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The I Don't Care Girl
This semi-film within a film opens in the office of producer George Jessel, who never saw a camera he couldn't get in front of, who is holding a story conference to determine the screen treatment for the life of Eva Tanguay, and Jessel is unhappy with what the writers present him.He tells them to look up Eddie McCoy, Eva's one-time partner, for the real inside story on the lusty and vital Eva. Eddie's version is that he discovered her working as a waitress in an Indianapolis restaurant in 1912, wherein singer Larry Woods and his partner Charles Bennett get into a fight over her and both land in the hospital, and McCoy convinces the manager to put Eva on as a single to fill their spot. She flopped, but McCoy arranges for Bennett to be her accompanist, and she went out of his life. The writers look up Bennett, now head of a music publishing company, who says McCoy's story is phony, and it was Flo Zigfeld who discovered Eva for his Follies.
Release : | 1953 |
Rating : | 6.1 |
Studio : | 20th Century Fox, |
Crew : | Art Direction, Art Direction, |
Cast : | Mitzi Gaynor David Wayne Oscar Levant Warren Stevens Craig Hill |
Genre : | Music |
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Reviews
Just perfect...
Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.
Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,
The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.
I didn't like the ending in this 1953 entertaining movie. Nice seeing David Wayne attempting a song and dance routine. Even though he mouthed the words, he got through it nicely.The film tells the story of the making of a film based on Broadway luminary Eva Tanguay.The dances and the songs centered around the theme of I don't care are marvelously staged.Wayne appears in and out of the film and his telephone drunk scene was so similar to when he gave up Susan Hayward (Jane Froman) to Rory Calhoun via the phone again the year before in "With A Song in My Heart."The film tells of different men in her life telling her story with differences that seem to come all together at the end.
It doesn't appear that this film is anymore a true biopic of performer Eva Tanguay than most biopics from the 1930s through 1950s were. But, despite having only a smattering of accuracy in it, some of Mitzi Gaynor's dance routines are fantastic.I had never even heard of Eva Tanguay, although I was vaguely familiar with the old song "I Don't Care". It's interesting to read her bio on Wikipedia...preferably before you watch the film; in fact, the bio may be more entertaining than the film.While far from her best film, Mitzi Gaynor shines here, although I doubt production numbers at the turn of the century were this lavish.Oscar Levant is here as a fellow performer. He seems more ill-at-ease here than usually; this just wasn't the right kind of part for him.David Wayne is surprisingly good as a song and dance man who, at one time, teamed with Tanguay. Bob Graham is a singer with his eye on Tanguay...but my reaction was Bob who? It's interesting to see George Jessel, as Himself, as the producer of the very film you're watching.A rather disappointing outing.
It's a great pity but "The I Don't Care Girl" was indeed severely cut. Scenes and numbers were shuffled, scenes and numbers ended up on the cutting-room floor, scenes were re-filmed, Jack Cole was brought in (and even his 'I Don't Care' and 'Beale Street Blues' traded places so that the one designed to end the film, didn't, and the other one, with its scene to follow, did), until what was released (in 1953, rather than 1952) was the hodge-podge you see today. Yet despite all of the butchery the multi-talented Mitzi sets the screen on fire whenever she appears, whether it's in a dramatic scene or dazzling her way through those Cole-choreographed production numbers. Sadly we'll never see the complete version, or those cut numbers. Drat!
It begins, even before the credits, with an onstage production number in which Mitzi, as famed vaudevillian Eva Tanguay, emerges hoarse and uncertain onstage, thus forcing the stage manager to ring down the curtain. AND IT NEVER COMES BACK TO THIS. That's how ineptly cut this Fox backstager is, leaving a major plot thread unacknowledged for the next 78 minutes. Along the way we get some clichéd show-must-go-on situations, the unappealing Oscar Levant (especially unappealing when deprived of good dialog, which Comden and Green provided him the same year in "The Band Wagon") plunking away on some classical piano, David Wayne in what first appears to be the leading-man role but turns into an inconsequential supporting part, the pleasant-voiced Bob Graham as Mitzi's love interest, George Jessel playing himself pretending to be a nice man, and several big, big production numbers. These have nothing to do with the vaudeville milieu and are set to undistinguished music, but the color's great, and Gwen Verdon gets to do some sinuous Jack Cole choreography in one of them. The whole thing's framed in a desperate-looking "Citizen Kane" conceit, as two studio boys are exhorted by Jessel to "come up with the REAL Eva Tanguay story," but the movie never wanders anywhere near the real Eva Tanguay story -- maybe it just wasn't that interesting. Worth looking at for the blazing Technicolor, the dances, and Mitzi, who's never less than professional, and never more.