“Junior Miss” is a mildly funny, thin, comic portrait of a few winter months in the life of an imaginative little girl named Judy Graves (Peggy Ann Garner), who goes to double-features and sees everything in terms of them. The comedy in “Junior Miss” is tried for, in part, by having the children broadly enact attitudes that are supposed to be childish copies of their parents’ acting and those of movie people. The children seem unchildlike and unreal because of the heaviness of these actions; they turn several degrees too awkward and unnatural and the attitudes themselves seem neither very real nor funny. Miss Garner is much more natural than the others, but she doesn’t strike me as being either adolescent, naïve or much but an ambitious, controlled actress. The children seem too carefully curried and dressed, and you are shown little of their adolescence. “Junior Miss” is—according to people who have also seen the play—a faithful adaptation, but, like the average play, it is talky, is has trouble getting outside the Graves’s living room, and every time a child goes off to a movie or a dance or has a date, the event is skipped and you are back in the living room listening to a conversation pretty much like the one that preceded it. There are funny spots—those having to do with the bedeviling of the elevator boy and the scorn of Judy’s pal Fuffy for her parents; but I think the film could show more feeling than it does, for instance, some of the very moving, very childlike emotion that is got in a brief scene of Judy playing for the last time with a doll.
The study of adolescence is pallid and theatrically mannered, but the treatment of Judy’s parents is less broad and more human and knowing. There is perfect casting in the role of the mother (Sylvia Field), who is less like a movie mother than any I’ve seen in years but resembles most of the ones I have seen shopping in Junior Miss departments. I liked the apartment building that was used to represent one of the less securely expensive buildings on Central Park, and the Graves’s apartment is correctly dull and sterile.
The first of the Gary Cooper productions, “Along Came Jones,” is, with a certain amount of good spirits and the desire to do something different in movies, a half-kidding of the kind of cowboy films in which Cooper has acted. But the movie gets awfully snarled (though Nunnally Johnson wrote the script) and talkative, and doesn’t seem either funny as a parody or exhilarating as a Western.
Danny Kaye’s new film, “Wonder Man,” is not less theatrical or inhuman than “Along Came Jones” or “Junior Miss,” but it is a much more entertaining, talented one to see. Kaye plays a night-club comic—a mildly irritating one because of his conceit, crassness and passion for goosing—the comic’s more likable twin brother, and the comic as a ghost after he is murdered by gangsters. All in all, the three parts allow him to use his talents for mimicry, mugging and screaming probably more than any of them has been used in even a half-dozen films. It is just as well, because the other three actors are Donald Woods and two very similar blonde heroines even more uninteresting than Woods. The production is more decorative and rich than is comfortable, and the dancing is mechanical and boring.
There is a memorable climax in which Kaye, in flight from the gangsters, ends up on the stage of the Metropolitan looking like a goof and doing a crazy operatic parody during which he manages to tell the audience about the murder of a fan dancer named Coochie LaVerne. Kaye’s attitude during this song changes elaborately from cringing fear to self-satisfied confidence, and each change is surprising and subtle. A nice diva sings and wrestles with Kaye through the duet, helping to make the duet formations as funny as the singing. There are two other good Kaye episodes: one a volatile argument among four Italians that the comedian breaks into in fake Italian and stops at its loudest with a screaming “Shaddup!”; the other an adroit parody of a jovial Russian baritone singing “Dark Eyes” during a fit of sneezing. Kaye manages each of his effects so that it comes at the best moment, very clear and well, and he is very deft in surprising you with the unexpected, such as repeating a yell even a fifteenth time, or, as in the sneezing act, managing an infinite number of improvisations on a single idea.
I don’t think he compares very well with comics like Keaton, Langdon or Chaplin, because the character he presents is somewhat ordinary and dull compared to the imaginative personalities of the best movie comedians, or compared even to those of some of the lesser ones like Charley Chase or Lloyd Hamilton. Also in the night-club style of comedy that Kaye uses there is too little that seems spontaneous and too much that was carefully, doggedly and minutely worked out by gag-writers. All these reservations could be made about almost every modern movie comic, and I mention them about Kaye in the interest of making one more plea for comedies which aren’t mainly the work of gag-writers, which allow the comedian to work at least part of the time rather freely, which would be more relaxed and not under the laborious necessity to be foolproof, and which are dominantly film comedies rather than a mixture of the styles of radio, theatre and films.
August 6, 1945