Old movie love

I ran home over the lunch hour (this is my longest day, and will be longer for having some 20 presentations to hear for one class). I graded a set of papers for another class (As I told a colleague: "It's like the Pacific Ocean. Lots and lots of "C.")

To keep myself in the chair, I flipped on TCM. (The main reason why I pay the extra $10 a month for "digital" cable. Well, that and the Nickelodeon cartoon channel...)

There was a funny old Ronald Reagan/Virginia Mayo movie on: "The Girl from Jones Beach."

I don't care much for modern "romantic comedies" (what I derisively call "meet cute movies") but I love the older, more "screwball" type of ones, where the situations are just unrealistic enough that you know they're not meant to be realistic. (I find that modern rom-coms seem to act as if "But yes, of course, two totally different people can meet when one knocks the other down on an icy street and then they fall immediately in love. Isn't that how it ALWAYS happens?")

In this one, Reagan played a "commercial artist" (referred to as a "girlie artist" by one of the characters). He falls for Mayo's character, who teaches evening Citizenship classes for Displaced Persons (I think this must have been a just-after-WWII movie). She is, of course, quite beautiful (and apparently, the "ideal woman," according to Reagan's character), but she's an intellectual, and has to be approached on intellectual grounds.

The "commercial artist," as it turns out, is somewhat of a "player," and so to win Mayo's character, he puts on a (bad) accent and pretends to be a Displaced Person taking her class.

I came into the movie part of the way through, in a scene set in the classroom, so I didn't realize that "Robert Benarak" was really "Bob Randolph" (those being the two aliases of Reagan's character). I also found myself going, "Dang. Reagan was REALLY BAD at accents." (not realizing it was SUPPOSED to be bad, a put-on). At times it sounded German, at others, Polish, and and other times kind of Scandinavian. (And Mayo's character comments at one point that the syntax of a particular sentence "sounds Greek.")

I'm sure the movie was no masterpiece but what I saw of it was certainly enjoyable. Reagan was quite good at comedy, he's funny to watch as the pretend-Displaced Person and he has a pretty good sense of timing. And Virginia Mayo was pretty good as the teacher role.

There were several lines and scenes - even in the short bit of the movie I saw - that made me chuckle. Like this: one of the female employees (a secretary, maybe?) at Randolph's firm comments to Eddie Bracken's character, "I'm too intelligent for the men I attract... and not beautiful enough for the men who attract me." Heh. I suspect, though, there are a lot of women who have felt that over the years.

Hopefully the movie will be on another time when I have a chance to watch all of it. I like those silly old comedies, where no one seems to take it too seriously. I think sometimes in this day and age movies (sorry: "films") suffer a bit from a tendency to take themselves too seriously. A lot of the older comedies, it seems like they were more intended as light entertainment than anything, without much of a pretension. (I think I like them for similar reasons I like the Strauss waltzes: the lightness, the fluffiness, the lack-of-anything-too-serious-of-the-outside-world-impinging-upon-them.)