Kitty Hollywood - Sun Valley Serenade & Orchestra Wives - 1941 & 1942

Let's get one thing straight. Sonja Henie is a terrible actress. I'm not going to be spruiking this film under false pretences. I often spend quite a bit of time watching Sun Valley Serenade itching to get some real emotion out of her, but that's not going to happen, no matter how many times I watch it.

Look, she's annoying, the ice-skating is kinda weird looking, the plot doesn't make any sense at all (Milton Berle and Sonja Henie somehow get engaged without stopping for breath or without her agreeing to it) but it doesn't matter. You look at the beautiful resort of Sun Valley and somehow you are transported there. You watch the dynamic footage of the Glenn Miller band and your foot is tapping and nothing else matters.

There is one bit of Sun Valley Serenade that actually sends me (one bit that isn't Band-related). John Payne and Sonja Henie are stranded in an alpine hut with a record player (as one is) and Henie puts on an instrumental track of 'I Know Why'. She starts humming along to it poorly, and he informs her that she has the tune wrong. He then starts humming himself, and it's beautiful. It's like champagne after passion pop. It's like a cup of  loose leaf tea in a bone china cup after polystyrene and teabags. I encourage you to mock Sun Valley Serenade as roundly as you desire, and to question Lynn Bari's courting methods (waaaaaaay overconfident), but when it gets to the Band, or to that moment in an alpine hut - just give in to it. You'll thank me in the end.

Orchestra Wives is a different beast altogether. It's harder to tear down, because right from the beginning the story is stronger. The world in which it is set is a much more real world (even if some of the outfits are In Your Face).

Hats - oh the hats....

 

It's got an aspirational quality to it - who wouldn't want to be the girl picked out of the crowd to be loved? The dialogue is delightful snappy:


Jackie Gleason: Why don't you guys settle down and get married? What are you going to do when you're middle aged?
Cesar Romero: How can I say now? Maybe by that time they'll discover something new.

You get the feeling that you are being let into this previously hidden world (not matter how ridiculous it might be) and that has an element of glamour to it. Like when you accidentally become friends with someone who is famous and they start telling about all their other famous friends (this has not happened to me. I am just guessing).

The interaction between the women in Orchestra Wives is fascinatingly dreadful - they all (bar one) delight in each other's misfortunes - the scene where Connie comes back to her home town after the wheels have fallen off her marriage and all her friends sit there in the soda shop delighting in her misery - well, it makes you want to have a stern chat with them about how to be good friends. And the notion that you couldn't get into a dance unless you were escorted by a man is just utterly ludicrous. What on earth did they think was going to happen?

 

Carole Landis, one of the wives, was actually a bit of a tortured individual in real life. By the time she was 26 she had been married 5 times (the first was at 15). She entered in a relationship with Rex Harrison, who was married at the time, and when he would not divorce his wife for her, she committed suicide. What a poor thing.

 And finally - the two Nicholas Brothers scenes in each of the films - absolute knockouts both of them. They're also oddly separate to the film. I've read in a few places that this was so that those sequences could be removed when the film was shown in the Southern states of the U.S., which just makes my blood run cold. 

I came across the most amazingly indepth article about these two movies as I was doing my research, and felt positively humbled by it. If you want to know more about these two films - I heartily recommend it. 

The Most In Depth Article You Could Read...

At that is it from me. Bless you, Glenn Miller.