2024-25 Saturdays with the Stars Recap

Debbie Reynolds & Audrey Hepburn, two of
our stars this year

It took longer than I expected, but we have finished up our sixth season of Saturdays with the Stars.  I will be honest-I don't entirely know whether or not this will be our final season.  I have two ideas rolling around my head for a theoretical seventh season (I do love this series...along with the My Ballots, it's my favorite thing I do here), both of which would be interesting, but I also am respecting that I chose to step away from longer-term blog commitments for a reason, and to some degree I'm making more of that time (exercising more, watching more OVP movies, reading considerably more), while other writing projects I've not yet gotten a good routine around in the way I used to have for this blog.  If we do do another season, it won't be until January, so we will for sure be getting a few months off regardless as I attempt two writing projects in the meantime.  I am unequivocally glad that I decided to finish this season up, though, regardless, as I don't love an unfinished project, and this had been bugging me.

One of the things that I'm struck by this season is that, for a large part, the movies this season were not as well-received by me as our past five years.  Part of this is my self-imposed rule that I don't repeat films I've already seen.  Some of these women have been in great movies, occasionally (like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday and Julia Roberts in Notting Hill) in movies that I would happily name-check as all-time favorites.  But I will also own that the title of being "America's Sweetheart" means that, even more than our second season focusing on sex symbols, the public limits how much risk the studio is willing to take on you.  With the exception of Sally Field, none of the women we talked about this month were able to have the same level of financial success when they were America's Sweetheart as they would after they would free themselves of that title, and thus while there are definitely good performances...they aren't as frequent.  I did still see some great work (and great movies), but I will own that none of the 12 films that I saw this year looks like a future medalist in our My Ballot Best Picture category (at best, it'll be one of the other titles that fill up the ten-wide Best Picture field), and only a couple of the performances will likely end up as My Ballot nominees for acting.  Still, there's more to life than awards, and there's lots of fluff & fun to recommend here.  Below, find my superlatives from our sixth season of Saturdays with the Stars.

Favorite Performance from Each Star 

January: Mary Pickford, Sparrows

February: Shirley Temple, Curly Top

March: June Allyson, The Glenn Miller Story

April: Audrey Hepburn, The Nun's Story

May: Doris Day, The Pajama Game

June: Debbie Reynolds, Mother

July: Annette Funicello, Beach Party

August: Sandra Dee, Gidget

September: Mary Tyler Moore, Ordinary People

October: Sally Field, Norma Rae

November (but really August 2025): Julia Roberts, Mystic Pizza

December (but really September 2025): Meg Ryan, Joe Versus the Volcano

5 Favorite Performers (Alphabetical, and based solely on the films we watched as a collective & not on the rest of their careers)

June Allyson

Doris Day

Sandra Dee

Audrey Hepburn

Julia Roberts

5 Favorite Performances of the Year (Alphabetical)

Sally Field, Norma Rae

Audrey Hepburn, The Nun's Story

Mary Tyler Moore, Ordinary People

Debbie Reynolds, Mother

Mary Pickford, Sparrows

12 Favorite Films of the Year (Alphabetical)

Babes in Toyland

Beach Party

Courage Under Fire

The Glenn Miller Story

Love in the Afternoon

Mystic Pizza

Norma Rae

The Nun's Story

Ordinary People

The Poor Little Rich Girl

Sparrows

Two Girls and a Sailor

Top 12 Performances of the Year (Not By Our Stars...and Yes, Alphabetical)

Frankie Avalon, Beach Party

Josh Brolin, Flirting with Disaster

Jimmy Durante, Two Girls and a Sailor

Timothy Hutton, Ordinary People

Tommy Kirk, Babes in Toyland

Hattie McDaniel, The Little Colonel

Jimmy Stewart, The Glenn Miller Story

Donald Sutherland, Ordinary People

Elizabeth Taylor, Little Women

Bobby Van, The Affairs of Dobie Gillis

Denzel Washington, Courage Under Fire

Ed Wynn, Babes in Toyland

Fireball 500 (1966)

Film: Fireball 500 (1966)

Stars: Frankie Avalon, Fabian, Annette Funicello, Harvey Lembeck, Chill Wills, Julie Parrish

