I watched this movie with a great deal of curiosity mixed with an equal feeling of dread. The curiosity was because it was based on one of my favorite books, "The City Boy" by Herman Wouk, best known as the author of "The Caine Mutiny" and "The Winds of War." "The City Boy" is an absolutely delightful period piece set in 1920s New York City and whose main character is a young Jewish boy, Herbie Bookbinder, who would be called a "nerd" today. Herbie is extremely intelligent but a dud at the sports and games that his male contemporaries find most important. He becomes enamored of a young girl at his school and manages to have his parents send him to the summer camp run by the school principal which his lady love is also attending. At camp, Herbie is initially the same pariah he was back in his old neighborhood until he figures out a scheme to win the camp competition to become "Skipper" or boss of the camp for the day. He succeeds by devious means but later atones for his sins and also manages to save his father's family business from ruin. The book is both great fun and also contains some genuine wisdom about growing up and the perils of doing bad now in order to do something good later.
I learned about this movie from an introduction by Mr. Wouk to a later edition of this book. He was apparently unhappy that his fat Jewish schoolboy was transferred into pretty young Irish child movie star Margaret O'Brien of "Meet Me in St. Louis" fame and claims that he never saw the film or knew anyone who had. (He may have been telling the truth, he got the title of the film wrong and I had to track it down by scanning a list of O'Brien's movies on IMDb.) So, based on the track record of how the film industry has consistently managed to turn excellent books into wretched movies I wasn't expecting much. However, while "pleasantly surprised" would be overstating the case, "not entirely appalled" would be closer to the mark.
Basically, Hollywood took Wouk's novel and reversed the gender of all the characters. Jewish Herbie Bookbinder is transferred into the WASPish Betty Foster, however, Betty is a bit of a female nerd, very good at the book larnin', but not terribly adept at the use of her feminine wiles. Herbie had an older sister, Betty has a younger brother named--Herbie, who gets saddled with some of the original Herbie's awkward qualities. Herbie was smitten with a young female classmate, Betty is moonstruck by a junior league hunk at her school. Both have a rival of the same sex for their boy/girlfriend's affections (casting against type, Betty's rival is played nastily by "Father Knows Best's" Elinor Donohue, normally consigned to "good girl" roles.) Both Herbie and and Betty connive to get themselves sent to summer camp and win the camp competition in order to further their romantic aspirations and both show themselves to be basically good kids in the end.
In summary, Wouk's plot was left basically intact. Of course, nearly all of the delightful flavor of the original novel was squeezed out. Instead of a realistic portrayal of life in pre-Depression Jewish New York, we are given a contemporary (for the 50s) setting that could have been set in any of the generic white bread Midwestern Protestant towns of a hundred movies and sitcoms. Wouk's book was also wonderfully satirical. In the movie, the school principal, Mr. Gauss, is portrayed a rather bumbling but basically sympathetic figure. In the book, Gauss is a small time hustler who runs his summer camp to produce the maximum profit for himself while providing the minimum of services to the children under his charge. Also, in the movie the family business is almost lost due only to the younger brother's carelessness with what he thinks is a bit of scrap paper, while in the book the disappearance of the crucial document is due to the chicanery of Betty's father's dishonest business partner.
Finally, if you are a fan of Wouk's book, you will not be completely disappointed in this movie, but can only mourn what might have been done if this material had been placed in the hands of really gifted adapters of the material. If you haven't read Wouk's book, I can't really imagine you being interested in this at all.
I learned about this movie from an introduction by Mr. Wouk to a later edition of this book. He was apparently unhappy that his fat Jewish schoolboy was transferred into pretty young Irish child movie star Margaret O'Brien of "Meet Me in St. Louis" fame and claims that he never saw the film or knew anyone who had. (He may have been telling the truth, he got the title of the film wrong and I had to track it down by scanning a list of O'Brien's movies on IMDb.) So, based on the track record of how the film industry has consistently managed to turn excellent books into wretched movies I wasn't expecting much. However, while "pleasantly surprised" would be overstating the case, "not entirely appalled" would be closer to the mark.
Basically, Hollywood took Wouk's novel and reversed the gender of all the characters. Jewish Herbie Bookbinder is transferred into the WASPish Betty Foster, however, Betty is a bit of a female nerd, very good at the book larnin', but not terribly adept at the use of her feminine wiles. Herbie had an older sister, Betty has a younger brother named--Herbie, who gets saddled with some of the original Herbie's awkward qualities. Herbie was smitten with a young female classmate, Betty is moonstruck by a junior league hunk at her school. Both have a rival of the same sex for their boy/girlfriend's affections (casting against type, Betty's rival is played nastily by "Father Knows Best's" Elinor Donohue, normally consigned to "good girl" roles.) Both Herbie and and Betty connive to get themselves sent to summer camp and win the camp competition in order to further their romantic aspirations and both show themselves to be basically good kids in the end.
In summary, Wouk's plot was left basically intact. Of course, nearly all of the delightful flavor of the original novel was squeezed out. Instead of a realistic portrayal of life in pre-Depression Jewish New York, we are given a contemporary (for the 50s) setting that could have been set in any of the generic white bread Midwestern Protestant towns of a hundred movies and sitcoms. Wouk's book was also wonderfully satirical. In the movie, the school principal, Mr. Gauss, is portrayed a rather bumbling but basically sympathetic figure. In the book, Gauss is a small time hustler who runs his summer camp to produce the maximum profit for himself while providing the minimum of services to the children under his charge. Also, in the movie the family business is almost lost due only to the younger brother's carelessness with what he thinks is a bit of scrap paper, while in the book the disappearance of the crucial document is due to the chicanery of Betty's father's dishonest business partner.
Finally, if you are a fan of Wouk's book, you will not be completely disappointed in this movie, but can only mourn what might have been done if this material had been placed in the hands of really gifted adapters of the material. If you haven't read Wouk's book, I can't really imagine you being interested in this at all.
