Saturday, June 30, 2012

Movie review - "Texas, Brooklyn and Heaven" (1948) **

Guy Madison was a handsome kid who made bobby soxers sigh in a short appearance in Since You Went Away but who was soon exposed to be a particularly wooden actor - never better demonstrated than in this romantic comedy. It's a kind of young-folks-in-the-big-city lark, complete with female lead Diana Lynn who played a variation of this part in My Friend Irma. Both get up to adventures - he's a newspaper journo turned aspiring playwright, she's a hitchhiker who winds up in a swim suit on Coney Island, there are wacky pickpockets, crusty old bartenders, zany little old ladies, theatre producers, shenanigans with a horse, etc.

It's like the book for a musical only there aren't any songs and it isn't in colour. Also, the leads are basically failures - Madison doesn't make the grade as a playwright, Lynn isn't much good at anything, neither of them make a go of it in New York City, and it turns out they both really want to raise a ranch for horses in Texas. Then why leave Texas to go to New York? Madison gets an inheritance - he could have just spent it on the ranch and that was that.

The supporting cast try and it moves along at a fair clip. Audie Murphy pops up at the beginning as a newsroom boy in Madison's paper. You can glimpse the famous Dallas Book Depository. But this is pretty ordinary. Directed by William Castle!

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