The Girl From Jones Beach (1949, directed by Peter Godfrey)


Painter Bob Randolph is famous for painting a beautiful woman who is known as “the Randolph Girl.”  Everyone wants to meet the model but they can’t because there is no one model.  Instead, there are a dozen models, each with a perfect feature that Bob uses in his paintings.  In need of money, Bob and his business partner, Chuck Donavon (Eddie Bracken) search for a woman who can be the real-life Randolph Girl.  Chuck thinks that he’s found her when he spots school teacher Ruth Wilson (Virginia Mayo) but Ruth has no interest in being a model.  She wants to be known for how she thinks and not how she looks.  Hoping to change her mind, Randolph pretends to be Czech immigrant and enrolls in Ruth’s citizenship class.

When a photograph of Ruth in a swimsuit is published without her prior knowledge, the school board decides that Ruth is not a good role model and they fire her.  With the support of Bob and Chuck, Ruth sues for reinstatement.  Bob ends up posing in the courtroom in his own swimsuit, the better to prove that there’s nothing wrong with  appearing in public in a swimsuit.

The role of Ruth was originally offered to Lauren Bacall, who turned it down because she didn’t think she could play a pin-up.  Not to knock Bacall but Virginia Mayo does seem like a better choice for the role of Ruth and she does a good job of bringing the role to life.  She proves to be a good match for Ronald Reagan, whose amiable nature allows him to get away with taking her class under a false pretext and speaking in a mangled approximation of a foreign accent.  The comedy is light and it fits well with Reagan’s affable screen presence.  The film is pleasant but ultimately lightweight and forgettable.  I can understand why, by this point in his career, Reagan was getting frustrated with the quality of scripts he was being sent.  The Girl From Jones Beach would be forgotten today if it didn’t star the future president of the United States.

The Big Let-Down: THE TWO MRS. CARROLLS (Warner Brothers 1947)


gary loggins's avatarcracked rear viewer

You would think THE TWO MRS. CARROLLS is just the type of movie I’d love. It’s a Warner Brothers pic from the 1940’s, it’s got Humphrey Bogart and Barbara Stanwyck , there’s mystery and murder, a Gothic atmosphere… and yet, I didn’t love it, or particularly like it, either. For the first three-quarters, it’s too mannered, slow-moving, and (the cardinal sin) boring for my tastes. Things do pick up a bit towards the end, with Bogie menacing Babs alone in that gloomy mansion, but the denouement failed to satisfy me.

There are a number of reasons why the movie just doesn’t work. It was filmed in 1945, but held back two years by the studio for some reason or another (reports vary). Director Peter Godfrey, a Stanwyck favorite, just wasn’t up to the task of creating much suspense. Then again, the screenplay by Thomas Job practically gives everything away early…

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