Alias Jesse James (1959)

Film: Alias Jesse James (1959)
Stars: Bob Hope, Rhonda Fleming, Wendell Corey, Gloria Talbott, Jim Davis
Director: Norman Z. McLeod
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Rhonda Fleming-click here to learn more about Ms. Fleming (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.


By the end of the 1950's (where we will end our look at the actress), Rhonda Fleming's career was in a weird place.  She had had a very big hit just two years prior to our picture today, Gunfight at the OK Corral, that might have turned around her career had she had a more significant part in it (we would have certainly profiled that for this series, and I'll likely see it at some point, but she didn't get above-the-line billing for it so it didn't qualify under our rules).  She had, in 1957, opened up a wildly successful nightclub act in Vegas and she had become independently wealthy through shrewd real estate investments (Fleming would not be one of those stars who soared and would go broke later in her career), but it was clear that a film career that had been given great promotion throughout the decade was coming to a close.  At 36, she reunited  with the man who had made her career in 1949 with The Great Lover, Bob Hope, but starring opposite Hope in 1959 didn't mean as much as it had ten years earlier, as Hope's career (in film, at least) was also winding down.  As a result, Alias Jesse James would come out just one year before Fleming would announce her "semi-retirement" from cinema and while she'd appear in pictures occasionally after 1960, she never had another starring role in the movies.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is a silly little western, one that exists almost solely for Hope to be a witty dope as Milford Farnsworth, an insurance salesman who accidentally gives a $100k life insurance policy to outlaw Jesse James (Corey), and his boss tasks him with tracking down James, stating that he either needs to prevent James from getting killed or die trying.  James and his brother Frank (Davis) see Wendell as an easy mark, someone who can be duped, and whom they can kill (and pretend it was James in order to get the insurance money).  Milford keeps foiling their plans by accident, living through preposterous situations, until he finally realizes toward the end of the film what is happening.  Along the way, he falls for Jesse's girlfriend Cora Lee (Fleming), who takes a shine to him despite the seemingly sexless nature of Milford (at one point Jesse tells Milford, who has just been kissing Cora Lee, something to the effect of "oh, Milford good, it's just you-I thought I saw a man through the window."  Like all films of the era, Milford gets the girl who is totally out-of-his-league, and then takes over as president of the insurance company, with a family of redheads in tow.

The film is most well-known for two scenes toward the end of the picture.  The first is an extended chase sequence where Hope is literally running at the speed of a moving horse as he's fallen through the bed of his carriage.  It's funny, and Hope makes the most of the physical comedy (Hope's humor, though dated and predictable, has a retro feeling watching it today that probably felt tired when the movie came out in 1959 & he was an everyday part of most people's film-watching lives for the past 15 years).  The most famous scene, though, is having Milford "shoot down" the James gang, but instead it's actually a series of western heroes who show up (without context) to shoot down the gang.  This is a delight, so if you genuinely haven't seen the movie skip to the next paragraph as I wasn't kidding about the spoiler alert.  The film has not only Hope's old pal Bing Crosby (just as a random cowboy), but also (in their famed costumes) Fess Parker's Davy Crockett, Gary Cooper's Will Kane, Jay Silverheels's Tonto, Hugh O'Brian's Wyatt Earp, James Arness's Matt Dillon, Ward Bond's Seth Adams, Gail Davis's Annie Oakley, and Roy Rogers as himself.  It's a who's who of popular western figures at the time, and for years the film was difficult to find on home release because of the copyrights involved with recruiting these characters.  The film marks the final cinematic appearance for both Bond and Arness.

