Customer Reviews

The Affairs of Dobie Gillis [VHS]

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

What a pleasant surprise for a hardened old cynic like me. Ordinarily I would avoid a title like The Affairs of Dobie Gillis as if it were the plague. But the sheer bounce and charm of Weis's direction along with Van and Reynolds proved completely beguiling. Sure it's dated. The innocence and idealized portrayal of college-age youth belong to a bygone era. Still, Van's easy way with a song and a smile continues to captivate, while even Reynolds' manages an energized side that doesn't annoy (the sight of her pony-tailed wholesomeness crouched demonically over a boiling witch's brew is hilarious). Surely these two were made for each other in some malt-shop heaven. There are so many nice touches, including: Hans Conreid's arrogant professor (his tight-lipped barbs at Dobie are priceless), Kathleen Freeman's gap-toothed Polish band (I'm sorry we didn't hear more), and the utterly delightful song and dance numbers (a whole lot simpler and more spontaneous than MGM's over-produced foot-stompers of the day). Clearly, the studio dribbled out a bare-bones budget to give their younger talent a chance, and the youngsters responded in spades. I'm only sorry that Van didn't get the career his talent deserved-- watching him and Fosse was a treat. All in all, this is a much better movie than it had any right to be, and a fine piece of unexpected pleasure for viewers of any age.

Why don't they make movies like this one anymore? Let's face it, the world needs them. No violence,no swearing, no explosions except for the Science Lab. Good harmless clean fun. Of course this movie would never set the world on fire, but who cares. Extremely likable and easy to watch. Hurry up with the DVD version!
But one sad note, all of the main actors with the exception of Debbie Reynolds have all passed away at the time of writing (2004)

Another missing film not on DVD!! Get into the year 2007 and re-master this one please!!!

I was so used to visualizing the tv version of Dobie Gillis with Dwayne Hickman that this movie caught me off guard seeing it for the first time . I found Debby Reynolds fun to watch and the story was enjoyable . BOOM !!!!! those science experiments .If you see the movie you'll know what I'm talking about.

The Affairs of Dobie Gillis is another metamorphosis of Max Schulman's character. All of Schulman's writing is hilarious. There were Dobie books, on top of the show, movie, and musical. It's incredibly hip and wonderful social satire. Bobby Van is wonderful and it's unfortunate he didn't act in more movies. The best line in the movie is: "Work's alright for workers." Watch out! At the end you get to peak at Happy Stella Kowalski and her Schotische Five.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0062Z0PHK/ref=cm_cr_rev_prod_img

This 50s film I had wanted to see for years and I was not disappointed. The main stars are Debbie Reynolds, Bob Fosse & Bobby Van. I am somewhat surprised that this musical comedy ended up in black & white unlike most MGM musicals of the era. Bob Fosse's type of dancing is very noticeable. I enjoyed this film and will view it again & again. I also enjoyed the comedy TV series, The Loves of Dobie Gillis which was produced for Fox TV during this period.Recommended. The print is clean on this DVD-R MOD release.

This review is of the 1953 MGM movie musical THE AFFAIRS OF DOBIE GILLIS, currently available only on VHS. It has its interesting moments, but to me it lacked the diverting quality, dramatic tightness and technical superiority so emblematic of MGM's better musicals of the late 1940s - early 1950s. On the plus side, MGM sent its most talented young stars through the pipeline during about the last year the studio system was functioning, so not only do we have Debbie (SINGIN' IN THE RAIN) Reynolds and the late Bobby (SMALL TOWN GIRL) Van in the lead roles, there are other talented newcomers, too, including Barbara Ruick and Bob Fosse, who of course is known much better for his choreography and work behind the camera. People with a fondness for post-World War Two film comedies, particularly the MGM kind, and also those who televiewed MAKE ROOM FOR DADDY/DANNY in any of its cathode-ray manifestations, will welcome Hans ("Uncle Tanoose") Conreid, who here is cast as an intransigent English professor who tangles with witlessly provocative Dobie over matters of grammar.

