Customer Reviews

Duchess of Idaho [VHS]

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4 star:		(4)
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The Duchess of Idaho is a cute lightweight Comedy starring Esther Williams as a woman who has a friend who is a secretary who is in love with her boss but the boss who uses her to pretend to be his fiance to help chase off his many girlfriends when they start to get too serious is completely clueless that she is in love with him so Esther's character comes up with a wacky scheme to help her friend get her boss to notice her and follows him to Sun Valley in Idaho and pretends to be interested in him but only to get him interested in her friend but that results in a bunch of misunderstandings when she meets and falls for a guy played by Van Johnson. The whole cast was good in this movie but especially Esther Williams and Van Johnson and I had seen Van Johnson in other movies before this but this was the first Esther Williams movie that I ever saw. The Duchess of Idaho is only available on video and is not available on DVD and I want to see it transferred to DVD!

This is one of the better Esther Williams outings. The songs are good, as is the opening swimming number. Van Johnson livens things up and Lena Horne pops in for a song. There is also the added excitement of Sun Valley. The plot is older than the ruins of Ancient Rome, but there is an energy and freshness to the film that makes it easy to overlook the deficiencies.

This is a fun movie! Though not Esthers best, still she shows her great ability as an actress. We have many guest appearences in this movie. Including Mel Torme, Lena Horne, Red Skelton, but best of all: Eleanor Powell dances! After been retires from the screen for over three years. She comes back, and proves that she is still the queen of tap!!

The movie begins with Esther's roomate. Who is a secretary to the man she is in love with. But he doesn't care 2 straws about her. To him the only thing she is good for, is taking notes, and getting rid of girls.
That is until Esther contrives a plot to get them together. Van Johnson is also in this, and is wonderful! See it!

I really enjoyed this film. Esther Williams ans Van Johnson were just wonderful in it. I highly recommend it.

MGM musicals employed the best and brightest of actors, dancers, singers (sometimes, luckily, all three!), songwriters, and other people involved in the famed Freed Unit. When certain actors or actresses were employed, you were certain of a particular style of film or plot, and while this created some of the film musical's most enduring classics, it could also hamper the plot and its cast. The latter happens in "Duchess of Idaho", where the film's amazing leads, Esther Williams and Van Johnson, are forced to fit what their audiences expected of them. Granted, I really enjoyed the film, but once I realized the script had to tack on swimming sequences for Williams, and bloated an already charming plot with the requisite "musical" numbers, I found my enthusiasm a bit dampened. Williams and co-star Paula Raymond (who reminded me very much of Gene Tierney) are roommates and ex-service women. Raymond's character, Ellen Hallit, is the timid secretary of playboy railroad tycoon Douglas Morrison (the underrated and under-used John Lund). He blithely uses her as a shield against designing women, ignorant of the fact that she is in love with him. Williams plays Christine Duncan, who has a vague job as a synchronized swimmer in Chicago, who decides to win Morrison for her roommate and friend by pursuing Morrison on a trip to Sun Valley, Idaho, just certain he will once more call for Ellen to pretend to be his fiancee and promptly fall in love with her.

On the train, Williams stumbles into Johnson, who plays bandleader Dick Layne to songstress Connie Haines (playing a singer named Peggy Elliot) and a very 40s big band. They "meet cute" during a smooth musical interlude--the highlight is the obscure quartet The Jubilaires--when Williams gets a cinder in her eye and accidentally wanders in Johnson's compartment. The pair are instantly smitten, though with the requisite clash of personalities, but Williams is committed to vamping playboy Morrison, who, oddly enough, is convinced he is a marvelous cook (his valet/butler is thoroughly unimpressed). The mix-up amongst the three is somewhat predictable, though the script is witty and sophisticated, and the cast is superb. The musical elements were rather odd, what with Lena Horne making an appearance and Eleanor Powell doing a tap in her last film role, as well as the scenes of Johnson, Haines, and the big band performing a few ditties. Red Skelton makes a cameo during a scene which explains the name of the film, and while everything is entertaining and funny, you can't help but feel the screenwriters grafted a sort of musical/comedy revue into a frothy romantic comedy. The plot returns to its romantic comedy roots with the appearance of Ellen, who managed to make Mr. Morrison /see/ her all on her own, and wants to nip Christine's pursuit of Morrison in the bud. There is a small mix-up worthy of the best screwball comedies of the 30s and early 40s, and the denouement is funny and interesting in light of our assumptions regarding gender roles in the post-WWII era.

Despite my caveats, I highly recommend the Duchess of Idaho, because MGM and the Freed Unit manage to make all of these elements work and work very well.

Need I say more?? This great lady isnt getting her just reward because so many folks cant see her talent displayed the way it should be!!! DVD is the only way movies are seen in 2007!! VHS has been dead for years !!!