ONCE UPON A HONEYMOON
Your September 2007 Random Movie Club Results Are In!
Tagline: Gee it's great to be together at last on another fellow's honeymoon!
Preshow Entertainment: 1964 World's Fair slide show
ONCE UPON A HONEYMOON is like watching Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson in
Well, we got to talking and talking. When the pizza arrived, we hadn't even started the Preshow Entertainment. So it became the Postshow Entertainment.
Top: Unisphere & US Royal Exhibit
Bottom: Monorail & Smoke Ring Button
As corny as it may sound, I do believe the '64 World's Fair helped shape me. Who knows what I would be today if I never went. I mean, it's what got me into blimps (Goodyear had all three, I believe, circling above the fair). And I still have my White Owl "Meet Me At The The Smoke Ring" pin (the second "the" is intentional). Look at the button in the picture above again.
So for the Postshow, I showed slides (well, pix on CD ROMs that I got on eBay). Whoever took these photos did a brilliant job. Bright and colorful, it took no time at all for me to get a bad case of nostalgia.
World's Fair NY Pavilion
Left: 1964 Right: 2003
NY Pavilion, Present Day
It was so bittersweet - the fashions, the technologies, the people...and those New York State colors of blue and orange. But the thrill was offset by the knowledge of what Flushing Meadow Park looks like today. You can't go home again. That's because home is a decrepit and rusty structure that used to be the New York Pavilion.
And Now, Our Feature Presentation:
Does ONCE UPON A HONEYMOON genre-jump? Sybil wishes she had this many personalities. But the world was at war, so Hollywood thought it was time for a Nazi comedy. And once again, Hollywood got it wrong. Was this a comedy? A thriller? A suspense story? A romance? Well, the answer is no, no, no, and let me think....no. For there's little comedy, mystery, suspense or romance. A strange animal, ONCE UPON A HONEYMOON was made and released during world War II (less than a year after Pearl Harbor). Its backdrop was the bloodiest war in history.
In a rare (perhaps the only) moment containing comedy, Pat pretends to be Katherine's fitter, sizing her up for her wedding gown. Clueless (he came with a retractable tape measure), he proceeds to bluff his way through the fitting, only to be exposed when the real fitter arrives. Making his intentions (and designs on Katherine) clear, the next hour and forty minutes whiz by with the speed of a turtle on a trytophan drip. And amid the whimsy there are scenes like smuggling a Jewish woman and her two children out of the country, or a brutal assassination of a general. It's also awkward watching these two wonderful actors trading flirty-cute repartee while bombs explode, countries are occupied, and innocent people die. But RMC Hero Hans Conried is here to save the day! Sadly, it's a tiny role as the real fitter. And though it was only five years into his career, ONCE UPON A HONEYMOON was Hans' 24th movie.
Hardly anyone in the movie is who they say they are - Katherine is really Katie, a stripper from Brooklyn looking to become a socialite through marriage. She also pretends to be a maid. Pat is, as stated earlier, a newsman who pretends to be a fitter, and later, along with Katherine, is mistaken by the Nazis for a Jew (panicked, Cary Grant actually says the line, "Now they think we're Jewish!"). A French photog is actually an American spy cozying up to the Germans to get info. And the good Baron is indeed a bad Baron. You'd think director Leo McCarey may have used these masquerades to his advantage and created a little more entertainment bang. Comedy, suspense...something!
Oh so promising a movie starring Grant/Rogers (they'd do better ten years later in Howard Hawks' MONKEY BUSINESS) and directed by McCarey (who did one of my top three favorite comedies, DUCK SOUP). But ONCE UPON A HONEYMOON is like some marriages - a well-intentioned mess that should never have happened.
Tags: random movie club, once upon a honeymoon, 1964 new york world's fair, ginger rogers, cary grant
