Gordon Douglas (1954)
In many respects ridiculous, in nearly every respect enjoyable. It’s a romantic comedy musical, interrupted by a shot of grim melodrama before the happy family conclusion. A main part of the enjoyment is the songs – although not the ones original to the movie. ‘Young at Heart’ (music by Johnny Richards, words by Carolyn Leigh) was a million-selling hit for Frank Sinatra the year before the film was made and he sings it over the opening and closing credits. (There’s no other good reason for the picture’s title.) His role here – he’s Barney Sloan, a jaded musical arranger who earns a few bob as a club singer-pianist – also gives Sinatra the chance to perform standards including ‘Someone To Watch Over Me’, ‘It’s Alright With Me’ and ‘One For My Baby’. The best of the mediocre numbers written for the film, which provided Sinatra’s co-star Doris Day with a big hit, is ‘Ready, Willing and Able’ (by Floyd Huddleston, Dick Gleason, and Al Rinker). Barney Sloan comes into the lives of the Tuttle family – the widowed father (Robert Keith), a music professor; and his three daughters Amy (Elisabeth Fraser), Fran (Dorothy Malone) and Laurie (Day) – through his acquaintance with Alex Burke (Gig Young), Tuttle’s former student and now a successful Broadway songwriter. On a trip back to Strafford, Connecticut, Alex makes himself at home with the Tuttles and all three daughters fall in love – or think they fall in love – with him, even though Fran’s boyfriend Bob (Alan Hale Jr) hopes she’s already spoken for, and Amy is being tentatively courted by a handyman called Ernie (Lonny Chapman). The treatment of Ernie is one of the few jarring notes in the movie, particularly when Laurie refers to Amy’s beau as ‘the romantic plumber’, as if that were an oxymoron.
The whole cast is good but what takes Young at Heart well beyond the limits of the material are Sinatra and Gig Young – and, in spite of the determined sunniness of the story and its resolution, the theme of half-loaves and disappointments in love. Only one of the three sisters doesn’t settle for second best; and Alex leaves town professionally in demand but romantically thwarted. Gig Young has a charming spark and humour – it makes perfect sense that the whole household, which also includes a shrewder-than-she-looks maiden aunt (Ethel Barrymore) – takes a fancy to him. Yet as soon as Frank Sinatra appears the dynamic changes – you feel it in a conversation between the two men, let alone in Barney’s first meeting with Laurie – and Sinatra’s appearance, after we’ve heard his voice at the start of the film, is delayed very effectively. Barney is primed for failure and Sinatra’s connection with the audience makes this clichéd character gripping. He’s effortlessly witty whether the words he delivers are spoken (the screenplay is by Julius J Epstein and Lenore Coffee, adapted from a 1938 film called Four Daughters) or sung. In her own, overwhelmingly wholesome way, Doris Day’s proficiency, both as an actress and a singer, is electric too. As screen personalities, she and Sinatra are hardly made for each other but that’s almost more entertaining than conventional chemistry. He’s romantically desolate, she’s determined to get a gold star for everything – although, to be fair to Day, she shows glimpses of vulnerability at least until she starts to sing. Thanks to Sinatra’s genius and Doris Day’s conscientiousness, the happy ending feels almost hard won.
Postscript: Watching this film was one of the most purely pleasurable experiences I’ve had in the cinema this year but there was a sting in the tail. The movie’s setting of Strafford, Connecticut is a fictional place – unlike Newtown, Connecticut, which was dominating the news twenty-four hours after I saw Young at Heart.
13 December 2012
