Springtime in the Rockies
                                                                             
Director: Irving Cummings
Year: 1942
Rating: 5.0
One last Fox musical for now with the biggest star of all the Fox stars at the time - Betty Grable. Back then they tracked popularity with polls, box office and votes and for about ten years she was in the Top 10. She basically stuck to musicals but ventured into drama as well with films like I Wake Up Screaming and A Yanks in the R.A.F. It took her years to get there. Her first role was in 1929 in the chorus and she was stuck there for much of the 1930s. She has a bit part with Edward Everett Horton in the Astaire-Rodgers film The Gay Divorcee in 1934 and then in another Astaire-Rogers film, Follow the Fleet in 1936. It took Alice Faye getting sick and Fox needing a replacement to finally get her over the top. She was as blonde as Faye and could dance and sing and so she got the top role in Down Argentine Way in 1940 and from that moment on she captured the heart of audiences.



She was of her time. The legs insured for a million dollars. The flashing smile and deep red lipstick. The hair ablaze with shimmering yellow. The blue eyes that Technicolor brought into sharp focus. The famous pin up of her that war pilots put up in their cockpit. All of a different time. She died too young at 56 from lung cancer, so every time she picks up a cigarette, I want to yell at her. Highly unlikely she would be a star in today's Hollywood. She needed the studio system to make her one. But I do enjoy the glamour they surround her with. Glamour is gone.



This film was a sizable hit with many of the usual suspects on hand. Hermes Pan doing the choreography, songs from Harry Warren and Mack Gordon and besides Grable there is Carmen Miranda, John Payne, Cesar Romero and character actors Charlotte Greenwood and Edward Everett Horton and the big band sound of Harry James. All the ingredients are there, but it never quite pops. The plot feels like it is 100 years old - which I guess it almost is - the musical numbers have no zip, Miranda is poorly utilized, the Horton and Greenwood quips fall flat and neither Payne nor Romero have the romantic spark to be with Grable. Admittedly, Romero often comes across as a second-rate paper thin gigolo but that is the problem. You know she will never end up with him instead of the hunky All-American Payne. Hell, ending up with Horton would have been better which might seem silly knowing how gay he is on screen and off - but damn he lands Miranda in this film. It cost his character $47,000 but it seems that he and Carmen went behind closed doors and things happened. When she kisses him earlier, his face lights up like a streetlight. This may be the only film in which Horton gets a girl.



Grable and Payne are a song and dance team on Broadway and she is expecting him to come in with an engagement ring but he comes in smelling of expensive perfume and a handkerchief with lipstick on it.  That is the end of that - she ends up with Romero in an act and he ends up with a bottle of scotch. Their agent - a reasonably slim Jackie Gleason - wants to get them back together and sends Payne off to the Rockies where she and Romero are performing at a swank hotel.  He is drunk and by the time he gets there he has hired Horton as his valet and Miranda as his secretary. And pursues Grable. And Miranda pursues Horton. A few songs break up the boredom. There are some ten songs - Grable gets no solos, Carmen has two, Helen Forrest has one as the singer in the James band and Harry James a couple instrumentals. James also got Grable. He was married when the film started and married to Grable before the year was out. They stayed married for over two decades. The film is disappointing - I came for Grable and her legs and it turns into a real ensemble piece in which she doesn't get enough to do but look angry at him.