Rhonda Fleming's role is, as you might be able to tell, minimal.  She once again plays a beautiful woman, someone for our hero to fall-in-love with within seconds of meeting her, and to be almost comically attractive to the point where men do stupid things to stay in her favor.  Fleming was very good at this type of role as we've seen throughout this series, and her Cora Lee is funny & she finds ways to elevate her even when she's not an interesting character on-paper.  However, the assertion made by Fleming that we discussed at the beginning of this series was apt-after working on films like Spellbound and Out of the Past (genuine masterpieces), Fleming used her newfound fame and leading lady status to kind of make forgettable pictures.  She definitely got fame & money, but she was correct in that she sort of sold out for playing toss-away parts in pictures that seemed to be beneath an actress as talented as she was.  It's hard not to think of two other actresses born the same year as Fleming (Gloria Grahame & Anne Baxter) who also took promising careers in supporting parts but unlike Fleming transformed them into memorable leading roles, and have as a result enjoyed a career longevity that Fleming has lacked.  Had she demanded at her heyday to get better parts in better movies, Fleming certainly had the talent to get off of a list of "actresses Oscar never acknowledged" and might not have needed to go into retirement in such unceremonious fashion.  Instead, she's the sort of actress you're surprised to watch in Out of the Past and realize how good she can be.

Fleming, though, is probably better remembered than the woman we'll profile starting on Thursday, an actress who enjoyed only a few years of proper leading lady status, and is arguably the most obscure leading woman we're going to profile during our 2019 series.  That said, unlike Fleming, she managed to get one truly great film out during her career that is better-remembered now than anything Fleming ever made in her career.  Stay tuned!

Scared Stiff (1953)

Film: Scared Stiff (1953)
Stars: Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Lizabeth Scott, Carmen Miranda, Dorothy Malone (plus two hilarious cameos I won't spoil here, but I do tag below)
Director: George Marshall
Oscar History:  No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Lizabeth Scott-click here to learn more about Ms. Scott (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

The career of Lizabeth Scott was incredibly short for a woman that was the lead for 21 of her 22 pictures.  When we think of careers of major stars, they slip quietly into the night, their fame slowly downgraded as they move into lesser and lesser roles/films, eventually getting to play parents and judges and more dismissible parts.  Scott didn't do that.  While she did occasionally make films after her partnership with Hal Wallis (whose obsession with her fueled much of her stardom, though it's kind of distasteful to give him too much of the credit since she was clearly a hit with audiences for a time), Scott's movie star career ended just a few short years after it began, sputtering out in the mid-50's.  Therefore, we're going to end our month-long journey with her penultimate film for Wallis, and her playing weirdly both against-and-within type, as a mysterious, tortured heiress in the middle of a criminal ring...who is aided by the slapstick stylings of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film focuses on Larry Todd (Martin), a cool lounge singer who is caught romancing a mobster's girlfriend (Malone) and his bumbling best friend, busboy Myron (Lewis).  The two go out on the run with Larry romancing an heiress Mary (Scott) who has just inherited her family's home, a small island off of the coast of Cuba.  The film sets into play a number of hijinks as the trio try to evade the mobsters who are trying to get after Larry & Myron, all the while trying to understand why Mary keeps getting threatening messages to sell her island and not to go there.  We learn soon that the island is haunted, but it's also very much being guarded by someone who has been in plain sight the whole picture, and we get an ending where Mary & Larry get the treasure, and live happily ever after while Myron is left to tag along.

I believe this is the first actual movie of Martin & Lewis I've ever seen, usually only watching their standup acts together or television appearances as themselves.  However, it's not hard to realize that Larry and Myron are pretty disposable as characters, and really they're just playing their big-screen personas here.  Based on a cursory look around the internet, this appears to be one of their best-loved pairings, but I'm not super familiar with the critical consensus on their pictures-if you have thoughts on the best Martin & Lewis movie, I'd be curious to know, as I quite liked their chemistry here.  There's an ease here, and Lewis is hilarious if repetitive, and while some of the jokes are so well-known that they're antiques, you can't hide star charisma, which is what both these men have.  The musical numbers in the film are pretty disposable (there's one where they literally sing the word "enchilada" seemingly a 100 times), but it's pretty fun.  There's also a cameo by Bing Crosby & Bob Hope at the very, very tail of the movie that made me do a spit-take I was so shocked it came out of left field.