Director: William Asher

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 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 Annette Funicello: click here to learn more about Ms. Funicello (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

By the mid-1960's, Annette Funicello's career was in a weird spot.  She regularly appeared in the Beach Party movies, and was about to start a different career path (pun intended) by doing race-car driving pictures.  However, her career wasn't really beyond that.  Like many teen idols before her, the roles weren't serious, and as she was entering her late 20's, the Beach Party movies and pretty young ingenue roles weren't going to be an option anymore.  Funicello would make our film today, Fireball 500 at the tail-end of her movie career.  The film was a moderate hit, one to spawn a follow-up called Thunder Alley, but that was basically the end of Funicello's career as a leading woman-she wouldn't star in another film for 20 years.

(Spoilers Ahead) Fireball 500 focuses on Dave "Fireball" Owens (Avalon), a race-car driver trying to get to the Indianapolis speedway, and willing to do whatever it takes to be the best.  He happens upon a small town racing operation, where he rides against Leander Fox (Fabian), beating him in their initial bout.  This results in Leander's girl Jane (Funicello) getting into Dave's sights, but it's actually Martha Brien (Parrish), who is running a liquor-smuggling ring, that ends up getting his heart.  Dave is sucked into two ends of Martha's operation, which is truly run by Charlie Bigg (Lembeck), her smitten partner, both romancing Martha as well as working for the cops, who are investigating not just the moonshine ring, but also a series of fatal car accidents of those involved in the enterprise.  The film culminates in a big rematch race between Leander & Dave, with Leander badly injuring himself (and in the process, winning Jane forever), while Martha & Dave ride off into the sunset when they reveal that Charlie has been the one killing the drivers, in hopes of murdering Dave to win Martha back.

The movie is terrible.  As I said last weekend, I loved Beach Party-I thought it was giddy, silly fun and everyone involved (including Frankie & Annette) were a gas (pun not intended but appreciated).  This, though, has none of that fun.  There are a couple of musical numbers, but none of them pop, and the cast doesn't work.  I have discovered a weird late-in-life crush on Frankie Avalon this month (he's so cute and short...I love it!), and he's the best part of this, but Fabian is a snore, and I have to admit, so is Annette.  They have no chemistry together, and he has the romantic projection of a broom.  This doesn't work, and I get why it didn't spawn more than one sequel.

Annette Funicello spent much of the 1970's raising her three children, and staying out of the lime light, her biggest acting gig being a series of commercials for Skippy's peanut butter.  During a comeback attempt, when she made Back to the Beach (a spoof of the original beach party movies that reunited her with Frankie Avalon), she started to have headaches & dizzy spells, and was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis.  She eventually went public with her diagnosis, and caused massive awareness; many people (including me) first heard of the disease in connection with Funicello, who would go on the cover of People Magazine when she revealed it in 1992.  Funicello would die from the disease in 2013, at the age of 70.  Disney CEO Bob Iger would said of her upon her death "She will forever hold a place in our hearts as one of Walt Disney's brightest stars."  Starting on Thursday, we're going to look at a contemporary star of Funicello's one who would have her own moments on the beach, but whose time as America's Sweetheart would belie a deeply tragic & complicated personal life.  

Beach Party (1963)

Film: Beach Party (1963)

Stars: Bob Cummings, Dorothy Malone, Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, Morey Amsterdam, Harvey Lembeck, Eva Six

Director: William Asher

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 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 Annette Funicello: click here to learn more about Ms. Funicello (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

