Philip Rapp Movies

Thanks to Martin's Molecular Reassembler, Martin (Ray Walston) and Mrs. Brown (Pamela Britton) swap personalities and intellects. Complications ensure when Detective Brennan takes Martin-as-Mrs. Brown on a date, for the purpose of proposing marriage. Meanwhile, Mrs. Brown-as-Martin is coming dangerously close to revealing the Martian's true identity. Future M*A*S*H director Bill Idelson appears as Mrs. Brown's brother Leroy. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In this lively musical a chorine hooks a successful businessman and becomes the snob she thinks he expects her to be. This is a problem, because he fell in love with her because she was so earthy and fun. Now that she has become refined and aloof, he is bored. Fortunately, just as he is leaving, the plucky girl sees the error of her ways and marital bliss ensues. Songs include: "Ain't Misbehavin'", "The Dixie Mambo", "I Love That Rickey, Tickey, Tickey", and "A Little Love Can Go a Long Way". ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

The satirical bite of Gogol's play The Government Inspector is dispensed with in favor of traditional Danny Kaye buffoonery in The Inspector General. Kaye plays the illiterate stooge of two-bit medicine-show- entrepreneur Walter Slezak. Abandoned by Slezak, the starving Kaye wanders into a corruption-ridden Russian village, which is all geared up for a visit from the Inspector General. Mistaking Kaye for that selfsame royal inspector, the townsfolk fawn on the confused Kaye, granting him his every whim and plying him with all sorts of bribes. In the original Gogol play, the boorish phony inspector takes advantage of the villagers' error by laying waste to the town and seducing a few local maidens; in the film, Kaye is as pure as the driven borscht, as is his true love (Barbara Bates), the only honest person in town. The treachery is in the hands of Slezak, who fakes Kaye's death and tries to blackmail the crooked local officials. The deus-ex-machina arrival of the real Inspector General foils the crooks and places the nonplused Kaye in the job of town mayor. Those of you who read the play in college may remember it ends with everyone frozen in horror when the genuine inspector shows up, with Gogol's stage directions insisting that the actors hold their fearful poses for a full sixty seconds. Be assured that in the film version of Inspector General, nothing stands still--least of all Danny Kaye, who cuts quite a swath through several Sylvia Fine/Johnny Mercer specialty songs. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

The presence of William Powell as legendary showman Flo Ziegfeld at the beginning of Ziegfeld Follies might lead an impressionable viewer from thinking that this 1946 film is a Technicolor sequel to the 1936 Oscar-winning The Great Ziegfeld. Not so: this is more in the line of an all-star revue, much like such early talkies as Hollywood Revue of 1929 and Paramount on Parade. We meet a grayed, immaculately garbed Ziegfeld in Paradise (his daily diary entry reads "Another heavenly day"), where he looks down upon the world and muses over the sort of show he'd be putting on were he still alive. Evidently Ziegfeld's shade has something of a celestial conduit to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, since his "dream" show is populated almost exclusively by MGM stars. Vincente Minnelli is given sole directorial credit at the beginning of the film, though many of the individual "acts" were helmed by other hands. The Bunin puppets offer a tableau depicting anxious theatregoers piling into a Broadway theatre, as well as caricatures of Ziegfeld's greatest stars. The opening number, "Meet the Ladies", spotlights a whip-wielding (!) Lucille Ball, a bevy of chorus girls dressed as panthers, and, briefly, Margaret O'Brien. Kathryn Grayson and "The Ziegfeld Girls" perform "There's Beauty Everywhere." Victor Moore and Edward Arnold show up in an impressionistically staged adaptation of the comedy chestnut "Pay the Two Dollars". Fred Astaire and Lucille Bremer (a teaming which evidently held high hopes for MGM) dance to the tune of "This Heart is Mine." "Number Please" features Keenan Wynn in an appallingly unfunny rendition of an old comedy sketch (performed far better as "Alexander 2222" in Abbott and Costello's Who Done It?) Lena Horne, strategically placed in the film at a juncture that could be edited out in certain racist communities, sings "Love". Red Skelton stars in the film's comedy highlight, "When Television Comes"-which is actually Skelton's classic "Guzzler's Gin" routine (this sequence was filmed late in 1944, just before Red's entry into the armed services). Astaire and Bremer return for a lively rendition of "Limehouse Blues". Judy Garland, lampooning every Hollywood glamour queen known to man, stops the show with "The Interview". Even better is the the historical one-time-only teaming of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly in "The Babbitt and the Bromide". The excellence of these sequence compensate for the mediocrity of "The Sweepstakes Ticket", wherein Fanny Brice screams her way through a dull comedy sketch with Hume Cronyn (originally removed from the US prints of Ziegfeld Follies, this sequence was restored for television). Excised from the final release print (pared down to 110 minutes, from a monumental 273 minutes!) was Judy Garland's rendition of "Liza", a duet featuring Garland and Mickey Rooney, and a "Baby Snooks" sketch featuring Fanny Brice, Hanley Stafford and B. S. Pully. A troubled and attenuated production, Ziegfeld Follies proved worth the effort when the film rang up a $2 million profit. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Start Cheering is Columbia Pictures' idea of a college musical: Practically everyone in the cast is past the age of 30. Charles Starrett plays a movie star who wearies of Hollywood and decides to get a college education. He enrolls incognito in a small university, much to the discomfort of his managers Walter Connolly and Jimmy Durante. Durante heads for college himself, hoping to sabotage Starrett's plans and bring him back before the cameras. While Jimmy Durante is saddled with inferior material, the film gives full head to such guest stars as bandleader Louis Prima, vaudevillian Chaz Chase (who had a cigar-eating act), radio's Professor Quiz (Dr. Craig E. Earle), and Columbia's short-subject headliners The Three Stooges (with Curly!) ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi