Betty Grable's farewell film turned out to be a third and final version of She Loves Me Not. As She Loves Me Not and True To The Army were done at Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox must have shelled out a lot of money for the rights. It was not money well spent.
Even though Bob Cummings was supposed to be a college student even the youthful looking Cummings wasn't that young to carry it off. And that was using the fact that he was a perpetual student in the place, paid for with Grandpa's trust fund. Tommy Noonan and Orson Bean weren't convincing as college kids either.
The same plot gimmick was used, nightclub dancer witnesses murder and flees the scene. This time however it was two girls Betty Grable and Sheree North, a pair of strippers in a clip joint who see one of their own murdered while doing her bumps and grinds. They have a front row seat for the crime, but leave real quick and go as far as their money takes them.
Which is a small college town where the guys all go to school. Noonan fancies himself a hypnotist, but has no success with any other subject other than North and that was by accident. Then North goes into a Marilyn Monroe imitation for the rest of the film, climaxed when she does a striptease at the graduation ceremonies making that pretty unforgettable.
Monroe turned this one down and I think wisely. Her next film was Bus Stop one of her immortal successes. Sheree North did much better work in the future, this was not a film she would have liked to be remembered for.
As for Grable, according to a recent biography she liked working with Bob Cummings whom she had worked with in one of her big successes Moon Over Miami at her height. But while Cummings, pun intended gives it the old college try, Betty looks just plain bored throughout. No wonder she left Hollywood and concentrated on stage, television, and the nightclubs the rest of her life.
Nunnally Johnson wrote and directed this and with him at the helm and the cast he assembled with people like Rhys Williams, Fred Clark, Charles Coburn, and Alice Pearce you would have thought something better would have come forth.
How To Be Very Very Popular wasn't with me.
