Look for the Silver Lining

Warner Bros, 1949
Starring June Haver, Ray Bolger, Gordon MacRae, and Charlie Ruggles
Directed by David Butler
Music by Jerome Kern and others; Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein and others

Dainty blonde dancer Marilyn Miller was one of the brightest stars on Broadway in the 1920's. We've already met her twice on this blog, in the 1929 film version of Sally and the 1946 Jerome Kern biography Til the Clouds Roll By; Judy Garland played her in the latter. Does her own film biography live up to her colorful and often tragic life? Let's head backstage on Broadway and find out...

The Story:  Marilyn Miller (Haver) recalls her life when a fan brings her a poster of her family's vaudeville act just prior to her final appearance in Sally. She started out with her family's act The Four Columbians when she was barely in her teens. After her father Caro (Ruggles) comes down with the mumps and her family's quarantined, she tries to go on for them, but is rejected because of her youth. Dancer Jack Donahue (Bolger) lets her come onstage with him to show just how good she is. She's not only taken into the act for good, but becomes its sole member when her sisters Ruth and Claire (Lee and Lyn Wilder) leave to get married.

Her role in a Broadway revue introduces her to Frank Carter (MacRae), a handsome and slightly egotistical singer. The two eventually fall in love, but have to put off marriage when he joins World War I. They wed the moment he gets back, but it doesn't last long. He dies in a car crash shortly after encouraging her to take her most famous role as Sally, the little dishwasher who becomes a star. Marilyn is heartbroken and wants to retire, but she's talked out of it by impresario Harry Dolan (Dick Simmons), who eventually marries her.

The Song and Dance: What makes the movie is the sweet relationship between Bolger and Haver. She has a huge crush on him at first, but he eventually becomes more like a mentor. It's rare to see a non-romantic friendship between a man and a woman depicted in a musical. Ruggles and Rosemary DeCamp are hilarious as her protective vaudevillian parents (especially when they're all quarantined for the mumps), and MacRae does fairly well in his brief appearance as Miller's first husband.

Favorite Number: Haver and Bolger have three numbers together that amply display the warm friendship between Jack and Marilyn. In the first early in the film, he brings her onstage to show her stuff after the manager won't let her perform because of her age. She does him the favor in the second after she's an older teenager and dances with him. The third much later on has them doing a fun duet to the title song from Miller's circus-themed vehicle Sunny.

I really love how realistic the numbers are in this movie. "Look for the Silver Lining," with long-time Warners favorite S.K Sakall in the star comic role, looks like it could have come straight from the original 1920 stage Sally, as do the two routines from Sunny and Frank and Marilyn's ballad in the Passing Show.

Trivia: Marilyn's name was created by combining her given name, Mary, with her mother's middle name, Lynn. Originally, it had an extra n on the end, but that was removed in the early 20's at the behest of Florenz Ziegfeld. It would also inspire the stage name of an even more famous - and tragic - blonde actress, Marilyn Monroe.

What I Don't Like: Unfortunately, that authenticity also extends to a brief version of Uncle Tom's Cabin that the family appears in early in the film. It's played for comedy when Marilyn gets stuck in a flying harness, but the rest of the family is in blackface and doing bad southern accents. Even though the scene is only about five minutes and is actually pretty funny, it's still likely to leave a bad taste in the mouths of many viewers today.

While the plot's a tad bit more interesting than the similar travails of Lillian Russell, it's still very toned-down from the real Miller's life. She actually started in her family's vaudeville act at the tender age of four and spent a lot of her early life dodging child labor laws. She did marry Frank Carter shortly after he got out of the army, and sadly, he did die in a car crash...seven months before Sally opened in December 1920.

There's absolutely no mention of her marriage to either actor Jack Pickford in the mid-20's or chorus dancer and stage manager Chester O'Brian in the 30's, possibly because the former was abusive and their union ended in divorce, and the latter was still alive and active at the time. She was married to a dancer named Jack Donahue in the late 20's, but he was quite different from Bolger's character. She was also said to have a blue vocabulary that would make a drunk sailor blush and any number of affairs, including with Ziegfeld and studio head Jack Warner.

The movie is maddeningly vague about how she died. It had nothing to do with dizzy spells; she passed away in 1936 from complications from surgery on a sinus infection she'd had all her life. She died two years after appearing in her last show, which was the revue As Thousands Cheer. And interestingly, there's no mention made of her brief film career, despite Warners having released all three of her movies.

The Big Finale: While there's some nice numbers and decent performances from Haver, Ruggles, DeCamp, and Bolger, it's not enough to overcome the cliched and melodramatic story. For fans of the cast or 40's musicals only.

Home Media: Currently, this is only available on DVD from the Warner Archives. (I actually dubbed my copy off TCM.)

DVD