THE GIRL NEXT DOOR (20th Century Fox 1953) Fox Home Video

Richard Sale’s The Girl Next Door (1953) is a rather bizarrely amusing claptrap of oddities that comes together in a practically delightful way. The film stars resident Fox rival blonde to Betty Grable – June Haver (in her last screen appearance) as Jeannie Laird; a superficial nightclub chanteuse who buys her first home in the glamorous foothills of an isolated community, then rants and reels at her neighbor - cartoonist and single father, Bill Carter (Dan Dailey) and his ten year old precocious son, Joe (Billy Gray). Despite everything that Zanuck tried, including putting Haver in one gawdy Technicolor extravaganza after the next, her star would never rival Grable’s. In years that followed, Haver discounted the rumors she and Grable had shared a mutual acrimony while on the Fox backlot. “There was plenty of work for all of us then,” Haver once mused, “And Betty and I did the Dolly Sisters. There was no fuss. No jealousy. We did our work. End of story.” Haver’s career had begun almost 11 years earlier, in 1942. Fresh out of high school, she was discovered by a Fox talent scout and immediately signed to $3,500-a-week contract, tested in the uncredited role of the hat-check girl in The Gang's All Here (1943).

Zanuck had desires – not all of them professional – but mostly, to mold Haver as a rising glamour girl who could easily stand-in for his two brightest money-makers, Alice Faye and Betty Grable – just in case either got out of line. But Haver caught on to popular appeal in Home in Indiana (1944) and was immediately reassigned as Faye’s replacement in Irish Eyes Are Smiling (also in 1944).The next year, a barely 18-year-old Haver met Fred MacMurray, the man who would become her husband, on the set of Where Do We Go From Here? (1945). Haver’s tenure at Fox may not have yielded any definitive movie classics – her movies were mostly popular fluff in and of the moment, including the epically mounted, I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now (1947) that Zanuck hoped would make her a big star.  It has been suggested that Zanuck pretty much lost interest in his bevy of blondes with the arrival of Marilyn Monroe on the Fox backlot in 1951. Perhaps, although Haver could never have been considered a threat to Monroe, whose allure went like a flash of lightning through the industry. Following her marriage, Haver retired from picture-making, contented to appear sporadically on TV and radio. But The Girl Next Door is a really odd movie for Haver to exit on.

Isobel Lennart’s screenplay, based on a meandering story by Leslie Bush-Fekete and Maria Fagyas, flits around a cacophony of misdirection, starting with the absurdity of Jeannie quickly becomes fixated on Bill as a potential beau – a move that sticks in Joe’s craw. You see, Joe has become used to their ‘father/son’ lifestyle and resents Jeannie as a threat to his monopoly on dad’s time and friendship. As Jeannie and Bill’s romance heats up, Bill cancels a retreat he planned for Joe – a move to prompt Joe to write his father’s paper and claim that his popular cartoon strip is not legitimate since it depicts an idyllic father/son who go fishing in Canada – something Bill and Joe did not do. There are some delightful moments to be had in this otherwise conventional and rather second-rate musical offering from 20th Century-Fox. On the plus side: The ‘Nowhere Man’ ballet is an overblown film noir regurgitation of MGM’s Girl Hunt ballet from The Band Wagon (1953), but fascinating for its psychological underpinnings. In it, Bill, who is observing the ballet from a front row seat at the nightclub where Jeannie is performing, projects his overly protective feelings towards her into the sequence. Becoming a sort of blithe spirit of the ‘Johnny Dollar’ detective serial, Bill fantasizes rescuing Jeannie from a pack of pawing cads.

There is also Bill and Joe’s delightful dish-throwing dance routine to the confirmed bachelor song, ‘I’d Rather Have A Pal Than A Gal.’ On the negative, is Bill and Joe’s rather tacky pas deux as a pair of dancing duds in a father/son dream sequence ballet. The musical program in The Girl Next Door is not exactly trend-setting; rather, more a series of failed experiments, in which only a handful of the ideas transcend beyond passable. It does, however, aspire to the ‘integrated musical’ – then a revolutionary staple of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musicals and, occasionally, some of MGM’s more progressive efforts from the mid-forties, whereby songs reflect characters’ sentiments and/or emotional state and are not merely interruptions to the plot. In the end, The Girl Next Door doesn’t expect much from its audience; a shortsightedness the audiences then seemed only too happy to reciprocate with a nod and a smile.

Fox Home Video’s DVD is a tad below their usual standard. The full-frame DVD captures the garish color palette of Fox musicals from this vintage. Like virtually all of Fox’s vintage 3-strip Technicolor product, no original separation masters survived the purge and deluge of the studio archives in the mid-1970’s. So, what we have here is an approximation of Technicolor reprinted onto Eastman stock that was never meant to last, and improperly stored for many decades thereafter. Given all these shortcomings, the image is rather pleasing with mostly bright, sharp and eye-popping colors, but alas, intermittent Technicolor mis-registration. Occasionally, the image appears grainier than it ought. Flesh tones lean toward orange. Certain scenes appear to have an overly blue/green tint. This is distracting. Minor edge enhancement also exists. The audio is 1.0 Dolby Digital mono but nicely represented. Three vintage featurettes and the theatrical trailer round out the extra features.

FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)

2

VIDEO/AUDIO

3

EXTRAS

1