(spoilers included)
For about half an hour, there are parlour songs and clambake songs with the whole family around and these are sung by Doris Day (as Laurie.) These are somewhat loud (as Doris Day usually is a bit) but not too loud (as she is sometimes, as in THE PAJAMA GAME, when a strident sound is produced). However, even this would have been hard to take much longer.
During this early part of the film Alex (Gig Young) appears as the son of an old friend of Day's father (Robert Keith). He makes himself well-liked, which may have to do with a milieu I am no longer a part of, because it is beyond me why the 3 girls (Day, Dorothy Malone, and Elisabeth Fraser) find him so charming: He is loud, pushy, obnoxious and even overtly inconsiderate. He's gonna write a MUSICAL...wow...
Almost as suddenly (Barney Sloan) Frank Sinatra appears as Alex's arranger and this opens up a fantastically dark new mood immediately. If you didn't know something about the film or story before hand, you would never have thought all that sugar-coated artifice of the first half hour would be toned down to the point that it is almost like one of Rothko's paintings, like "White Over Red" maybe. Sinatra even looks very sleazy and literally half-starved (as the character is supposed to be) when he is inside this house that stops just short of Hansel and Gretel.
This is what separates this musical from the other fluffy things Doris Day made during the first part of her career, before the non-musical fluff took over. Of course, it had the advantage of a real story to base itself on--by Fanny Hurst.
Barney's "bad attitude" is Day's missionary material. He sees himself as a hard-luck guy, a loser, second banana to Alex. His self-pitying attitude is actually refreshing here, albeit it may not be helping the character in his own life.
In the cafe where he plays, while living in Connecticut to work for Alex, he does 3 standards--"Someone to Watch Over Me," "Just One of Those Things," and "One for My Baby, and One More for the Road."
Well, Gershwin, Porter and Arlen never had it so good--these are definitive performances of songs all the big singers did.
The last is the great moment of the picture, when toward the end of the song (and after a quarrel with Laurie about keeping Alex's old bracelet), she appears in the club and sits down enjoying his extraordinary singing of the Arlen. When she appears, a change comes over his face, and the whole atmosphere of the melancholy song changes as she exposes her wrists to let him know that she is no longer thinking of Alex--she has gotten rid of the bracelet.
Alex's lack of consideration is overt twice: when he and Laurie decide to get married, he insists upon announcing it at her father's birthday party that night--but she asks him to please not do so, to let it be her father's night, to let him be the center of attention. Even after agreeing to this, as the party ends he pushes again and goes ahead and announces it. This is a most agreeable family, and they take almost everything in stride, so they barely notice.
The second time is more severe. Near the very end, before Barney's accident, Alex is alone with him in the car and offers him some money--this is mainly to show off his own success, which assuages his wounded ego that he did not win Laurie's hand in marriage. Barney refuses it, but when Alex is leaving on the train, Alex literally shoves the money on Barney and tells him to spend it on Laurie.
This actually causes Barney's immediate depression and makes him so suicical that his auto accident is not precisely an accident, as is clearly seen.
Earlier, at the family Christmas Eve gathering, Laurie had even told Alex that she was going to have Barney's baby before telling Barney himself. This prompted Alex to tell her almost literally that Barney was not worthy of her; her face does at least register the rudeness of this remark.
Also, Amy (Elisabeth Fraser) had been in love with Alex and somehow it never worked out for them even after Laurie was out of the way. She may well have found him out for what he really was in the interim.
So that, when we finally see the whole gathering of friends and family together again after Barney's recovery, Alex has finally been excluded: Not a word about his "villainy" has ever been expressed; it has been merely understood.
Sinatra and Day sing together only once at the very end--and both were in marvelous voice throughout this picture. The way the new songs and the old standards were so casually integrated within the plot is most unique and satisfying. And the whole picture is framed with Sinatra's fine rendition of the title song.
The cake at the birthday party for Mr. Tuttle interested me, for purely subjective reasons. I had just re-watched PICNIC a few days before, and in the opening scene, when Bill Holden is approaching Mrs. Potts (Verna Felton) to ask her for a little work, she holds out a freshly baked coconut cake that she will bring to the picnic to Millie (Susan Strasberg) and says "Oh, Millie, doesn't it make your mouth water?" And this cake IS almost palpable, you immediately want some of it. The cake in YOUNG AT HEART is not nearly so alive--it may have been prepared by Aunt Jessie (Ethel Barrymore) but it still looks "bought." These 2 films were made within a few years of each other. If YOUNG AT HEART does not quite reach the poetics of PICNIC, it is nevertheless also one of the finest examples of 50's Americana, and I highly recommend it as a great film musical.
