OVP: The Seven Little Foys (1955)

Film: The Seven Little Foys (1955)
Stars: Bob Hope, Milly Vitale, George Tobias, Angela Clarke, James Cagney
Director: Melville Shavelson
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Writing-Story and Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

We continue on our OVP write-ups with this film, a mid-1950's movie starring Bob Hope that is surprisingly dramatic for the obviously well-known comedian Hope.  The movie takes place over a number of years (despite the fact that the children in the family rarely seem to get older) and is about famous Vaudevillian Eddie Foy, Sr. and the act he had for a number of years with his seven children.

(Spoilers Throughout) The film starts with Eddie (Hope), a dedicated bachelor whose life is entirely about making a name for himself and getting his name on Broadway.  He is coaxed from his path when he accidentally is forced into an act with a young dancer (Vitale) and her prim piano-playing sister (Clarke).  Along the way, he finds a way to have seven children he claims he didn't want, and eventually moves them to a country estate, all-the-while taking to the road and having little to no use for them.

Eventually, of course, he changes his tune, and after his wife tragically dies, leaving all seven children very young and without a mother, he decides to create an act based on his seven children, whom he claims have no talent, and suddenly he's playing the Palace and has everything he ever wanted, even though his children seem to just want to be kids and live in New Rochelle with their stern aunt.

The film is rarely at its best, but when it is, it's when they allow Hope to be his own comedic self.  He fails miserably when he's trying to be dramatic-Hope can't seem to say anything without it sounding like the set-up to a punchline, and when he's performing on a stage, he's at ease (again, he wasn't a great actor so much as a world-class entertainer).  The highlight of the film is when Hope is joined in a cameo by James Cagney, playing once again George M. Cohan (the role which won him an Oscar in 1943), and having them tap-dancing on a table.  I assume that since it was 1955 that wasn't a trick of the eyes and it was really them dancing, in which case their hoofer skills did not diminish with age.

The film, otherwise, is filled with bad cliches and overwrought plot twists.  It was fun to play "is that who I think it is?" with a couple of the children (stay sharp-eyed and you'll see Lydia Reed from The Real McCoys and Billy Gray from Father Knows Best), but none of them have enough of a plotline between them for the audience to differentiate any of the characters.  The children also have to take part in a horribly racist "Chinatown" sequence that should have been obviously in bad taste even in the 1950's.  Milly Vitale is not good as Hope's wife-you never get the remotest inclination as to why she has fallen for this cruel, dismissive man, and only after she's dead does he pay the remotest of attentions to her.  And Hope, as I've mentioned before, doesn't handle the drama well at all-every time he has to deliver a heartfelt speech or a sincere remark he comes across as sarcastic.  His delivery is wrong for drama, and someone like Cagney would have been a better choice for the lead.

Lastly, I wanted to say how thoroughly disappointed I was in the inaccuracy of the film in regard to real-life.  I knew very little about Eddie Foy, Sr. before this movie, and was hoping to get a little bit of knowledge about him from real life.  A quick search about the man, however, showed that he started the Foy family act well before the death of his wife, was married four times (twice before he married the real-life Madeline Morando), and that hundreds of people perished in the Iroquois Theatre Fire, though they did correctly show that Foy performed onstage until the last minute to keep people calm.  All-in-all, it's one of the least accurate biopics I've ever seen, and I have to say it loses a star as a result (all films indulge the truth, but to completely rewrite it makes no sense-Oprah would have gone all Million Little Pieces on them if this had been made fifty years later).

But those are my thoughts-what are yours?  Did you enjoy The Seven Little Foys?  Were you, like me, stunned that they took so many liberties with the real-life tale?  And considering his constant complaints about not ever being nominated for an Oscar, what film do you think Hope got the closest for?