The scenario, which lifted the title and nothing else from James Starr's collection of Tinseltown short stories, opens on one-time wonderboy director Jimmy Dale (James Dunn), now living out of a bottle due to the flops that scuttled his career. He finds himself receiving a hand up out of the gutter from J. Walter Delmar (Grant Mitchell), the proprietor of a shady acting school, who wants to trade on what's left of Dale's reputation to sucker prospective enrollees.
One such pigeon is Alice Perkins (Faye), fresh off the bus from Peoria and fully expecting Delmar's academy to gain her entree to the business. Dale loses patience early with the raw recruit, but comes to see her potential. As the story progresses, Delmar hungrily makes the acquaintance of a hayseed heir (Frank Melton), whom he wheedles into staking a low-budget production. Delmar then sells Dale on the idea of a comeback vehicle with Alice as the lead, all the while planning to kick back a significant chunk of the budget. Dale has his hands full pulling together the project, polishing Alice's skills, and trying to stay a jump ahead of Delmar and his unctuous leading man and co-conspirator (John Bradford).
The long portfolio of director George Marshall is marked with the great (Destry Rides Again), the near-great and the not-so-great, and 365 Nights In Hollywood trends toward the lower end of the scale. The film presents Faye in the manner in which Fox packaged her in the early years of her career, as essentially an own-label Harlow with hair bleached platinum and plucked eyebrows. Her performance here is indicative of what audiences got from her all through her peak period; enough acting skill to get by until the production numbers, where her throaty delivery and pert radiance would carry the day.
Dunn brought to his role the affability that Fox put to best use in Shirley Temple's earliest vehicles and many more from the studio's musical output in the early to mid '30s. With sad irony, his art here wound up presaging life for Dunn; by the decade's end, Fox was curtailing its musical output, his opportunities grew more infrequent, and he began to lose his war with his own private demons. He did receive validation when he captured the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for portraying the weak-willed father in A Tree Grows In Brooklyn (1944), but the accolade didn't restore his career's momentum.
Grant Mitchell is capable as the sleazy Delmar, and John Ford regular John Qualen has his moments as Dunn's ally on the "faculty." Less welcome are the comic relief efforts of the knockabout clowns Frank Mitchell and Jack Durant, who appeared in various Fox musicals of the period, and have lapsed into deserved obscurity in the generations since. Their shtick, which was mainly comprised of wrestling one another into the scenery at the drop of a hat, makes the Stooges look like Noel Coward, and gets old extremely fast. For the Alice Faye archivist, 365 Nights In Hollywood qualifies as a must-have; for everybody else, caveat emptor.
While an exceptional effort was made to clean up the audio for this release, there was no such luck with respect to the visuals. Mastered from a complete 35mm print in the possession of Faye biographer Frank Moshier, the scratches and mottling betray the master's age, but aren't so prevalent as to detract from the viewing experience. The sole extras are trailers for several of the horror/exploitation films from Williams' archives that are available on DVD through Image.
For more information about 365 Nights In Hollywood, visit Image Entertainment. To order 365 Nights in Hollywood, go to TCM Shopping.
by Jay Steinberg
