In Academy Awards history, there are several nomination omissions that make people go "huh?", and one nomination in that particular category that gives them a double take. Such is the race for Best Actor in 1948 when Humphrey Bogart was not nominated for his highly praised performance in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" and somehow slipped in Dan Dailey in this 20th Century Fox musical about the good old days of vaudeville and burlesque. There's a little more to his performance than just singing and dancing and clowning and a little bit of a plot. In this case, Dailey is a serious alcoholic, so that makes the light-hearted memories of him and Betty Grable in the previous year's "Mother Wore Tights" go right down the drain. While their first entry was highly above average (dealing with a vaudeville couple struggling with being always on the road yet trying to remain good parents), this one goes up a notch. It's a bit dour with its combination of hoofing and hooching, but Dailey certainly is worthy of praise, his drunk scenes every bit as believable as Ray Milland's in the 1945 Best Picture winner "The Lost Weekend".
Musically, this isn't really memorable, but that's a good thing because then all the focus is on the trauma of this married couple's issues of addiction, loyalty, recovery and atonement. Previously filmed as both "The Dance of Life" (1929) and "Swing High, Swing Low" (1937), this third version of the play "Burlesque" (which introduced Barbara Stanwyck in the Grable role of the long-suffering partner and wife) has the Fox color but not the lightness of their other big musicals of the 1940's. Dailey is already seen as a lush from the start, perhaps not constantly schnockered, but definitely someone who would get a major tongue lashing from Carrie Nation. He has already nearly been unfaithful with chorus girl Jean Wallace who gets a severe tongue lashing and threat of violence from Grable, and when Dailey goes to New York on his own and ends up with Wallace as his partner, the steel magnolia Grable follows him there to put an end to the threat of the end of her marriage. But finding booze bottles hidden in his hotel room makes her concerned, although she really does nothing but sit back and pray that he wakes up and smells some hot black coffee.
The second leads are played by Jack Oakie and the former "Baby" June (Havoc), making Grable go from Haver to Havoc in just a few years, having appeared opposite June Haver in "The Dolly Sisters". Havoc, with her throaty no-nonsense voice, is playing a role similar to the parts that Veda Ann Borg and Iris Adrian played, and gets many of the film's best lines. There are some looks at old vaudeville routines that were later paid tribute to in the big 1979 Broadway musical revue "Sugar Babies" and later given a gay twist in the Nathan Lane play "The Nance". James Gleason gives his usual no-nonsense but slightly buffoonish performance as a theater manager, with veteran actor Richard Arlen ("Wings") as the respectable businessman who falls in love with Grable and wants to take her away from the trauma that is Dailey's alcoholism. Dailey has one amazingly disturbing scene where he realizes that his marriage to Grable is over (already having been ended through divorce) and gets proceedingly drunker and drunker, crying through the booze has he hobbles out of her hotel after having crashed a little party in her room with Oakie and Gleason.
I can see why Dailey was even remotely considered a potential nominee, and if you see this after pondering why he was nominated and not Bogart, you will begin to see past the idea that he just didn't belong there, even in a year when Gene Kelly in "The Pirate" and Fred Astaire in "Easter Parade" gave first rate performances in big movie musicals. A similar film that year (Warner Brothers' "April Showers") basically told the same story with Jack Carson in the Dailey role and Ann Sothern as his wife, but this has much darker elements that the technicolor cannot hide. Of the musical numbers, only the title song stands out, the rest rather standard. I felt that Grable's hairstyle seemed much too modern to be believable for the era that this was set in, and I also wish that the writers had given her character a bigger backbone to play hardball with the husband she obviously loved to get him sober and not go through a divorce when it is obvious what the conclusion will be.
Musically, this isn't really memorable, but that's a good thing because then all the focus is on the trauma of this married couple's issues of addiction, loyalty, recovery and atonement. Previously filmed as both "The Dance of Life" (1929) and "Swing High, Swing Low" (1937), this third version of the play "Burlesque" (which introduced Barbara Stanwyck in the Grable role of the long-suffering partner and wife) has the Fox color but not the lightness of their other big musicals of the 1940's. Dailey is already seen as a lush from the start, perhaps not constantly schnockered, but definitely someone who would get a major tongue lashing from Carrie Nation. He has already nearly been unfaithful with chorus girl Jean Wallace who gets a severe tongue lashing and threat of violence from Grable, and when Dailey goes to New York on his own and ends up with Wallace as his partner, the steel magnolia Grable follows him there to put an end to the threat of the end of her marriage. But finding booze bottles hidden in his hotel room makes her concerned, although she really does nothing but sit back and pray that he wakes up and smells some hot black coffee.
The second leads are played by Jack Oakie and the former "Baby" June (Havoc), making Grable go from Haver to Havoc in just a few years, having appeared opposite June Haver in "The Dolly Sisters". Havoc, with her throaty no-nonsense voice, is playing a role similar to the parts that Veda Ann Borg and Iris Adrian played, and gets many of the film's best lines. There are some looks at old vaudeville routines that were later paid tribute to in the big 1979 Broadway musical revue "Sugar Babies" and later given a gay twist in the Nathan Lane play "The Nance". James Gleason gives his usual no-nonsense but slightly buffoonish performance as a theater manager, with veteran actor Richard Arlen ("Wings") as the respectable businessman who falls in love with Grable and wants to take her away from the trauma that is Dailey's alcoholism. Dailey has one amazingly disturbing scene where he realizes that his marriage to Grable is over (already having been ended through divorce) and gets proceedingly drunker and drunker, crying through the booze has he hobbles out of her hotel after having crashed a little party in her room with Oakie and Gleason.
I can see why Dailey was even remotely considered a potential nominee, and if you see this after pondering why he was nominated and not Bogart, you will begin to see past the idea that he just didn't belong there, even in a year when Gene Kelly in "The Pirate" and Fred Astaire in "Easter Parade" gave first rate performances in big movie musicals. A similar film that year (Warner Brothers' "April Showers") basically told the same story with Jack Carson in the Dailey role and Ann Sothern as his wife, but this has much darker elements that the technicolor cannot hide. Of the musical numbers, only the title song stands out, the rest rather standard. I felt that Grable's hairstyle seemed much too modern to be believable for the era that this was set in, and I also wish that the writers had given her character a bigger backbone to play hardball with the husband she obviously loved to get him sober and not go through a divorce when it is obvious what the conclusion will be.