The movie is largely based upon an immensely successful 1951 collection of eleven stories gathered into book form (called THE MANY LOVES OF DOBIE GILLIS, as the 1959-1963 CBS-TV program also would be) by the versatile author Max Shulman, who among his many comedic works had given us BAREFOOT BOY WITH CHEEK in 1944 and would go on to write RALLY ROUND THE FLAG, BOYS (1957). MANY LOVES introduced the world to indefatigable Dobie Gillis, though as separate stories he appeared as anything in age from late high-school to law school, and had numerous college majors. Shulman set those MANY LOVES stories in and around the University of Minnesota, even back then a large, sopisticated affair in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St. Paul); but when Shulman wrote the screenplay that became this 1953 release for Metro, he moved the college out of its urbane location and doubled-down on a setting of Upper Midwestern abrasiveness: Grainbelt University, with its grim motto "WORK. WORK. WORK. STUDY. STUDY. STUDY. LEARN. LEARN. LEARN." That's fine as far as it goes: the constricted and restricted grounds of a mediocre rural college, sans citified distractions, could make for tighter focus in a drama or comedy-drama and give it that "lifeboat" quality that often works for drama and comedy-drama.

Although Dobie's essential bumptiousness, verging on self-centeredness, is relatively constant through Shulman's eleven stories, the settings of the individual stories themselves hop over time or out of time as the character of Dobie manifests as a student in high school, various level of college, and even the first year of law school. Since the movie deals with a linear plot without first-person narration (which usually calls for an ironic observer and narrator speaking from a studio echo-chamber, such as the "dead" William Holden in 1950s SUNSET BOULEVARD and today as the deceased housewife who narrates DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES), such irony is difficult to maintain on an ongoing basis. Yet the zest of Dobie's character -- what makes him wittier and saves him from dislikableness, is precisely that ongoing tug-of-war in Shulman's stories between what Dobie thinks in his mind those unspoken "thought balloons" Dobie allows only us readers to hear, and the tentative and often hilariously tactlessness with with the inexperienced youth tries to housebreak the interior dialog into the external dialog. To put it another way, the character of 20-ish Dobie Gillis depends on his being at times too witty to be smart, at other times too smart to be witty.

THE AFFAIRS OF DOBIE GILLIS is, as it had to be, a chronologically-ordered movie with unity of character and venue. Despite the odds, Shulman was able to incorporate a few plot events from his Eleven Stories into the screenplay (how could anyone leave out a chem-lab explosion? - almost the varsity equivalent of slapstick's banana peel). This movie's leads are certainly good, even charming: Bobby Van's Dobie is fresh-faced and, as the role requires, plays Dobie as naively arrogant (though I for one prefer the slightly more matter-of-fact aplomb of Dwane Hickman's TV Dobie in the CBS series). Debbie Reynolds plays Pansy Hammer (Shulman adored giving his characters credibility-stretching names, and Pansy was carried over from one of the eleven stories). Pansy is one of those weirdos who actually went to college to "WORK, WORK, WORK (etc.)", and in so doing please her father the tuition-payer, then pursue a good career in a big city. (If you've seen the 1955 MGM comedy THE TENDER TRAP you know how well Reynolds played a blithely complacent, but unintentionally quite irritating, young woman with her plans all mapped out.) Dobie, on the other hand, just wants to have fun. Officially there was no code of "slack" for college-aged young men, but in reality, the young men and women between their late teens and early twenties who filled the theates on weekends and matiness loved this swipe at The Establishment. Some themes endure; not everything has changed over the past 60 years despite the near-abdication of the professoriat from undergraduate teaching and contemporary tuitions' being thirty or more times higher.

The comic clash of the unmotivated, lazy male undergraduate and the alluring but uptight, busier and more harried female has probably been a staple of campus comedy since American coeducation became the norm: Recall MGM's GOOD NEWS (1947), a college musical-comedy movie based on a 1920s play and starring Peter Lawford and June Allyson as the two undergrads from different worlds who nonetheless fall from each other. Durn good movie with Mel Torme included and besides, it's in color (see below). In this movie, Dobie and Pansy click, and much of the film's comic tension and motivation has to do with the ongoing struggle between the two over their opposing college goals, all the while played out against the downside of their mutual college aspirations: that t Dobie's academic mediocrity will degenerate to the point he gets kicked out of the U., and the possibility that Pansy's determined excellence will be dragged down from spending too much time with Dobie -- which would displease her martinent father enough to force Pansy to live Back East with a maiden aunt. Barbara Ruick and Bob Fosse play the lighter second leads in their own inimitable ways; their styles are not similar, and Ruick was not a pro dancer, but each is charming in her/his own way. (It was a pity that Barbara Ruick hit major roles in movie musicals just at the time they began to die as a routine product of the studio system; today, thank heaven, we have her radiant Carrie from the 1956's CAROUSEL as well as many other films she made on the way up.)

