My Blue Heaven generates a degree of novelty by focusing on the freshest and most exciting entertainment development of its day: the advent of television, only a couple of years into its phenomenal rise to popularity and power. In fact, My Blue Heaven is not only up to date, it's beyond up to date, full of on-screen TV sets showing broadcasts in vivid color, even though color TV wouldn't be available in real life until three years later. You can't blame Fox for wanting to spread the movie's Technicolor hues to every corner of the big screen - or for reminding viewers that since real-life TV hadn't caught up with color technology yet, some treats were only available at the local picture palace.
Grable and Dailey play Kitty and Jack Moran, talented entertainers who have their own radio show at the beginning of the story. On the air they portray an affectionate but sometimes feuding couple. Off the air they have a contented married life that becomes even happier when two things happen: they get an offer to do their own TV show, and Kitty learns she's going to have a baby. The move to TV works beautifully, but a car accident ends Kitty's pregnancy and makes it doubtful she can ever have another one. She and Jack are too spirited to stay childless against their will, however. Learning that their friends Walter and Janet Pringle have adopted some of their many kids, they go to an adoption agency, put in an application, and receive a baby boy to love and nurture - only to have him snatched away because the stuffy, prissy head of the agency thinks show-biz people are too flighty to make good parents. Still determined to have the pitter-patter of little feet in their Manhattan apartment, the Morans adopt a little girl from a shady broker representing a single mom, but again the deal goes sour and the baby goes away. And now the pressure starts eating away at the Morans' marriage, nudging Jack toward an affair with Gloria, the second banana on their TV show.
Thanks to an ably constructed screenplay, My Blue Heaven manages to add a steady string of song-and-dance numbers to the Morans' miseries without showing too much strain. Some of these are fun, including a Halloween number that begins by spoofing Irving Berlin for having written about all the other big holidays while forgetting this one. There's a more period-specific kind of amusement in a number called "Friendly Island," which pokes fun at South Pacific - a smash Broadway musical at the time - and features Dailey singing in a bizarre pseudo-operatic voice meant as a parody of Mario Lanza, the classically trained tenor and up-and-coming movie actor who was starring in the stage production.
In its nonmusical scenes, My Blue Heaven works better when it aims for laughs than when it tries for drama. Yet some of the most interesting moments find a precarious balance between the comic and the serious. Eager to show the adoption-agency lady how responsible they are, for instance, the Morans soberly escort her to their apartment, which turns out to be full of champagne-guzzling friends throwing a surprise party for them, instantly destroying the joyous event they were trying to celebrate. Other examples include scenes with a nasty nurse who almost ruins Kitty's pleasure with Baby #2, and a strange scene in the TV studio where Jack inexplicably starts kissing Gloria, who promptly decides he has to abandon Kitty and run away with her. These aren't great moments in cinema, but they have a peculiar sort of charm.
Grable and Dailey play Kitty and Dan with panache. (Fittingly for a story that starts with a radio performance, they recreated their roles for an hour-long radio adaptation of the film in 1952.) Mitzi Gaynor is admirably perky as Gloria, the tempting actress who does the ridiculous commercials on the Morans' television show. David Wayne and Jane Wyatt are solid as the friends who inspire Jack and Kitty to adopt a baby, and Una Merkel is excellent as a nice woman from the agency. The wonderful Louise Beavers gets to shine briefly as Selma, the Morans' sensitive and sympathetic maid. The film's title notwithstanding, its color scheme concentrates mainly on green, with blue and red in secondary roles; but the magic of Technicolor makes every hue look vibrant.
New York Times critic Bosley Crowther, a cinema snob to his bones, found My Blue Heaven to be "probably the gooiest and guckiest musical film from Twentieth Century-Fox in years," evidently pitched to "that audience which...gurgles and glees at the most elementary banalities that occur on the video screen." More recently, though, Leonard Maltin called it a "pleasing musicomedy" and Entertainment Weekly said it uses the "feckless heroine's ethereal charm as a springboard for elegant melodrama." Perhaps the most prescient review came from Variety in 1949, applauding "some highly entertaining goings-on" by the stars and declaring that "the real eye-catcher of the pic is a lush brunet youngster making her initial screen appearance. She's Mitzi Gaynor. She's long on terping and vocalizing." Few viewers today will disagree.
Director: Henry Koster
Producer: Sol C. Siegel
Screenplay: Lamar Trotti and Claude Binyon; based on a story by S.K. Lauren
Cinematographer: Arthur E. Arling
Film Editing: James B. Clark
Art Direction: Lyle Wheeler, Joseph C. Wright
Music: Harold Arlen; lyrics by Ralph Blane; musical direction by Alfred Newman
Cast: Betty Grable (Kitty Moran), Dan Dailey (Jack Moran), David Wayne (Walter Pringle), Jane Wyatt (Janet Pringle), Mitzi Gaynor (Gloria Adams), Una Merkel (Irma Gilbert), Don Hicks (young man), Louise Beavers (Selma), Laura Pierpont (Mrs. Johnston)
C-97m. Closed Captioning.
by David Sterritt