By 1963, Funicello was 21, and couldn't really get away with playing "little girl" roles anymore.  Walt Disney actually had an idea to put her in their movie Summer Magic (Funicello was still under contract to the studio), but she had already committed to make a different film instead, and that role went to Hayley Mills.  There were rumors of a rift between Disney and Funicello after Summer Magic, but the actress would go on to make two more (very successful) movies for the studio in the years that followed, so that seems to have been water-under-the-bridge.  Still, giving up Summer Magic ended up being a grand idea for Funicello, as the film she make instead would define her film career: Beach Party.  The movie, which spawned an entire decade's worth of spinoffs, spoofs, and sequels to the wildly-successful film, would become the signature role of Funicello's adult career.  It was also a much saucier role than she'd played at Disney.  While other actresses like Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, & Miley Cyrus in the years that followed would be in the "good girl gone bad" mold for the Mouse House, Funicello was the original.  According to legend, Disney was so worried about his (still under contract) star losing her wholesome image with Beach Party that he insisted that she not bare her naval in the movie...which of course she did as Dolores in this iconic 1960's picture.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie does have a plot, if you can believe it.  The film follows Frankie (Avalon) and Dolores (Funicello) as they are going to a cabin by the beach.  They are not engaged, but Frankie assumes that a horny Dolores will finally put out for him if he gets her alone...which is exactly why Dolores has invited all of their friends to the cabin.  She doesn't want to go all the way until Frankie says "I love you" and the two breakup as a result, with him ending up with the buxom blonde Ava (Six), while Dolores becomes besotted with Professor Sutwell (Cummings), an anthropologist who is observing the beach party culture and comparing it to African cultures he's studied in previous lines.  All the while, Marianne (Malone), his associate, is clearly in love with him and also wants to know if he's horny for all of these beautiful bikini-clad women or not, and there's a biker gang, led by Eric von Zipper (Lembeck) who are constantly trying to wreck the gang's fun.  In the end, both Professor Sutwell & Marianne, as well as Frankie & Dolores, end up in each other's arms and falling in love just in time for one last musical number.  Even Vincent Price shows up in a totally bizarre cameo.

The Beach Party movies are not rocket science (despite having Cummings play a scientist in the lead, which is a nice touch).  But I was quite surprised that they're actually incredibly fun, and not just in the "it was fun" concession prize sort of way we see people talk about modern blockbusters-the first Beach Party movie is a blast.  It helps that Frankie Avalon is unfathomably sexy in this movie.  With toned abs, flawless hair, and a wonderful voice, he embraces his short king status with a flare, being swoon-worthy in every scene (if he had planned a weekend with me at a cabin, no one would've gotten invited to come with, I can tell you that...Annette has more willpower than I do).

But honestly everyone is good in this.  Funicello is not a great actress, but she also doesn't need to be-she takes on this part really well, and has you rooting for her the whole time.  Dorothy Malone is hilarious as the jaded (and decidedly not-virginal) woman who is attempting to seduce an oblivious Bob Cummings, landing every one of her punchlines.  Cummings might be the only fault here, as at some point I want to see him acknowledge the hormonal reality of this movie (everyone is jiggling, twisting, and getting all worked up).  But the film is weirdly both wholesome and sexy at the same time-a hard-to-juggle combination that Disney would end up perfecting years later with their cavalcade of sweaty, shirtless Chris's in the MCU.  Suffice it to say, the next Beach Party movie was immediately added to my Letterboxd Watchlist after this, though we'll end our look at Funicello next week with a different genre of movie that she made famous in the 1960's.

OVP: Babes in Toyland (1961)

Film: Babes in Toyland (1961)

Stars: Ray Bolger, Tommy Sands, Annette Funicello, Ed Wynn, Tommy Kirk

Director: Jack Donahue

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Scoring, Costume Design)

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 Annette Funicello: click here to learn more about Ms. Funicello (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Disney has long had a way of knowing exactly which stars it needed to keep in its orbit before they left, and Annette Funicello was no different.  After the end of The Mickey Mouse Club, the series' breakout hit was still under contract, and used throughout a variety of Disney properties, including Zorro and Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, as well as today's film Babes in Toyland, her second (of four) theatrical films with Disney.  She also became something of a jukebox star during this time frame, coming out with several hit songs including "Pineapple Princess," "O Dio Mio," and "Tall Paul," the latter a Top 10 hit and the biggest tune of her career.  Babes in Toyland is a pretty good encapsulation, though, of why Funicello would eventually need to escape the Mouse House, given the 19-year-old star wasn't being asked to stretch her abilities much within the Disney universe.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie (tangentially a Christmas movie, which feels nice given today is the day the Hallmark ornaments are announced, a tradition to pour over in my family, so I'm fully Christmas in July) takes place in a land of make believe, one that is still fully capitalistic as we have the villainous Barnaby (Bolger) trying to wed the beautiful Mary Contrary (Funicello) even though she is engaged to Tom Piper (Sands).  The reason he wants to marry her is that she is set to inherit a large fortune, something she is unaware of, and will go to her when she becomes betrothed (and he intends to steal the fortune).  He does this first by trying to have Tom killed (but his henchmen are unsuccessful in doing this), and then in having him shrunk when they reach the Toymaker (Wynn) and his assistant (Kirk) in the forest while looking for Mary's sheep.  Mary & Tom, though, defeat Barnaby, save Christmas (by having enough toys built for the holiday), and end up blissfully wed.

