Customer Reviews

Higher & Higher [VHS]

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

When you come across something that has caught your eye you don't forget it easily. This classic, "Higher and Higher", caught my eye about 6 years ago, when my mother was introducing her children to a higher plain of movies. Classic Movies! Ah, just let the Words roll off your tounge. The movie will have you in stiches from beginning to end, and asking for more. Romance, comedy, and a mysterious twist at the end, that keeps comming at you minute after minute. Character acting, of course is flawless. The comradery between the actors and actresses seemed to be weaved together like a tightly nit throw blanket designed to comfort and keep you warm in any situation. So, as you rent this Comedic video remember that it will take you Higher and Higher.

Higher and Higher is an enjoyable lightweight comedy/musical from 1944 and stars Michele Morgan as a scullery maid who becase their once wealthy boss is now broke the other servants hatch a plan to pass her off as his wealthy debutante daughter and get her married to a wealthy husband but she is in love with someone else, a fellow servant but he doesn't know she's in love with him and he is the main person who is making her pretend to be someone she isn't.! The movie also stars Jack Haley who played the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz and Frank Sinatra in what I think is either his first or one of his first movies and he is playing a crooner. He is basically playing himself as his character is also named Frank Sinatra. This is a good movie and I would like to see it put on DVD!

Ok so it's highly unlikely that even a scullery maid could make that many stupid mistakes and sure, they sing a tune at the drop of a hat, but the atmposhere is so light and funny. True entertainment comes from classic movies. It's almost impossible to find modern humour, but you put in a movie like "Higher and Higher" and it's so light that it gives you an instant lift. I think it's witty and adorable and I highly reccomend it to old movie lovers like me! :)

How tired I am of watching so many of the present day movies that are so ugly, perverted and twisted and making no sense, oh those writers! Go back to the days when people cared for each other and were happy to sing and dance and love...not lust. Oh how much you young people have missed..so sad. This movie showed Sinatra at his Loving Innocence and his voice was the same, Beautiful & Sweet. The storyline was interesting and had a lot of cute scenes. No it's not a Gone with the wind but Sinatra sings his beautiful Heart out and what a wonderful trip back in time..no, as they say, they don't make musicals like this anymore, not in this world.

I absolutely love this movie. Sinatra is too sweet and too flippin' adorable for words! It's hilarious watching him play himself in a film, where only one or two other characters recognize that he's not just another "singing hack." The songs are classics - "I Couldn't Sleep a Wink Last Night," "The Music Stopped," "I Saw You First," and "Lovely Way to Spend an Evening" are all top-notch examples of Sinatra's early singing style - lush orchestrations and an irresistibly romantic delivery. While this is definitely not the best musical ever filmed, it's one of my favorites from RKO. It's filled with a slew of well-known actors, among them Mary Wickes (always hilarious) and a very young Mel Torme. My favorite actor sightings in the cast have to be a young Barbara Hale (a.k.a. Della Street on the Perry Mason show) and Victor Borge of all people (he was actually kind of dashing back in the day!). Frank really doesn't get a chance to stretch his acting chops in this movie (his first starring role), but his singing more than compensates for any lack in the acting experience department. The movie provides great documentation of how and why Sinatra made bobbysoxers swoon in the 1940s. My one quip with the storyline (*spoiler*!) is that Frank is turned down for Jack Haley, a.k.a. THE TIN MAN from The Wizard of Oz (Two-Disc Special Edition). That's absolutely insane! :P The DVD doesn't have chapter selections, but the picture is crisp and clear and sounds great. The film is sweet and funny and a great document of a young Sinatra at work.

If you like corny, Frank Sinatra, no plot, crooner movies--this is for you. Not only is it Frank Sinatra's film debut...but also that of Mel Torme' and Barbara Hale aka Della Street-

Frank Sinatra is razor thin and Mel doesn't look like he is old enough to drive--but Mel gets to sing briefly too and there is no denying that Mel is destined to be the Velvet Fog.

