Panama Hattie (1942)

Film: Panama Hattie (1942)

Stars: Red Skelton, Ann Sothern, Rags Ragland, Ben Blue, Marsha Hunt, Virginia O'Brien, Dan Dailey, Lena Horne

Director: Norman Z. McLeod

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Ann Sothern: click here to learn more about Ms. Sothern (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

After Maisie, Ann Sothern's career definitely entered a strange era.  Similar to an actor today like Melissa McCarthy or Jon Hamm, who has a hit TV series and then tries to experiment with other options in their film career, seeing if lightning strikes to bring them to the next level she alternated between her moneymaking series & trying to find a less typecast niche.  For Sothern, Panama Hattie, which was made during the midway point of her Maisie-bolstered career (her last film for the series was in 1947), both was & wasn't that movie.  The film was a hit, a pretty big one by the standards of Sothern's career, but it was not a critical success.  Originally starring Ethel Mermen when the musical it was inspired from was playing on Broadway, the translation was lambasted by critics, and the production was troubled.  When it comes to Saturdays with the Stars, this kind of recipe (where critical & commercial success differ) is frequently my favorite combination-getting to go into a movie trying to understand if it was the critics or the public that got it wrong usually yields some of the most interesting movies.  Unfortunately, the critics were the correct ones in this scenario.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses on Hattie (Sothern), a nightclub singer who is in love with a moneyed naval officer named Dick Bulliard (Dailey).  Dick's ex Leila Tree (Hunt) has designs on him, and she might have a shot at him as Hattie keeps screwing up her relationship with Dick's daughter, who has recently started staying with him.  What starts as a frosty relationship blossoms into a friendship, and soon his daughter Gerry is helping Hattie, along with three of her naval buddies, including one played by Red Skelton, who get into a series of shenanigans that eventually (inexplicably) involve a bed of hungry crocodiles.  The movie ends with Hattie & Dick together, though it actually concludes with a patriotic rendition of "The Son of a Gun Who Picks on Uncle Sam," to close things out.

The movie is strange for a variety of reasons, and perhaps one of the biggest, and why it failed in its translation, is that a lot of the musical numbers from the original production are not in the movie.  Only three songs made it to the film version, and while there are times that's okay (specifically the two Lena Horne numbers, which are the highlight of the movie), most of the time the additions are silly filler, and not successful.  The closing "Uncle Sam" number, in particular, feels like wartime propaganda that falls completely flat, and like it misread the movie entirely.

The cast doesn't help much.  Sothern works fine here (she's a pro for a rom-com), but she's saddled with playing a ridiculous woman, and that's hard if the script doesn't acknowledge it.  It's a key plot point that Hattie behaves like a child in front of Gerry rather than just brush off a little girl laughing at her outfit, and yet that takes up like a third of the movie, and we're meant to believe that a nightclub singer could be so ruffled by a little girl.  Sothern is better than most of her costars, though.  The entire subplot involving Skelton, Ragland, & Blue as interchangeable sailors feels like such a bizarrely-handled scenario (they read like a comedic Rosencrantz & Guildenstern) that you'll be forgiven for forgetting what their actual connection to Hattie is at all.  And Dan Dailey continues to be one of the dullest leading men in Classical Hollywood, his Dick about as charming as lead paint.  The only saving grace on the call sheet is Horne, in immaculate vocal range during her years at MGM where she was relegated to just doing musical numbers that could easily be lifted in Southern theaters.  Despite being a hit for Sothern at the time, this movie is a giant miss for me.