Scott, in our final film profiled this month, seems more at ease here than she has in any other role we've seen.  After nearly a decade of playing similarly-designed femme fatales and damsels-in-trouble, it's great to see her play with this character a bit and milk her sturdy delivery and incredible beauty for laughs. It's interesting to see Scott getting to play with this motif a bit, never scoring the biggest laughs (Lewis is there for a reason), but at least having a ball in the picture, against someone like Carmen Miranda, who essentially also plays herself here, in her last role.  Miranda more than almost any other actor in Hollywood's Golden Age, got stuck playing the same character over-and-over again, and it's weird to contradict here Scott, who did get some room to breathe with her character despite as we've seen this month routinely being typecast, and Miranda, who was never given that sort of leverage when she was typecast herself.  Miranda's character feels unfortunately disposable as a result-there's a scene where she's randomly missing for seemingly no reason (other than for Lewis to dress in her famous fruit hat), and then shows up in a future musical number, no questions asked.  Scott at least is afforded more courtesy with her character, and I feel like I leave understanding a bit more of her talents.  Next month we'll investigate a different actress who also got her start in noir, but soon expanded into proper leading lady roles throughout the 1950's...something she'd later regret.

Oscar Trivia: Presenting the Oscars, Part 1

All right Oscar trivia nerds, it's time to step up to the plate as a project I came up with last month and have been scouring through books and websites since to figure out (okay, one book and one website, but I don't get to do a lot of research projects in my life so indulge me) has come to a close and now we'll have some articles as a result.  I recently was googling, and could not find a list of the most frequent presenters at the Oscars.  I found lots of lists of the most-common host (Bob Hope), but never regarding the presenters and I thought that was just silliness, so I took it upon myself to come up with the list.  As I was compiling, I realized there was a whole host of trivia to come out of such an idea, so I figured why not create a blog post or two on the matter.  Therefore, we'll be having a short three-part series called Presenting an Oscar over the next week.  Today, we'll go with a straight-up list of the Top 10 most frequent presenters, as well as a little trivia about them in regard to Oscars.  Shall we begin?

(Note: People count as Oscar presenters if they introduce an award, performance, clip reel, or nominated film.  I'm not counting hosting unless you also presented a specific award and I'm not counting performers of musical numbers for this list at least.)

8. Michael Douglas (tie)

Times He's Presented: 12
First Presented: 1984 (Best Documentary Short)
Latest Presented: 2012 (Best Director)
Has He Presented Best Picture?: Yes, twice in 2000 and 2002 (the latter with his father Kirk, for Chicago, a film starring his wife)
What's His Oscar History?: Douglas is weirdly two-for-two when it comes to Oscar, having won for both Best Picture (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and Best Actor (Wall Street).  Those are his only two nominations.  It feels like the right number of wins, but I'm surprises Douglas, a movie star for over forty years, hasn't been able to score more nominations.

8. Goldie Hawn (tie)

Times She's Presented: 12
First Presented: 1970 (Best Actor, famously stating "oh my god" before announcing George C. Scott...it's vintage flower-child style Goldie if you've never seen the clip)
Latest Presented: 2013 (Best Picture segments for Captain Phillips, Philomena, and 12 Years a Slave)
Has She Presented Best Picture?: No, and considering how frequently it's levied at the Oscars that they are pretty repetitive and sexist when it comes to who gets to hand out the top honor, this seems like a pretty damn good choice.  Get on it AMPAS!
What's Her Oscar History?: Hawn won an Oscar for Cactus Flower in 1969 and was nominated eleven years later for Private Benjamin.  It's worth noting that Goldie, despite being a frequent attender and even a two-time host of the Oscars, wasn't there to pick up her only Oscar, instead having Raquel Welch pick up her trophy.

8. Audrey Hepburn (tie)

Times She's Presented: 12
First Presented: 1954 (Writing Awards)
Last Presented: 1991 (Honorary Award to Satyajit Ray)
Has She Presented Best Picture?: Yes, four times (second only to Jack Nicholson) in 1955, 1960, 1966, and 1975
What's Her Oscar History?: Audrey won Best Actress in 1953 for Roman Holiday, and was nominated in 1954 (Sabrina), 1959 (The Nun's Story), 1961 (Breakfast at Tiffany's), and 1967 (Wait Until Dark).  Her humanitarian work also won her the Jean Hersholt in 1993.

8. Nicole Kidman (tie)

Times She's Presented: 12
First Presented: 1991 (Presented by Best Song nominee "Everything I Do (I Do It For You)")
Latest Presented: 2014 (Best Foreign Language Film)
Has She Presented Best Picture?: Not yet, though there's time considering she's relatively young by such standards.  Her ex-husband Tom Cruise did, though, in 2011.
What's Her Oscar History?: Despite a truly impressive filmography in the past decade (one could argue this number should be double what it is), Kidman has three Oscar nominations from 2001 (Moulin Rouge!), 2002 (The Hours), and 2010 (Rabbit Hole), winning for The Hours.

8. Jack Nicholson (tie)

Times He's Presented: 12 (and yes, I figured this number would be greater too, but Jack took some long breaks in presenting)
First Presented: 1971 (Best Picture)
Latest Presented: 2012 (Best Picture)
Has He Presented Best Picture?  If you are actually asking this question, you need to start watching the Oscars.  Jack always presents Best Picture, having done it eight of his twelve times at presenting.  He did it in 1971, 1976, 1977, 1989, 1992, 2005, 2006, and 2012.  It's worth noting that with A Few Good Men competing in 1992 and The Departed in 2006, he's actually presented in years where he was in the eligible picture, which is rare.
What's His Oscar History?: Jack Nicholson is a twelve-time Oscar-nominated legend.  Cited for Easy Rider (1969), Five Easy Pieces (1970), The Last Detail (1973), Chinatown (1974), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Reds (1981), Terms of Endearment (1983), Prizzi's Honor (1985), Ironweed (1987), A Few Good Men (1992), As Good As It Gets (1997), and About Schmidt (2002), Nicholson is second only to Meryl Streep in terms of nominations and second only to Kate Hepburn in terms of wins (he won for Cuckoo, Terms, and As Good As It Gets).  He is also tied with Michael Caine for most consecutive decades with a nomination.

8. Steven Spielberg (tie)

Times He's Presented: 12 (again, I thought it would be more too)
First Presented: 1979 (Best Director, along with Goldie Hawn no less...wonder if Spielberg could convince her to make another movie?)
Latest Presented: 2010 (Best Picture)
Has He Presented Best Picture?: Yep, three times (2003, 2008, and 2010)
What's His Oscar History?: Steven Spielberg has a truly weird career with the Oscars.  While everyone today thinks of a Spielberg film as a gimme nomination, prior to his wins for Schindler's List, it was very hit-and-miss.  He wasn't nominated for directing Jaws, The Color Purple, or Empire of the Sun, and films like Close Encounters couldn't seal-the-deal in the Best Picture race with a nomination.  Still, he has 15 nominations with three wins amongst them (Best Picture/Director for Schindler's List and Best Director for Saving Private Ryan), plus he also has the Thalberg Award won in 1986), so it's not like they haven't amply rewarded the man.

7. Dustin Hoffman

Times He's Presented: 13
First Presented: 1967 (Best Cinematography)
Latest Presented: 2012 (the Writing Awards, with Charlize Theron)
Has He Presented Best Picture?: Twice, in 1986 and in 2004 (which he co-presented with his Meet the Fockers costar Barbra Streisand)
What's His Oscar History?: Hoffman has been nominated seven times for Best Actor, for The Graduate (1967), Midnight Cowboy (1969), Lenny (1974), Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Tootsie (1982), Rain Man (1988), and Wag the Dog (1997); he won for both Kramer and Rain Man.

