Three Little Words (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Dec 20, 2024
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
Richard ThorpeRelease Date(s)
1950 (September 3, 2024)Studio(s)
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (Warner Archive Collection)- Film/Program Grade: A-
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: B+
Review
The third of MGM’s four songwriter musical biopics, Three Little Words (1950) is arguably the best of the lot. At a time when the studio’s big Technicolor musicals typically cost around $2.75 million, Three Little Words was produced on a tighter, more economical budget, just $1.47 million. While the other three pictures—Till the Clouds Roll By (about Jerome Kern, 1946), Words and Music (Rodgers and Hart, 1948), and Deep in My Heart (Sigmund Romberg, 1954)—were bloated, all-star affairs, really musical revue-type films with thin storylines, this film about songwriters Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby is more intimate and character- and story-driven, showing off its stars—Fred Astaire, Red Buttons, and Vera-Ellen, to good advantage.
Bert Kalmar (Fred Astaire) is a huge star in 1910s Vaudeville, dancing with partner and sweetheart Jessie Brown (Vera-Ellen). He, however, is a workaholic eager to expand his talents into other areas of show business, including writing plays and performing magic. He so obsessed with the latter that he moonlights as “Kendall the Great” at Coney Island, performing for bored spectators. There he also meets Harry Ruby (Red Skelton), a baseball-obsessed song plugger and piano player.
After Bert breaks a kneecap sidelining his dancing for many months, he and Harry eventually team up to write My Sunny Tennessee, the first of a series of hits that lead to a run of spectacularly popular Broadway shows. Jessie, who left Bert for a solo career after he rejected her marriage proposal, reunite and happily marry, while tensions between the two songwriters flare up over Bert’s desire to expand his interests, Harry’s inability to find a suitable wife, and so forth. (In real life, Kalmar and Ruby were the best of friends and rarely argued about anything.)
In many respects, the film is almost a warm-up to Paramount’s later White Christmas (1954): Astaire/Bing Crosby is the show business veteran, while the more comical Skelton/Danny Kaye, trying to prove his own worth, at the beginning rides the showbiz veteran’s coattails until he’s able to establish himself an equal. He, in turn, eventually wants the veteran to slow down, to not work so hard, and both become involved with women who are performers themselves (Vera-Ellen/Rosemary Clooney and Arlene Dahl/Vera-Ellen). Both films have key scenes aboard a train, both have climaxes built around a big broadcast (radio in Three Little Words, a TV special in White Christmas) and on and on.
And like White Christmas, the chemistry among the stars is an essential ingredient to its appeal. Astaire and Buttons are a good fit, the former effortlessly appealing even when dancing on a bare stage with no audience, the latter in a quasi-dramatic part that keeps his broad slapstick and mugging in check, while allowing for some pleasant comedy scenes here and there. Astaire wasn’t always paired with good dancers, but Vera-Ellen is more than up to the task and her dancing scenes with Fred are especially elegant. (She also looks healthier and less anorexic than she does in White Christmas.)
Kalmar and Ruby aren’t as remembered as, say, Rodgers and Hart—arguably modern audiences know Kalmar and Ruby best for their long association with the Marx Brothers, they having written the score for the Broadway hit Animal Crackers and songs for most of their Paramount films, including Horse Feathers and Duck Soup. Kalmar died in 1947, but Groucho Marx was a great admirer and close friend of Ruby’s until Ruby’s death in 1974. The Kalmar-Ruby song Hooray for Captain Spaulding became Groucho’s signature song (heard weekly on You Bet Your Life) and, in later years, Groucho frequently sang Ruby songs like Father’s Day and Show Me a Rose on Dick Cavett’s talk show and elsewhere.
Other notable songs from the team include Who’s Sorry Now? and A Kiss to Build a Dream On. The movie recreates Helen Kane’s I Wanna Be Loved by You with Debbie Reynolds in one of her first films as Kane, with Kane herself providing the singing voice.
Three Little Words is largely fictional, though less outrageously so than other biopics of the period. Astaire and Skelton only vaguely resemble the real Kalmar and Ruby, though Astaire was close friends with both men, and himself lived the Vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley period depicted in the film—it became a personal favorite among Astaire’s starring films. One senses he’s trying to inject a little of Kalmar’s quirks into his performance. (Ruby makes a cameo in the film, as a baseball player receiving a toss from Skelton.) Frequent use of candlestick telephones and 1920s automobiles aside, period authenticity is thrown out the window; costumes and hairstyles are emphatically late-1940s rather than 1910s and ‘20s and, as with the later Singin’ in the Rain, the musical arrangements are strictly contemporary, though this hardly matters.
The screenplay by George Wells is extraordinarily clumsy at times—Keenan Wynn’s garrulous agent character seems to exist solely to throw monkey wrenches into the Kalmar-Ruby relationship, and a kind of running gag with Ruby trying to sell Kalmar on the melody of “Three Little Words” over several decades is obvious, overdone, and predictably resolved.
The film was a considerable hit for MGM, earning $4.5 million at the box office; compare its success to the better-remembered The Band Wagon, Kiss Me Kate, Kismet, and Brigadoon, all of which lost money. The song and dance numbers (choreographed by Hermes Pan) are effective but not overdone or gimmicky, the best being Thinking of You, a lovely, understated dance number with Astaire and Vera-Ellen.
Three Little Words is another winner from Warner Archive, a gorgeous restoration utilizing the original nitrate three-strip black-and-white separations (in 1.37:1 standard format) to perfectly capture the lush original Technicolor. A repurposed featurette from 2006 for WB’s DVD release, Three Little Words: Two Swell Guys, includes standard-def footage demonstrating the great advancements in home video technology in the nearly 20 years since that release. The DTS-HD Master Audio (mono) is very good for what it is, supported by optional English subtitles. The main menu includes song, as well as chapter selections.
Besides the aforementioned featurette, supplements consist of an HD remastered Tex Avery cartoon, Ventriloquist Cat, a Fitzpatrick Traveltalks short, Roaming Through Michigan (both 1950), a trailer, and the audio-only Paula Stone’s Hollywood USA radio promo.
While not quite a top-drawer MGM musical, Three Little Words is colorful and quite enjoyable. Recommended.
- Stuart Galbraith IV