At the same time Alma and Alfred Hitchcock, a very cute couple, emigrated to America and a promising sweetheart contract with David O. Selznick, the senior producer-director Herbert Wilcox brought his proprietary superstar Anna Neagle to RKO to film three classic but dated Broadway shows, SUNNY, IRENE and NANETTE. The results were neither happy nor memorable. La Neagle in musical comedy is intriguing--a large-boned woman with very long dancer's limbs, accentuated in exceptionally unbecoming costumes and hairstyles that emphasize her maturity (the original 1925 Nanette was to be a teenybopper flapper). Miss Neagle eerily resembles another soubrette/flapper, Miss Joan Crawford, having a really bad hair and costume day.
The film was already hopelessly dated in 1940, creaky in its lumpen timing and enjoyable solely for the brilliant but largely wasted supporting cast, Roland Young, Eve Arden, Helen Broderick, ZaSu Pitts and Victor Mature. Neagle gamely skips (literally) through the film in best Stiff Upper Lip tradition but her ingenue days are far behind her, and there is far too little of her dancing (and too much skipping). Diehard Vincent Youmans fans are still seething that this film virtually throws away the two big hits "I want to be happy" and "Tea for two," both severely cut and over before they've properly begun. Both should have been major production numbers in the Arthur Freed Metro manner, but this Anglicized take on an all-American, scintillating tapdance score all but jettisons the musical numbers in favor of lame and tame screwball matinee respectability and dignity.






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