I’m the fellow she’s going to be married to. London, World War Two: Kitty McNeil (Betty Hutton) and her dance partner Donald Elwood (Fred Astaire) are performing for the troops. Don announces his engagement to Kitty on stage, but Kitty later tells him she’s recently married pilot Richard Everett, a member of a wealthy Boston family. Donald splits up the act. Boston, 1950: Widowed Kitty is locked in a struggle with her late husband’s grandmother Serena (Lucille Watson) for the custody of Kitty and Richard’s son, Richard ‘Richie’ Everett VII (Gregory Moffett), Richard Sr. having been shot down shortly after the marriage. Serena dislikes Kitty, and thinks she knows best about Richie’s education. Kitty decides to flee to New York City with Richie, her sister-in-law Carola Everett (Ruth Warrick) is sympathetic and feels like fleeing herself. Desperate for money, Don has taken a job at Larry Channock’s (Barton MacLane) nightclub. Don runs into an out-of-work Kitty at a café and manages to get her a job as a cigarette girl at the club after visiting her in a boarding house where he sings Richie a song to get him to sleep but falls asleep himself and outside a private detective observes him the next day. Serena sends her two lawyers Pohlwhistle (Roland Young) and Wagstaffe (Melville Cooper) to the club, where they subpoena Kitty in an attempt for Serena to gain custody of Richie. Don persuades Larry to give Kitty a steady job as his dance partner at the club, but various potentially embarrassing details about Richie not going to school and spending most of his time at the club emerge at court. However, all are easily answered by the kind nightclub staff. The judge gives Kitty sixty days to give Richie a stable home life, to which end Don agrees to marry Kitty. However, Don and Kitty get into an argument at the marriage licence bureau, thus ending their short-lived engagement. Then Kitty becomes engaged to the rich Timothy Bryant (Shepperd Strudwick) whom Carola likes … You rushed me on the stage and next thing you know I’m a bigamist. A Fred Astaire musical with only one solo number? Brash Hutton is foregrounded in what could be a pretty irritating plot – widows and kids don’t fun pictures make, as a rule. However despite her foghorn performing style and a tip-off with two cowboy scenes to her barnstorming Annie Get Your Gun six months earlier (we love it when they shoot the TV broadcasting a western showm to the song They Were Doing Our Dance) this works well, with Frank Loesser’s witty lyrics a major plus in this lesser Astaire. The script is niftily structured around two engagement announcements by Astaire, one by Strudwick and then ends in the Tunnel of Love amusement ride. In between, Watson does her best to get the kid while Astaire does his best to get one over on Watson with his various business schemes and marry Hutton (third time’s the charm). Fortunately, the kid isn’t hateful or even too cute to stomach. Written by Allan Scott with additional dialogue by Dane Lussier adapting a 1948 story Little Boy Blue by Maurice Zolotow whom we know better as a showbiz columnist and Hollywood biographer. Directed pacily in lovely Technicolor by comedy veteran Norman Z. McLeod. If you have fallen in love with a widow the wise men say first make sure the children have fallen in love with you
mondomovies 