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So much average

Just perfect...

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Producer: Alex Gottlieb. Copyright 2 September 1944 by Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc. A Warner Bros.-First National picture. New York opening at the Strand: 4 August 1944. U.S. release: 25 July 1944. U.K. release: 22 February 1945. Australian release: 28 February 1946. Running times: 106 minutes (US); 95 minutes (Aust).NOTES: The stage play opened on Broadway at the Henry Miller on 10 September 1942 and ran a remarkable 642 performances. Gwen Anderson, Howard St John and Linda Watkins starred. Antoinette Perry directed. Incredibly, Owen Marks was nominated for an Oscar for Best Film Editing, losing to Barbara McLean's Wilson. Sequel: Janie Gets Married.COMMENT: Janie is every bit as bad as the players, synopsis of the story and a contemporary New York Times review by Bosley Crowther led us to expect. Its only redeeming promise lay in the movie credits, but regrettably these gentlemen all let us down. The film is very sloppily and often atrociously edited and Mike Curtiz lets his players run riot. Admittedly the script is very weak, but no amount of excess fulminating by Ed Arnold could improve it. Miss Reynolds makes Janie a precocious twit and Robert Hutton is a dill. Richard Erdman does what he can with the painfully ridiculous role of Scooper. Robert Benchley glides through the motions of his role with customary hand-out-for-his-weekly-pay-check aplomb. As far as production values are concerned, it's little more than a photographed stage play with a few crowd scenes thrown in.

Janie is a pleasant family comedy that had its origins as a successful play on Broadway running 642 performances during the 1942-44 seasons on Broadway. Warner Brothers bought the film rights and brought the film to the movie-going public the same year the play closed on Broadway. It certainly reflects more innocent times.Young Janie is your typical teen of the times, having romantic thoughts mostly instigated by the fact there is an army camp just been built in her sleepy little Midwest town of Hortonville. All those soldiers around may excite her, but for her father Edward Arnold town newspaper publisher and former doughboy from the last war who remembers what soldiers are like, they're oversexed and over here and the sooner we get them off to war the easier he'll feel.Janie played by Joyce Reynolds gets the idea to have an intimate gathering for her girl friends and their soldier dates at home and gets Arnold and her mother Ann Harding out for the evening. But her civilian high school sweetheart Richard Erdman gets on the horn and pretty soon Janie's got a regular USO going at her house for the evening. Worst of all her own soldier beau Robert Hutton is stuck on a bus with her little sister Clare Foley. Hutton by the way looks like a pale imitation of Jimmy Stewart.Janie got an Oscar nomination for Editing, but the highlight of the film for me is the lone musical number Keep Your Powder Dry performed in Busby Berkley style by the partygoers which include the Williams Brothers Quartet with that youngest Williams brother Andy who had a solo career of sorts, future head Mouseketeer Jimmy Dodd, and even Hattie McDaniel who is Arnold's and Harding's maid. As usual Hattie gets some devastating lines.Although the mores of the times have changed and Janie has a most old fashioned look, I hope someone put a print of this film in a time capsule. The vacuum will keep it pristine and some folks in the future will have an idea of the American home front in 1944.

Joyce Reynolds seems a might grown-up for the role of Janie, a boy-crazy sixteen-year old in small town America who ditches her steady guy for a visiting soldier AND winds up on the cover of Life magazine (smooching at a blanket party) all in the same week! Non-stop barrage of wisecracks, put-downs, bull talk, and unfunny bits of business such as Janie's little sister bribing family members, Hattie McDaniel (as the maid) constantly scuttling after sassy kid sis, Janie's mother involved with the Red Cross, and Janie's father trying to write an editorial on the problems with today's teenagers (as the parents, stuffy, sexless Edward Arnold and pert, chatty Ann Harding make an unlikely couple, even for 1944; he looks incapable of helping to conceive a child much less raising two of them). Nominated for an Academy Award (!) for Owen Marks' editing, Warner Bros. followed this in 1946 with "Janie Gets Married". Reynolds must have outgrown her co-horts by then--she was replaced by Joan Leslie. *1/2 from ****

I usually find movies of this era a little too slow or dull, this one kept me. It was humorous and well paced, nostalgic. Nothing too serious, but not too goofy either. Of course the girls were all immaculately dressed and the costumes and scripting for phrases was excellent. The premise was the same as what they use to build sitcoms today, Small town girl has beau that she has grown up with, romantic older fellow in uniform sweeps her off her feet, girl is torn between childhood ties and grownup romance...girl plans small affair while her parents are out, huge crowd shows up, party ensues and is broken up by the police and all of the characters still love each other in the end; all of the little side plots are happily resolved and that's the end. Good family film. (doesn't Janie look remarkably like Geena Davis?!?)