1972 Oscar Viewing Project

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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.

OVP: The Little Prince (1974)

Film: The Little Prince (1974)

Stars: Steven Warner, Richard Kiley, Bob Fosse, Gene Wilder, Donna McKechnie

Director: Stanley Donen

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Scoring, Best Original Song-"Little Prince")

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

We continue on with our week devoted to music & the Oscars with a story I somehow didn't know.  I'd heard of the famous children's story The Little Prince by Count Antoine de Saint-Exupery, as it's obviously well-known and has been remade many times, but I'd never seen it done & didn't know the plot (which was much more modern than I expected upon actually viewing the film).  This production, possibly the most famous version of the story committed to screen, was in an era where screen musicals were basically dead, or at least this style of them had completely gone out-of-fashion, other than in children's movies like Bedknobs and Broomsticks or Tom Sawyer.  I generally like mid-1970's musicals because they're so earnest (and not trying to be edgy at all), so I was curious what this one would be like-would it join other splendid children's classics or be horribly dated?

(Spoilers Ahead) The story, for those unfamiliar is of a Pilot (Kiley) who must make a landing in the middle of the Sahara Desert.  There he meets a young boy, the Little Prince (Warner), who has fallen from a nearby asteroid.  The Little Prince does not understand adults, and how they have such peculiar & jaded ways of looking at the world, but when he lands on Earth he learns several life lessons from a Fox (Wilder) and a Snake (Fosse), life lessons that he teaches the Pilot while he fixes his plane.  The Pilot tries to keep the Little Prince alive as his stories end & the plane is fixed, but to no avail-the Little Prince dies, and the Pilot eventually comes to realize that the Little Prince never existed, and if he has, he has returned to the stars.  The Pilot moves on from the experience, forever changed by the young apparition.

The story is quite silly initially, and a bit confusing.  We are meant to understand that the Pilot doesn't relate well to other adults, and had many of his childhood dreams crushed (he strived to be an artist, but was mocked for his work so he gave it up), and the film easily could've been horribly dated, as cinematic children of the 1970's always sound either like Charles Wallace from A Wrinkle in Time or Dennis the Menace (and right off the bat the Little Prince is more in the former camp).

But then after a while something happens-The Little Prince ends up being kind of magical.  The two leads have a fascinating rapport, with the Little Prince sharing life lessons from the Snake & Fox that the Pilot had never put together, about responsibility & how people become special & unique when we decide to love them.  As a result, while the film is made on a shoestring budget & is occasionally a tad ridiculous, it's also strangely beautiful, and you'll cry when it's over.

This is apparent based on the movie's two Oscar nominations.  The score is filled with fun songs, but none better than the title tune.  I have a serious soft spot for Richard Kiley (that baritone-my god), and so him singing this beautiful, haunting ode to his dying friend (a goodbye, but also a debt of gratitude for giving him a fresh appreciation for his life) is chilling.  I loved the song, and I really enjoyed the movie.  I don't know if this is the kind of film that I'd recommend to everyone else (this might be a "right mood, right time" situation that occasionally happens), but The Little Prince is a tale I won't soon be forgetting.

OVP: Kiss Me Kate (1953)

Film: Kiss Me Kate (1953)
Stars: Kathryn Grayson, Howard Keel, Ann Miller, Tommy Rall, Keenan Wynn, James Whitmore, Bob Fosse
Director: George Sidney
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Scoring of a Musical)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Occasionally I watch movies and I wonder what the casting director was thinking.  I look and see the supporting players and compare them to the actual leads and wonder at what point the director realized that they had made a mistake with the casting and should have gone in a different direction.  This was my reaction to the charming but uneven Kiss Me Kate, a musical from the mind of Cole Porter (so you know you're in for some quality there) that occasionally veers into sheer brilliance but mostly just muddles along in a series of dated attitudes toward women and toward the vanity of actors.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about a pair of former paramours Lilli (Grayson) and Fred (Keel) who are brought together in a musical version of The Taming of the Shrew, which is partially what Kiss Me Kate is (for a 1950's musical, it's meta to the highest-order).  The film unfolds with them having a story offscreen while also telling the story onscreen and the story offscreen mirrors the story onscreen...it sounds confusing but it's not when you actually watch it.

The plot itself is incredibly fun, if occasionally a bit sexist (the scene of Keel spanking Grayson on stage made me wildly uncomfortable).  I am a fan of older musicals in general, and so I eat up the lack of plot (there's so many of them running around) and the random series of misunderstandings even if they would never happen that way in real life.  The film, though, is too reliant on the questionable comedic talents of the stars.  This is my first real introduction to Kathryn Grayson as a leading woman, and I have to say I'm not impressed.  While her voice is insane (I love that we used to have straight up opera singers in movies-someone call Renee Fleming's agent), her acting is wooden and stiff.  I think that everyone sort of loved the gameness that she brought at the time, since it was out-of-character for her specifically, but not being familiar with her she feels way too stiff here.

Keel, on the other hand, I've seen in numerous movies, but he always plays the same character and doesn't have the great sense to choose particularly compelling costars like Cary Grant did when he kept playing Cary Grant.  Keel's chauvinism and machismo doesn't play as well today as it did then, partially because standards of male beauty have changed through the years, and today the Brawny-paper towel appeal that Keel's broad shoulders exudes doesn't click as well.  It's harder to tell why women keep throwing themselves at him despite his resonant basso cantante being an admittedly attractive trait.  These styles of musicals, though, don't echo as well and their voices seem more suited for a Broadway or opera stage than the movies-we don't get the far more pleasurable jazzy musical numbers that someone like Rita Moreno or Gwen Verdon would soon make popular.

This is why I think the casting director may have looked back on the charmless lack of chemistry between the two leads and wondered why Ann Miller and Tommy Rall couldn't have been out in front.  Ann Miller has never been better than she is in the role of Lois Lane (a marvelous moniker, I must admit), a randy dancer who is constantly in the arms of her beau Bill (Rall) but also ends up charming other fellas as well.  Miller's dancing is perfection here-she's so well-known for her hoofing abilities that you almost would be forgiven for not being aware of flawless comic timing and fun, brassy vocals).  All-in-all, the film dies whenever she's not onscreen, and she's at her best when paired with Tommy Rall.  Rall, known for roles in films like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, is insanely fun and sexy as one of her suitors, and also dances with great aplomb.  Also, and it has to be said, but his costume of pink tights may be the most revealing outfit I've ever seen in a movie from the 1950's (think Billy Magnussen's leather pants in Into the Woods), and probably taught a generation of young gays, headed to this for the outfits and the musical numbers, that they were leaning toward the fellas.

The film received a nomination for Best Scoring, and like the rest of the movie, this is a split, as the numbers featuring Grayson and Keel fall flat and are unmemorable, while the brilliant "Too Darn Hot" (Miller) and "Always True to You in My Fashion" (Miller/Rall) hum off the screen and are wildly addictive in terms of singing them the next day.  It's also worth noting that the dancing overpowers the singing in all cases, particularly the ballet number late in the film that is danced and performed by Bob Fosse (this movie was a big break in his career).  All-in-all, it's a tough bill when you have films like Calamity Jane and The Band Wagon as competition, but Kiss Me Kate at least earns its spot at the door.

Those are my thoughts on this musical (which, despite its difficulty in finding on DVD, many of you have likely heard of and perhaps even seen), what are yours?  Do you agree with me that this is the Miller and Rall show, and not the Grayson/Keel hour?  Do you have a favorite Cole Porter musical, or a favorite 1953 musical?  And did anyone else have a similar reaction to Tommy Rall's pants?  Share your thoughts in the comments!