Sunday Salon: Mini-Reviews

Well, I thought I would do more mini-movie reviews. All of these have been watched in the past two months.

Watch Lucky Me (1954)

• If you're a big, big, big Doris Day fan and you just have the need to see every single movie she ever made.
• If you love musicals and are running out of new-to-you musicals, and you don't mind lowering your standards a bit. (Lucky Me is no Singin' in the Rain, no Showboat, no Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.) Personally, I found some of the songs so painful that I fast-forwarded...and I like musicals...and Doris Day. 
• If you don't mind movies with the oh-so-predictable mistaken-identity plot.
• The original trailer

Watch On Moonlight Bay (1951)

• If you're a fan of Doris Day 
• If you're a fan of Gordon MacRae
• If you've seen the sequel By the Light of the Silvery Moon (1953) two or three times but have never yet caught the original movie
• If you like romantic comedies. This one is genuinely both, I think. Though perhaps in an old-fashioned way. Doris Day plays the young teen girl, Marjorie Winfield, who falls in love with a college man, William Sherman. He does not get along with her father because he's silly enough to go around boasting about how he doesn't believe in marriage! 
• If you like movies about rascal-y little brothers. Marjorie's brother, Wesley, played by Billy Gray, is A RASCAL if I've seen one. He is something else. Oh the trouble this boy causes, the messes he makes!!! The lies he tells. One of the big scenes in the movies (for me) is when he sneaks out to the movies. The silent film is about the dangers of drinking alcohol. After watching the Prohibition series, I do believe that there were such propaganda films, but it was just very, very, very interesting to see!
• If you like movies set during this time period, around the start of World War I. By the end of the movie, we see William Sherman as a soldier all ready to go to war. 
• If you don't mind traditional, old-fashioned notions of love, romance, and women's roles. (Marjorie is definitely having to choose between a father who would control her and a would-be-husband who would control her.) 
• Not a clip of the movie, but there are pictures and music

Watch Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951)

• If you like sea-dramas, action-adventure films with big, big, big battle scenes at sea (like this one).
• If you like or love  Gregory Peck.
• If you have low expectations. This film doesn't come close to comparing with Errol Flynn at his very best...as in Captain Blood (1935) and The Sea Hawk (1940). It is not the best romance, by any stretch of the imagination, in fact I'd rank it as a non-romance. For at the time, he's married and his wife is pregnant with their son AND she's engaged to another man. As a mindless sea adventure it works a bit better.
• Original trailer;

© 2012 Becky Laney of Becky's Book Reviews