences in 1951 found this a safe haven from the threats of the real world going on outside – the cold war was taking shape and what better way to spend an afternoon than to revisit the innocence of a pre-WWI small Indiana town.

The sequel ‘By the Light of the Silvery Moon’ picks up with Bill Sherman returning back home from war. Bill and Marjorie have yet to tie the knot deciding to wait until he gets back. Marjorie has unsurprisingly reverted back to her tomboy ways where she mires away her time working on her dads old jalopy. Alice and George wait patiently for Bill to return so she will get married and start a family and hopefully leave all the boyish foolishness behind. Everyone gets a surprise, however, when Bill decides that he wants to wait to get married so Marjorie has no choice (well she does have a choice but not in this film) but to wait patiently.

This film comes to rest heavily on the ‘ole misconstrued gag where in this case, an innocent letter becomes a cause for concern with both George and Marjorie suspected of having affairs of their own which causes no shortage of foolishness on the parts of Wesley, who becomes obsessed with Sherlock Holmes and decides to use this clue-looking to find out the truth about his father, and Bill who thinks Marjorie might be having an affair. Will everything be worked out during the climatic end at ‘ol Miller’s pond?

The entire cast returns to reprise their roles for the sequel but some of the magic has definitely evaporated. Where the original felt fresh and open, the sequel seems content to just rehash the same old themes less effectively. The tomboy, rival suitor, and marriage issues all pop up again and the family, so well-done in the first film, serves as merely backdrops here. It’s not a bad film necessarily and individual scenes prove pleasant enough but one can tell that more time should have been devoted to the script where the feeling of an actual sequel could have been generated.

Both films are presented in their original aspect ratio of 4:3 full frame. Special Features for ‘On Moonlight Bay’ include a vintage musical short ‘Let’s Sing a Song about the Moonlight’, a classic cartoon ‘A Hound for Trouble’ and the films theatrical trailer. ‘By the Light of the Silvery Moon’ provides us vintage Joe McDoakes comedy shorts ‘So You Want to learn to Dance’ and ‘So You Want a Television Set’, an Oscar-nominated cartoon ‘From A to Z-Z-Z-Z’ and the films theatrical trailer.

Finally, we arrive at our one Cinemascope widescreen title in the collection, 1955’s musical ‘Lucky Me’ from Jack Donohue, a fairly unsuccessful film that didn’t exactly set audiences or critics aglow upon its release.

The film takes place in Miami where we find a vaudeville act not having much luck. The members Hap Schneider (Phil Silvers) along with Candy Williams (Doris Day), Duke McGee (Eddie Foy, Jr.) and Flo (Nancy Walker) are broke and ready to hightail out of town when they run across a cop who happens to be a fan. Arranging a fancy dinner at a hotel, they hope to be ‘arrested’ by the officer but instead find another cop taking over the shift where they are forced to wash dishes to pay for their meal. Their bad luck continues when they find themselves continuing to work for the hotel after they break a hotel statue.

This bad luck could be good luck, however, as Flo meets a famous Broadway producer and songwriter Dick Carson (Robert Cummings) who is setting up his next production. Candy, meanwhile, meets Carson under false pretenses as she believes he’s a car mechanic (after he wrecks two cars: one swerving to avoid her as she was standing rather unintelligently in the middle of the road and the second time after watching her shake her ass down the sidewalk). Candy becomes annoyed with Carson once she finds out the truth and Hap must trick her into auditioning for Carson who wants her for his show. Candy agrees to be in the show but jealously makes an ugly entrance when the daughter of a financial backer of the show wants Candy thrown off the show. Will Candy and Dick be able to succeed in love and show business?

Opening with an addictive musical number, the ‘Superstition Song’ sets up the film with a nice set piece as our heroine proceeds down a Miami street skipping and hopping around while avoiding various superstitious traps like ladders and not stepping on cracks. The music continues with the Vaudeville numbers ‘Men’ and ‘Parisian Pretties’ where Phil Silvers is allowed to show off his stuff and the film peaks early with these first twenty minutes. As the film progresses, Silvers is pushed to the sidelines which is a shame - he does come back for a nice bit at the end but the film would have been much better with his constant involvement. Oh well.

Day and Robert Cummings both seem to be on auto-pilot here and while there’s nothing too distracting with their performances, their chemistry never quite feels right. With a big, bombastic musical like this, you need to feel like the performers are having fun and I’m only sensing that glee with Silvers. Look at ‘Singing in the Rain’ and tell me everybody in that picture isn’t having a blast.

The film is presented in 2.35:1 widescreen and is enhanced for widescreen televisions. Special Features include a vintage short ‘When the Talkies were Young’, an Oscar-nominated cartoon ‘Sandy Claws’ and the films theatrical trailer.

An easy recommend for Doris Day fans where this set captures her first two film performances as well as one of her most-loved films with ‘On Moonlight Bay’. I would be hard-pressed as a film aficionado to rate these films as classics or required viewing for film fans but these films are mostly easy watches, completely frivolous entertainments that looked to brighten the moods of audiences wanting an escape from the paranoia of the cold war and there’s certainly nothing wrong with escapism – which reminds me, when is Spiderman 3 coming out?

The Doris Day Collection, Vol. 2 is now available at Amazon. As of yet, there is not a release date for the UK. Visit the DVD database for more information.