One of the stories in the 1951 collection has Dobie blowing up a *carboy* in the chem lab, and unsurprisingly that plot element carried over into the movie at hand. It was at that explosive point, not one of the good-humored if smallish song-and-dance numbers, that I began to feel cheated that this flick had been filmed in black-and-white (does anyone remember Doris Day's 1961 LOVER COME BACK and its multi-colored laboratory explosions?). Later on, Bob Fosse joked that AFFAIRS OF was the only black-and-white musical to come out of Metro since 1938, and while that's an exaggeration, the film definitely has a fish-out-of-water, cheapie feel, not that extremely crisp, silver-screen cinematography of classics like BROADWAY RYHTHM OF 1938. By and large, commercial color movie film stock was a good deal more expensive than B&W thru the Fifties and even into the Sixties, and of course the many color release prints America's movie palaces demanded only added to the production costs. Filming in monochrome was probably the easiest economy to impose, especially since most of the stars and other players were under contract to MGM already. Under then-studio head Dore Shary, splashy musicals were being phased out in favor of dialog comedies, which Metro's research had revealed attracted the same audience as musical-lovers, but at about half the production costs. Louis Mayer was fully out, and the age of cost economies was coming in.
**I had to look "carboy" up. Currently it means a very large, jug-type bottle, usually of plastic or glass, with a ventilating out-spout (usually on the top) that is used to carry corrosive liquids or home-brew beer and such. When Dobie was in college, carboys were more strictly lab equipment, and the movies tended to portray them as scary-big apparatuses, often spherical with a side out-spout and a silvery hemispherical lower half, employed to hold nasties like sulfuric acid, and so bulky they required separate carts to be rolled or dragged around. Back in the Dobie day, carboys were all glass, and all expensive. Never in the entire history of U.Minn./Grainbelt U. had a carboy been blown up in the lab until Dobie came along! And the impecunious lad is expected to pay for a new one . . .

[The following grafs offer mainly referrals to what I consider better musicals of the day: The discrepancy between AFFAIRS OF, with its lack of smooth flow of situation, non-evident Classic Cinema tightness of script and absence of Technicolor's razzle-dazzle, is all the more poignant since (out of MGM alone) 1953 was a peak year for musicals, really the last great year of routinely good mass-produced musicals made just before commerical television went nationwide; and many of these musicals were unmentioned or barely mentioned in the first two THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT compilatins. I for one much prefer the color confection SMALL TOWN GIRL, with Jane Powell playing opposite Bobby ("hop all over town") Van and Farley Granger. Much sillier oveall than the Dobie flick, but if the viewer considers the Granger-Powell sections of the movie a romcom including Powell's coloratura, and the more phantasmagorical, interwoven musical sequences directed by Busby Berkeley as a separate unit to boost the overall film, the viewer's assessment will be quite right -- that's why studio heads budgeted and included wonderful, surreal production numbers (only one of which made it into in T.E. 2) from notoriously troublesome late-career Busby Berkeley. That same year also saw the release of the film version of Cole Porter's B'way smash KISS ME KATE with a wonderful cast, including a little bit of Bob Fosse hoofing in ultramodern 1953 style as part of a tremendous production number, "From This Moment On," that included Bobby Van and Tommy Rall (as Ann Miller's fictional swain). "From This Moment On" was borrowed from a different Cole Porter musical and is a high note in terms of vivacity and style, but again, only a little bit of that one sequence made the T.E. 2 cut. It leaves out any reference to stars Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel, fresh from SHOW BOAT success, who clicked together as a romantically antagonistic divorced show-biz couple who mix it up onstage as well as off. "Nineteen fifty-three" was also the running verbal symbol of modernity in THE BAND WAGON with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, directed by Vincente Minnelli. Really, BAND WAGON belongs up there in the pantheon with SINGIN' IN THE RAIN and AN AMERICAN IN PARIS. After her tremendous success and acceptance in SINGIN' IN THE RAIN (1952), MGM kept Debbie Reynolds as busy as possible in fifty-three, and at least two of her 1953 releases, GIVE A GIRL A BREAK and I LOVE MELVIN, are widely recommmended by other reviewers and critics. By the time THE AFFAIRS OF DOBIE GILLIS ended, though the whole affair seemed so distant and canned that I was happy when it ended, a rare attitude for me with most musicals. Even if the film had been produced with the most charming Three-Strip Technicolor ever, though, I think I would still find it programmatic and a little tedious at times. I admit I've been spoiled by that year's other big and medium-sized MGM products from the last of the Dream Factory's years.

