It Happens Every Thursday (1953)

Film: It Happens Every Thursday (1953)

Stars: Loretta Young, John Forsythe, Frank McHugh, Edgar Buchanan, Jane Darwell

Director: Joseph Pevney

Oscar History: No nominations

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

Sometimes with these Saturdays with the Stars months, we complete a year with a lot of untold chapters from the actor's life.  That's not going to be the case for Loretta Young.  Last week, we talked about the pinnacle of Young's career, the late 1940's, when she made massive hits, starred in a holiday classic, & won an Oscar.  Young, however, was in her late thirties at that point, which has always been a "sunset" time for actresses in Hollywood, and was particularly during the Classical Hollywood era.  By the early 1950's, though she was still working, her film career had started to wane, and today's movie, It Happens Every Thursday, was the final theatrically-released film that Young made in her career...though as we'll get to in a second, she had a surprisingly long second act as a performer.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie in many ways resembles the films we were discussing last week, with Young playing a perfect wife in a romantic-comedy.  The movie is about Jane MacAvoy (Young), a woman who is trying to find a new life for she & her husband Bob (Forsythe) as they are expecting a baby, so they move to California and buy a small-town newspaper, not realizing that it is unsuccessful.  Initially they struggle to establish the paper, but soon find that a certain kind of soft journalism (involving guessing old photos of townspeople) sells well, and they begin to take off.  When they realize that they'd been forgoing actual journalism by ignoring a drought, Bob hires an Air Force expert to use dry ice to try to get it to rain.  While the stunt doesn't actually happen, a downpour follows anyway, and when that leads to flooding, the MacAvoys are nearly run out of town before they convince the newspaper readers that the flooding (which soon ends) is not their fault.

The movie is, for lack of a better word, stupid.  The plot as described is exactly how it plays out in the movie, and you'll be forgiven for thinking "that sounds kind of silly" because it's how it plays in the film.  A lot of your mileage on this movie will depend on your tolerance for Young's sickly sweet persona, and while I have gained a newfound respect for the actress this month with intriguing work in Midnight Mary and The Stranger, she's not a favorite yet, and certainly not to the point where I'll forgive a movie this ridiculous.  Even if you watch it in suspended belief, you're going to get bored.

Young's film career ended with this picture, but it wasn't the end of her career.  The actress quickly transitioned to television, starring in an eponymous anthology series for NBC, which she hosted and frequently starred in as an actress.  The show became known for its trademark opening, with Young opening-and-closing a set of doors, and then coming out & twirling in a gorgeous evening gown.  I highly recommend you google it, as it's as over-the-top as you'd hope, and the series was a ratings & critical success, being in the Top 30 in several seasons and winning Young three Emmys.  The actress would largely retire from acting after this, just briefly coming back in the 1980's long enough to win a Golden Globe for the TV movie Christmas Eve, but mostly devoting her life to her political causes (she was a diehard Republican who campaigned for Eisenhower, Nixon, & Reagan) and Catholic charities before dying at the age of 87 in 2000.  Next month, we're going to talk about a leading man contemporary of Young's (though they never made a movie together), who like Young, starred in a major holiday classic in the 1940's and got a second act in television during the 1950's.