For about half an hour, there are parlour songs and clambake songs with the whole family around and these are sung by Doris Day (as Laurie.) These are somewhat loud (as Doris Day usually is a bit) but not too loud (as she is sometimes, as in THE PAJAMA GAME, when a strident sound is produced). However, even this would have been hard to take much longer.
During this early part of the film Alex (Gig Young) appears as the son of an old friend of Day's father (Robert Keith). He makes himself well-liked, which may have to do with a milieu I am no longer a part of, because it is beyond me why the 3 girls (Day, Dorothy Malone, and Elisabeth Fraser) find him so charming: He is loud, pushy, obnoxious and even overtly inconsiderate. He's gonna write a MUSICAL...wow...
Almost as suddenly (Barney Sloan) Frank Sinatra appears as Alex's arranger and this opens up a fantastically dark new mood immediately. If you didn't know something about the film or story before hand, you would never have thought all that sugar-coated artifice of the first half hour would be toned down to the point that it is almost like one of Rothko's paintings, like "White Over Red" maybe. Sinatra even looks very sleazy and literally half-starved (as the character is supposed to be) when he is inside this house that stops just short of Hansel and Gretel.
This is what separates this musical from the other fluffy things Doris Day made during the first part of her career, before the non-musical fluff took over. Of course, it had the advantage of a real story to base itself on--by Fanny Hurst.
Barney's "bad attitude" is Day's missionary material. He sees himself as a hard-luck guy, a loser, second banana to Alex. His self-pitying attitude is actually refreshing here, albeit it may not be helping the character in his own life.
In the cafe where he plays, while living in Connecticut to work for Alex, he does 3 standards--"Someone to Watch Over Me," "Just One of Those Things," and "One for My Baby, and One More for the Road."
Well, Gershwin, Porter and Arlen never had it so good--these are definitive performances of songs all the big singers did.
The last is the great moment of the picture, when toward the end of the song (and after a quarrel with Laurie about keeping Alex's old bracelet), she appears in the club and sits down enjoying his extraordinary singing of the Arlen. When she appears, a change comes over his face, and the whole atmosphere of the melancholy song changes as she exposes her wrists to let him know that she is no longer thinking of Alex--she has gotten rid of the bracelet.
Alex's lack of consideration is overt twice: when he and Laurie decide to get married, he insists upon announcing it at her father's birthday party that night--but she asks him to please not do so, to let it be her father's night, to let him be the center of attention. Even after agreeing to this, as the party ends he pushes again and goes ahead and announces it. This is a most agreeable family, and they take almost everything in stride, so they barely notice.
The second time is more severe. Near the very end, before Barney's accident, Alex is alone with him in the car and offers him some money--this is mainly to show off his own success, which assuages his wounded ego that he did not win Laurie's hand in marriage. Barney refuses it, but when Alex is leaving on the train, Alex literally shoves the money on Barney and tells him to spend it on Laurie.
This actually causes Barney's immediate depression and makes him so suicical that his auto accident is not precisely an accident, as is clearly seen.
Earlier, at the family Christmas Eve gathering, Laurie had even told Alex that she was going to have Barney's baby before telling Barney himself. This prompted Alex to tell her almost literally that Barney was not worthy of her; her face does at least register the rudeness of this remark.
Also, Amy (Elisabeth Fraser) had been in love with Alex and somehow it never worked out for them even after Laurie was out of the way. She may well have found him out for what he really was in the interim.
So that, when we finally see the whole gathering of friends and family together again after Barney's recovery, Alex has finally been excluded: Not a word about his "villainy" has ever been expressed; it has been merely understood.
Sinatra and Day sing together only once at the very end--and both were in marvelous voice throughout this picture. The way the new songs and the old standards were so casually integrated within the plot is most unique and satisfying. And the whole picture is framed with Sinatra's fine rendition of the title song.
The cake at the birthday party for Mr. Tuttle interested me, for purely subjective reasons. I had just re-watched PICNIC a few days before, and in the opening scene, when Bill Holden is approaching Mrs. Potts (Verna Felton) to ask her for a little work, she holds out a freshly baked coconut cake that she will bring to the picnic to Millie (Susan Strasberg) and says "Oh, Millie, doesn't it make your mouth water?" And this cake IS almost palpable, you immediately want some of it. The cake in YOUNG AT HEART is not nearly so alive--it may have been prepared by Aunt Jessie (Ethel Barrymore) but it still looks "bought." These 2 films were made within a few years of each other. If YOUNG AT HEART does not quite reach the poetics of PICNIC, it is nevertheless also one of the finest examples of 50's Americana, and I highly recommend it as a great film musical.