Ultimately, did this reviewer "learn learn learn" anthing from THE AFFAIRS OF DOBIE GILLIS? If you're on the fence about paying the bucks, there are plenty of MGM musicals (straight comedies, too) from this era, on DVD, along with the better-known ones I've mentioned above. A number of them starred or featured Debbie Reynolds on her way to becoming "America's Sweetheart," pre-SINGIN' IN THE RAIN. (Consider her delightful bit in THREE LITTLE WORDS, or her more accomplished A DATE WITH JUDY. THE TENDER TRAP from 1955 has the title song as its only music, but it's entertaining anyway.) I should mention that Bobby Van, in addition to a medium-sized role in SMALL TOWN GIRL, offers a wonderful production-number dance experience alongside Bob Fosse and Tommy Rall as one of the suitors/dancers in KISS ME KATE (1953), stars Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson in a studio adaptation of the Cole Porter Broadway smah.

Personally, I'm hoping MGM/UA or someone will release THE AFFAIRS OF DOBIE GILLIS on DVD, but I myself am saving my pennies for the candy-colored GIVE A GIRL A BREAK on DVD (also out of MGM, 1953), with Marge and Gower Champion, Debbie, and a stop-action sequence that has helium balloons floating down and confetti drifting up! And it's available on DVD now.]

But please let me repeat, no matter what's on the box, THE AFFAIRS OF DOBIE GILLIS was not made in color (yet FWIW all of MGM's 1953 releases were in conventional aspect ratio, not widescreen; therefore, there aren't margins to worry about when viewing the videotape). If this movie is colorized in the future, I doubt I'd love it anyway even if it were the most realistic colorization ever. Perhaps it was the episodic nature of the source-material stories that made the movie seem a little lax in the tight-script department (a much-admired virtue in the Studio Era), or perhaps it was the MGM repertory-based habit of casting its own Juveniles, Ingenues and Romantic Leads to fit a rather generic screenplay, despite Shulman's witty but usually highly verbal comedic situation. However, Max Shulman was so successful an author I hate to point the finger at him or anyone else.

The character of Dobie Gillis definitely got his own back, and then some, in the 1959-to-1963 (B&W) sitcom for CBS, whose title reverted back to THE MANY LOVES OF DOBIE GILLIS. THAT's the one with Dwayne Hickman, Tuesday Weld and Bob Denver playing the Beatnik. For more information, consult reviews of the TV series on DVDs. For a free taste of Shulman's writing, it's easy to find online at least one chapter of the original eleven stories, "Love Is a Fallacy," a charmingly funny period short stories and still used to teach students the most common logical fallacies. Severe Dobie-heads may want to seek out the 1954 volume I WAS A TEENAGE DWARF, which I am told brings Dobie back in all new short stories by Shulman.

Trivia Note: Barbara Ruick was the daughter of Lurene Tuttle.

I wish it could have been a dvd, but I was still thrilled to be able to get it in any format. I saw this movie once on tv when I was a kid, many years ago, and have been looking for it ever since.

If you remember "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis" (1959 TV series) [1959-1963], you're are about to be disappointed as the movie "The Affairs of Dobie Gillis" (1953) as even though it is played by popular actors of the day, the story is week and the acting is too tongue in cheek.

Dobie (Bobby Van) and buddy are going to collage to party and have fun, as that is what collage is for. However Dobie falls in love with the studious Pansy (Debbie Reynolds) who is there to work, work, work and study, study, study.

Will Dobie learn to work, work, work? Or will Pansy learn to play, play, and play?


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