5. Bob Hope (tie)

Times He's Presented: 14 (he also hosted the show eighteen times, a record that will likely stand forever considering the fickle nature of entertainment)
First Presented: 1938 (Short Subjects)
Last Presented: 1990 (Presented a montage called "My First Movie")
Has He Presented Best Picture?: No, likely because he was always too busy getting ready to close the show.
What's His Oscar History?: As Hope lamented many, many times through the years he was never able to get nominated for an acting award during his illustrious career (likely because he dabbled in comedy more than drama, and also because he was far better at playing Bob Hope than he was a fictional character).  The Academy didn't forget him, however, and gave him five honoraries in 1940, 1944, 1952, 1959 (the Jean Hersholt), and 1965.  One hopes they shell out at least one eventually for his modern-day equivalent Billy Crystal.

5. Jack Lemmon (tie)

Times He's Presented: 14 (he also hosted the Oscars four times)
First Presented: 1955 (Art Direction, which he handed out with singer Peggy Lee)
Last Presented: 1997 (the Writing Awards with his longtime costar Walter Matthau, who with eleven awards presented just missed this list)
Has He Presented Best Picture?: Yes, in 1965 to The Sound of Music
What's His Oscar History?: Lemmon was nominated for eight Oscars in 1955 (Mister Roberts), 1959 (Some Like It Hot), 1960 (The Apartment), 1962 (Days of Wine and Roses), 1973 (Save the Tiger), 1979 (The China Syndrome), 1980 (Tribute), and 1982 (Missing); he won for Mister Roberts and Save the Tiger.

4. Gregory Peck

Times He's Presented: 16 (in addition to being a major movie star, Peck also served as president of the Academy which helps in his count here)
First Presented: 1957 (Art Direction, with Eva Marie Saint who has presented ten times at the Oscars so far, nearly making this list)
Last Presented: 1994 (Presented the Quiz Show Best Picture segment)
Has He Presented Best Picture?: Once, in 1964 to My Fair Lady
What's His Oscar History?: Peck was nominated five times in 1945 (The Keys of the Kingdom), 1946 (The Yearling), 1947 (Gentleman's Agreement), 1949 (Twelve O'Clock High), and eventually winning in 1962 in To Kill a Mockingbird.

3. Tom Hanks

Times He's Presented: 17
First Presented: 1986 (Best Animated Short Film, with co-presenter Bugs Bunny)
Latest Presented: 2011 (Best Cinematography and Art Direction)
Has He Presented Best Picture?: Twice, in 2001 and 2009.
What's His Oscar History?: Everybody's favorite movie star of the 1990's has been nominated five times in his career, in 1988 (Big), 1993 (Philadelphia), 1994 (Forrest Gump), 1998 (Saving Private Ryan), and 2000 (Cast Away), winning for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump.

2. John Travolta

Times He's Presented: 18
First Presented: 1977 (Best Supporting Actress)
Latest Presented: 2014 (Best Original Song, with Idina Menzel, whose name he infamously butchered the year before...considering he'd presented 17 times at that point you'd think he could have better practiced).
Has He Presented Best Picture?: Nope, not yet, though I'm sure it will eventually happen-maybe when he eventually takes over number one?
What's His Oscar History?: Travolta is a two-time nominee, for 1977's Saturday Night Fever and 1994's Pulp Fiction.  While he's never won, I have to imagine that either an Honorary Award or an "old-age" style award is in his future as he seems genuinely popular in Hollywood and consistently makes movies, though lately not very many good ones.

1. Jack Valenti

Times He's Presented: 24
First Presented: 1966 (Honorary Award to Y. Frank Freeman)
Last Presented: 2002 (Best Documentary Short Subject)
Has He Ever Presented Best Picture?: Nope, Valenti's appearances at the Oscars almost always happened in the middle hour of the ceremony and he rarely got a marquee award.
What's His Oscar History?: For those of you saying "who?!?" in regard to Valenti topping movie stars like Travolta and Hanks on this list, Valenti was once one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood.  The head of the MPAA, he was imperative to creating the modern ratings system and spent years fighting the idea of home video (saying it would be the death of the movies).  Valenti was also in one of the most iconic photos in American history-he can be seen in the bottom left corner of the picture of President Lyndon Johnson, as he served as a media adviser for him.  Despite his repeated awards from the industry (he won an honorary trophy from both the PGA and DGA), he never won an Honorary Oscar.

