recommended

Pretty Good

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Funny girl Joan Davis was a hit on TV in the mid 1950's, but is all but forgotten because of a legendary redhead who took the title of this wacky housewife the moment she got in front of the TV camera. She had tried movies, too, and along with Joan Davis, became comic queen of the B's. Joan is appreciated by many, but her films are rare. "Beautiful But Broke" is fast moving fun with Joan as the desperate new owner of a talent agent who becomes determined to turn a girls band into a hit band, getting them into all sorts of hi-jinks, proving that some like it hot in an all girl's band, but everybody likes it funny.Davis gets the film off to a hysterical start with a gag involving "Pop Goes the Weasel". Some snappy music sung by Jane Frazee and Judy Clark, dealing with war issues and of course a little romance. Davis has great presence on camera and has one of the most delightful comic speaking voices that she uses expertly to make normally unfunny lines hysterical. One of the highlights is a scene where the girls take refuge in a farmhouse which is being used as target practice. Davis, who is actually quite attractive, gets to be self deprecating in a scene where she gets knocked around trying to sell kisses while the soldiers set their aim on other girls. And if dealing with soldiers isn't bad enough, just imagine Joan up against some pranksterish children! A slapstick finale involving Joan dealing with working in a construction site is very funny even if it does go on a bit too long.

As a representative of the consensus rating for this feature on IMDb, I should point out that this film will be worth the time of very few people. Since the U.S. closed 95% of its mental hospitals in cost-cutting measures during the past couple decades, most citizens with serious problems such as paranoid schizophrenia are cared for in maximum security prisons instead nowadays. BEAUTIFUL BUT BROKE may be a good fit for this captive audience, since this poorly-developed musical features seven entirely forgotten songs that will not set off any painful memories (since they have never been heard before). Further, the cast is composed entirely of forgotten people (NONE of them is notable enough to have a head shot coupled with their name in IMDb's cast listing). The picture itself lacks even poster art here, though thousands of much earlier flicks have at least one such piece on display. The best specific example of why most paying customers (probably everyone except draft dodgers) demanded their money back from BEAUTIFUL BUT BROKE in 1944 was that the producers had to pad out its meager 69-minute running time with a totally nonsensical, ill-fitting, interminable, incongruous, non-entertaining, seemingly-endless (probably 20-minutes-long) crazy carpenters vaudeville slapstick act! It's not hard to understand why a misfire attacking its audience expectations so maliciously has not been released theatrically since the invention of metal baseball bats.

When I was a kid, I LOVE LUCY was the big comedy on TV, but in my household we watched I MARRIED JOAN, starring Joan Davis. Lucy was a beautiful woman who occasionally went crazy, particularly when things fell apart. Joan Davis was crazy from the beginning and much funnier from start to finish. Besides, I had relatives like her.Columbia came out with this girl's musical co-starring Joan and Jane Frazee, who had just gone through a phase as Universal's teen-aged songbird when Deanna Durbin went adult. It's towards the end of the war, so all the bands have gone to war, as has Joan's, leaving her to book the acts. So she promotes some girl bands.There are some excellent numbers, including a fine rendition of "Shoo-Shoo Baby", and it's all big-band boogie-woogie. Lively, tuneful and funny, it's a perfect artifact of its period.

Not much of a movie in overall aesthetic terms, but a real charmer with a lot of good swing music, capably sung by Jane Frazee and Judy Clark, and a great performance by Joan Davis. She appears equally capable of getting laughs from slapstick and dialogue, and through much of the movie she reminded me of Rosalind Russell's comic side in her sheer energy and indomitability. It's also got some good comic supporting performances by John Eldredge and the marvelous Byron Foulger, and the early scene in which the girls are trying to sing along to a record and it gets stuck eerily anticipates the performance glitch that undid Milli Vanilli (you remember). The ending is a bit of a patriotic cop-out but the film overall is a lot of fun and well worth seeing.