The movie has a lot of plot holes, more than you'd expect even from a live-action Disney film in the 1960's.  We never discover what Mary thinks of being an heiress, what happened to Barnaby, or what happened to the sheep.  The film feels like from scene-to-scene it's a patchwork picture, and I'll be honest-it's not a great movie.  I think it has a lot of heart, and there are warm performances (it's easy watching this to understand why Funicello would take on the role of America's Sweetheart so well-her song "I Can't Do the Sum" is the musical highlight of the picture), and the art direction is lovely (better than the Oscar-nominated costumes, though those also have their moments like Mary's yellow dress), but it's too juvenile.  Your mileage with this movie as an esteemed holiday classic will largely depend on if you had a copy of it on VHS in your parents entertainment center growing up or not...watching it cold as an adult, you see the songs are only okay, and that Tommy Sands as a lead is a bit charmless.

On the flip side, I quite liked Tommy Kirk, who along with Ed Wynn steals most of the picture.  Kirk would work with Funicello eight times in his career, but this is the last of the films we'll track with the two of them this month, so I thought it would be appropriate to discuss his unusual (and sad) career path to end this week.  Kirk is best-known today for his role as the young boy in Old Yeller, but he was a major star for Disney in the late 1950's and early 1960's.  He had mammoth hits in The Shaggy Dog and The Misadventures of Merlin Jones, a movie that was such a big hit that Disney essentially had to unfire him to make the sequel, as Kirk had been caught having gay sex at a Burbank swimming pool, and Walt himself personally fired him after the discretion.  Kirk, though, was gone from Disney after the sequel was also a hit, and while he would work in several of the beach party films (including a couple opposite Annette Funicello), his career was washed up by the end of the decade, and years of drug abuse (and his public sexuality, which was made known in the early-1970's after Disney had initially covered it up in the wake of Merlin Jones success) meant that by the 1970's one of the top box office draws of the 1960's was working as a waiter in Los Angeles.  Thankfully, a successful small business (and access to residuals from his many Disney films being released in syndication and on home video) meant that Kirk eventually got to have a happy ending to his life, and was made a Disney Legend in 2006 from the studio that had once fired him.

The Shaggy Dog (1959)

Film: The Shaggy Dog (1959)

Stars: Tommy Kirk, Fred MacMurray, Jean Hagen, Annette Funicello, Tim Considine, Cecil Kellaway

Director: Charles Barton

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 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 Annette Funicello: click here to learn more about Ms. Funicello (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Annette Funicello joins Shirley Temple as the only two actresses this season that really became famous as children, and that's where they started their reign as "America's Sweetheart."  In Funicello's case, though, she began not in the movies like Temple did but in television.  Funicello was the star of the original Mickey Mouse Club TV series on ABC during the 1950's, but unlike the 1990's remake (which would feature future superstars Ryan Gosling, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, & Britney Spears), the only one of the stars of the original that would truly break out into superstardom was Funicello, who proved to be the most popular actor in the cast from the start.  Hand-selected by Walt Disney for the show, she quickly turned around her fame with The Mickey Mouse Club into starring roles in both the Disney TV series Zorro and then her feature film debut with the studio, today's film The Shaggy Dog.