And there you have it folks-we'll get into some other fun minutia of the presenters later this week, but in the meantime-who is a surprise on this list?  Who did you expect to top the list?  Do you have a favorite amongst these presenters?  Share your thoughts in the comments!

OVP: Bachelor in Paradise (1961)

Film: Bachelor in Paradise (1961)
Stars: Bob Hope, Lana Turner, Janis Paige, Jim Hutton, Paula Prentiss
Director: Jack Arnold
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Song-"Bachelor in Paradise")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Trying to find common ground between the Oscar Viewing Project and the Best Original Song category is a difficult thing for me on occasion.  In the case of things like musicals, it's fairly easy to rationalize needing to see the film-the song is made or broken based on what I'm seeing in addition to what I'm hearing, and I have long felt that a film should get some points (for or against) when it comes to how they incorporate a song, not just for how great it is.  "Moon River," for example, one of this film's competitors at the 1961 Oscars, is not just a song that is sung over the credits; it's also a song that Audrey Hepburn beautifully and enchantingly sings on her New York balcony, drawing in the viewer. This film's title song (also written by Henry Mancini) just plays over the opening credits and basically just sits there even then, so the rest of the film has little attachment to the music.

This wouldn't be a problem under normal circumstances-I watch movies because I love movies, not just because Oscar found them attractive-but Bachelor in Paradise is tired, sexist, and far too long for a film that can't quite decide if it's a comedy or a melodrama, but fails at both.  The film talks about a Lothario named A.J. Niles (Hope), a playboy who bed-hops around the world and writes about it in sensational books, but then runs afoul of the IRS and is forced to live in suburbia and write a book about America.  The premise seems ripe for good laughs (it does star Hope, after all), but it descends into wildly antiquated ideas about femininity and what it takes to have a successful marriage.  Hope teaches classes to the ladies of the neighborhood how to light the fire back in their marriages; the lesson essentially boils down to that old Jerry Hall quote about being a maid, chef, and whore.  Just when you think it hasn't gotten any worse, he makes a crack about Susan Hayward vs. Gina Lollobrigida and you've sunk deeper.

As the film is supposed to be a comedy, you know that there's an epiphany coming for Hope's character, and like any good film from this Classical Hollywood format, he falls in love with a local woman (a real estate agent named Rosemary, played by Turner) who has sworn off men.  Turner is in a weird conundrum with this performance-she's clearly far, far too beautiful to successfully play a cinematic spinster, but she's also a woman of a certain age and the script is calling for her to be more standoffish in the role.  Think Shirley Jones in The Music Man, except instead of singing goodnight to her someone, she just avoids alcohol and seems frustrated at every turn.  Turner is not an actress that I've taken a strong shine to, but even I know that she can be better than this: completely pent-up, wild character swings without any sort of reason.  The script is doing her no services here (let the woman land a punchline once and a while!).

It's also worth noting that while Turner is about the right age for her character, Hope is not.  Hope consistently played the leading man in comedies, but he wasn't Laurence Harvey-the guy got the girl by being the funny one, not the hot one.  A lady loves to laugh, and Hope could do that.  Except that in this film the nearly 60-year-old Hope has women throwing themselves at him with utter abandon the second he enters the screen.  It makes absolutely no sense when you look at it objectively, and it seems that a more alluring actor would have been a better choice for the role (perhaps someone in Turner's age group?).

About the only thing that I truly enjoyed about the film was the supporting performance of Paula Prentiss.  Prentiss, unknown to most audiences today, was a consistent presence in films of the 1960's.  Tall with a spectacular speaking voice, she lit up every scene she was in during Bachelor, rising well above her sexy next-door-neighbor routine to give us a more well-rounded individual.  The rest of the movie was in desperate need of some of those real life touches, but she's not in enough of the picture to save the movie.