This movie is pure corn, but hey....its supposed to be. :)

If this weren't Frank Sinatra's first film it might better be remembered as another sprarkler from the Hollywood pro Tim Whelan, who made dozens of great films in the 1930s and 1940s. He started out in Indiana, then in Hollywood worked as Harold Lloyd's gofer on several of the comedian's silent films. His great learning curve came after his relocation to the UK in the early 1930s, where his expertise with sound film was desperately needed by a foundering British film industry. In short time he was one of the most sought after men working behind the camera.

Whelan directed the stunning version of George Eliot's THE MILL ON THE FLOSS, with Geraldine Fitzgerald and James Mason as the doomed brother and sister, long before either went to Hollywood. He worked with Olivier on several movies, including Q PLANES and THE DIVORCE OF LADY X with Merle Oberon, and gave us Vivien Leigh, Charles Laughton and Rex Harrison in THE STREETS OF LONDON, and many more. He is even co-credited for the work he did on THE THIEF OF BAGDAD, though today most of us consider it a Michael Powell film. Indeed, it has been Whelan's fate to stand totally in the shadow of such directors as Hitchcock, Powell, Anthony Asquith and a host of others, yet his slate of British films is second to none. Perhaps one of the reasons for his relative obscurity is his refusal to be pigeonholed. He could direct comedy, drama, thrillers, "action," melodrama, so-called "women's pictures," and the outright farce. In the USA he only broadened his reach, extending his oeuvre to musicals, although RKO's paltry budgets sometimes hampered his good efforts. Still, there is gold in them there hills, and maybe one of these days we will get a complete Whelan retrospective. He made many fascinating films (why, even his misfires are worth watching), and if HIGHER AND HIGHER isn't the best, it has some wonderful character work and some smooth transitions between different planes of farce. Like Mitchell Leisen, Whelan was an expert at combining otherwise irreconciliable elements; in any other movie Sinatra might have been an excrescence shoehorned in at the insistence the boys at the front office. Here he's perfectly blended in, like vermouth in a Martini, the whole concoction perfectly smooth.

It is sort of odd the way Sinatra is married off to Della Street. Made for each other? I don't think so, but it adds to the film's goofy charm.

A song brought this movie to mind so I thought I would check Amazon. Again they did not disappoint. This movie would be shown on TV many times a year but no longer. I thought I would never see this movie again. Quality is very good. I love this movie -- it's funny and the music is great.

Really a good film for a RKO release, this also has a All Star Cast:
Frank Sinatra, Jack Haley, Victor Borge, a very young Mel Torme, Mary Wikes, and more. Very entertaining, and a sweet love story. Very New Yorker Theme movie..

Mr KILLIAN is quite right about TIM WHELAN. I wouldn't blame RKO for the failure of that movie who had enough money for a cheap screenplay(Jay Dratler and Ray Spence) RKO had paid 15000 dollars for the rights of the Rodgers and Hart musical, a flop in 1940. Only one song was kept and Adamson-Mc Hugh were paid for four new songs. No question about money there. Whelan was also producer on that one. The cinematography by Robert de Grasse was good, as usual.
But Leon Errol does his Leon Errol thing. Victor Borge plays the piano, as Borge is expected to do. Haley plays Haley. Sinatra plays himself, so there is no character in the movie. He looks over made up and very tired, and just sings not so good songs. Our own Michèle Morgan looks old and not attractive. The Edward Stevenson gowns even look without style.
Only Marcy Mc Guire, as a servant chasing Sinatra is her usual dynamic self.
It is really too bad as the beginning looks promising: a song around the kitchen table by all the servants, and the same for another song in the dining hall. Then everything and everybody falls asleep.
The DVD transfer is very good, as all the Sinatra transfers in the box (the best being IT HAPPENED IN BROOKLYN) The DVDs are inexpensive and there is no chapters list in the box, which is now usual. Unfortunately there is no list either on the DVD, which is a bad move for a musical.