(Spoilers Ahead) Even by the standards of a Disney live-action movie, this is a bizarre plot, but I'll give it a shot.  Wilby Daniels (Kirk) is an ordinary teenage boy, one who pals around with his buddy Buzz (Considine) and lusts after girls, namely Buzz's on-again-off-again girlfriend Allison (Funicello) and the new neighbor Francesca (Roberta Shore).  When he's visiting Francesca's father's house, he comes across a man named Professor Plumcott (Kellaway), and accidentally takes a ring from him that has magical powers, namely that it will turn him into Francesca's sheepdog Chiffon.  Adventures ensue, as Wilby transforms (with little control) between both himself and Chiffon, including when he and Buzz are attempting to take both girls to the Prom at the same time, but it's a Russian spy ring that's uncovered by Wilby that takes over the wackiest final third of the film.  With the aid of his dog-hating father Mr. Daniels (MacMurray), he stops the spies, but Buzz & Wilby end up getting neither girl, as Francesca moves back to Paris and Allison realizes that she can do better.

You'll notice that I barely mentioned Fred MacMurray in that plot, which is weird because MacMurray is the most famous name in this cast and would've been in 1959 as well.  Walt Disney had a history of making a lot of live-action films in the 1950's & 60's, and the studio would continue to do this after his death well into the 1970's.  This was because at a time when the studio's costly animated features struggled at the box office (it's hard to believe now, but in their initial run, now-beloved classics like Alice in Wonderland and Sleeping Beauty were flops for the studio), the live-action movies were gigantic hits.  The Shaggy Dog was the studio's most successful feature of the decade (more than even Cinderella), and because of this movie's success, three stars who would feature prominently in a lot of those pictures were Kirk, MacMurray, & Funicello.

Annette, though, doesn't have a lot to do in this movie (and while he's in a lot of it, MacMurray doesn't get much to "do" in it either).  She's basically just sitting around waiting for one of the boys to call (this was apparently a recurring motif for her until she broke out in non-Disney films a few years later).  Maybe that's for the best as The Shaggy Dog isn't very good.  The plot makes no sense, and it's really more silly than funny (when you need it to be both).  Kirk is charming as the lead (you get why he became a star in films like this), but MacMurray and his onscreen wife Jean Hagen are a snooze.  Given both of them have roots in film noir, and we're watching a movie about a plot to foil Russian spies, you kind of wish they'd ditch the dog and just make this into a gritty thriller.

Saturdays with the Stars: Annette Funicello

Each month of 2024 we are taking a look at an actress who bore the title "America's Sweetheart" during the peak of her film fame, and what she did with the title (including when it was passed on to the next Hollywood princess).  Last month, we talked about Debbie Reynolds, who started at MGM but saw much of her initial fame come from the breakup of her picturesque marriage (and had to spend decades afterward reclaiming her rightful place as a big star of the Golden Age in the public imagination).  This month, we're going to take a turn toward television, with an actress who got her start as a successful child performer, but who as an adult struggled initially to find her footing, despite a public eager to see her succeed, and eventually became one of the first Disney stars to strike out in a more "mature" role after her fame (which would become the model in some aspects for future performers like Britney Spears, Lindsey Lohan, & Miley Cyrus).  This month's star is Annette Funicello.

Funicello moved to California from Utica, NY, at the age of four, and quickly showed a penchant for dancing & music.  A local dance recital caught the eye of Walt Disney, where he cast her in a television series that he wanted to launch around his iconic mouse Mickey, entitled The Mickey Mouse Club.  She proved to be the breakout star of the show, and she was still getting thousands of fan letters a week when the show ended in 1959.  Still under contract to Disney, she made a series of successful films for the studio including The Shaggy Dog and Babes in Toyland, many of which she was severely underpaid for given the original parameters of her contract (she tried to get out of her contract as she knew she was being undervalued, but the courts at the time refused).

But it was after Disney where Funicello found some of her most lasting fame, and we're going to talk about that this month.  The actress would go on to become a teen idol in the early 1960's with the "Beach Party" movies opposite Frankie Avalon, playing a girl who (to Disney's chagrin) showed off her navel in a two-piece bathing suit.  She would go on to an unusual career, one including a stint in a series of sports films, an endorsement brand deal, and becoming the face of a disease that would eventually claim her life (but her public conversation about it brought awareness to an until-then little-discussed illness).