The Affairs of Dobie Gillis (1953)

Film: The Affairs of Dobie Gillis (1953)

Stars: Debbie Reynolds, Bobby Van, Bob Fosse, Barbara Ruick

Director: Don Weis

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2024 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the women who were once crowned as "America's Sweethearts" and the careers that inspired that title (and what happened when they eventually lost it to a new generation).  This month, our focus is on Debbie Reynolds: click here to learn more about Ms. Reynolds (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Debbie Reynolds was always meant to be a star.  After she won the Miss Burbank contest in 1948, she apparently was so in-demand that Warner Brothers and MGM tossed a coin to see who would get to sign her.  Warner won, but it was at MGM that she would make her early mark in musicals, first with Two Weeks with Love, and then in the film that would make her a star for all time, Singin' in the Rain.  While the film wasn't nearly as much of a success as it is now (it made a small profit, which honestly for MGM in the 1950's was sometimes a stretch for their musicals), and it wasn't up for too many awards (just Best Supporting Actress amongst the major categories), it was well-received, and it made Reynolds a proper star.  Over the next few years, she'd frequently be cast in young ingenue roles, the kinds a decade before would've been taken by America's last sweetheart, June Allyson, and one of those was as a college freshman in The Affairs of Dobie Gillis, which would have enough of a cultural impact that it would eventually become a TV series, launching the career of actor Bob Denver.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Dobie Gillis (Van), who has just come to college but is more excited about "enjoying" life than "working" through it.  He meets on his first night, three people: Pansy (Reynolds), his soon-to-be-girlfriend, Charlie (Fosse) his equally unambitious new roommate & best friend, and Lorna (Ruick), who is smitten with Dobie but it's Charlie who actually falls for her.  The four of them go off on a series of adventures together, which eventually results in Dobie & Pansy both failing out of school.  Pansy moves to New York City, while Dobie stays in school because his English instructor assumes he's a literary genius (as he cribbed an essay from a book in the library).  The two can't be apart, though, and through a series of misunderstandings, the two of them end up together, with Pansy's father's reluctant approval AND in the process they save the school magazine from going under.

The movie is kind of your textbook teenybopper flick of the era.  Much of what would happen in The Affairs of Dobie Gillis, which runs as a year-in-the-life of these four students, would eventually be absorbed by television.  There's at least 3-4 episodes of a TV sitcom here, and the only thing really holding it together are the key actors' personalities, much like television.  At this point TV sitcoms were just starting to come into their own, so you actually see a lot of movies like The Affairs of Dobie Gillis come out around this time, with basically the movie substituting for a TV episode.

But that doesn't mean it's not fun, though I will own that the weirdest part about this isn't that I was drawn to Reynolds, who is fine but a bit too simple as Pansy, nor to Bob Fosse (and yes, this is the Bob Fosse, the legendary Oscar-winning director), who is nothing special here, though he does get to show off his dancing skills (including that upturned hat move he'd become iconic for).  No, the real star here is Bobby Van, who never really took off as a leading man (he'd have more success on Broadway and as a game show panelist in the 1970's), but is so much fun.  He's adorable (the dimples on this man...you will want to kiss your television), and he lands pretty much every joke, even the ones that aren't funny.  I kind of wish that he'd been given more to do after this, because there's so much potential in his title character.