What are your thoughts about Bachelor in Paradise?  Was I overly critical or right on the nose?  Do you have a favorite Paula Prentiss movie?  And where does "Bachelor in Paradise" rank in the Henry Mancini discography?  Share in the comments!

OVP: The Seven Little Foys (1955)

Film: The Seven Little Foys (1955)
Stars: Bob Hope, Milly Vitale, George Tobias, Angela Clarke, James Cagney
Director: Melville Shavelson
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Writing-Story and Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

We continue on our OVP write-ups with this film, a mid-1950's movie starring Bob Hope that is surprisingly dramatic for the obviously well-known comedian Hope.  The movie takes place over a number of years (despite the fact that the children in the family rarely seem to get older) and is about famous Vaudevillian Eddie Foy, Sr. and the act he had for a number of years with his seven children.

(Spoilers Throughout) The film starts with Eddie (Hope), a dedicated bachelor whose life is entirely about making a name for himself and getting his name on Broadway.  He is coaxed from his path when he accidentally is forced into an act with a young dancer (Vitale) and her prim piano-playing sister (Clarke).  Along the way, he finds a way to have seven children he claims he didn't want, and eventually moves them to a country estate, all-the-while taking to the road and having little to no use for them.

Eventually, of course, he changes his tune, and after his wife tragically dies, leaving all seven children very young and without a mother, he decides to create an act based on his seven children, whom he claims have no talent, and suddenly he's playing the Palace and has everything he ever wanted, even though his children seem to just want to be kids and live in New Rochelle with their stern aunt.

The film is rarely at its best, but when it is, it's when they allow Hope to be his own comedic self.  He fails miserably when he's trying to be dramatic-Hope can't seem to say anything without it sounding like the set-up to a punchline, and when he's performing on a stage, he's at ease (again, he wasn't a great actor so much as a world-class entertainer).  The highlight of the film is when Hope is joined in a cameo by James Cagney, playing once again George M. Cohan (the role which won him an Oscar in 1943), and having them tap-dancing on a table.  I assume that since it was 1955 that wasn't a trick of the eyes and it was really them dancing, in which case their hoofer skills did not diminish with age.

The film, otherwise, is filled with bad cliches and overwrought plot twists.  It was fun to play "is that who I think it is?" with a couple of the children (stay sharp-eyed and you'll see Lydia Reed from The Real McCoys and Billy Gray from Father Knows Best), but none of them have enough of a plotline between them for the audience to differentiate any of the characters.  The children also have to take part in a horribly racist "Chinatown" sequence that should have been obviously in bad taste even in the 1950's.  Milly Vitale is not good as Hope's wife-you never get the remotest inclination as to why she has fallen for this cruel, dismissive man, and only after she's dead does he pay the remotest of attentions to her.  And Hope, as I've mentioned before, doesn't handle the drama well at all-every time he has to deliver a heartfelt speech or a sincere remark he comes across as sarcastic.  His delivery is wrong for drama, and someone like Cagney would have been a better choice for the lead.

Lastly, I wanted to say how thoroughly disappointed I was in the inaccuracy of the film in regard to real-life.  I knew very little about Eddie Foy, Sr. before this movie, and was hoping to get a little bit of knowledge about him from real life.  A quick search about the man, however, showed that he started the Foy family act well before the death of his wife, was married four times (twice before he married the real-life Madeline Morando), and that hundreds of people perished in the Iroquois Theatre Fire, though they did correctly show that Foy performed onstage until the last minute to keep people calm.  All-in-all, it's one of the least accurate biopics I've ever seen, and I have to say it loses a star as a result (all films indulge the truth, but to completely rewrite it makes no sense-Oprah would have gone all Million Little Pieces on them if this had been made fifty years later).

But those are my thoughts-what are yours?  Did you enjoy The Seven Little Foys?  Were you, like me, stunned that they took so many liberties with the real-life tale?  And considering his constant complaints about not ever being nominated for an Oscar, what film do you think Hope got the closest for?