FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Verity Robins Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

edwagreen Typical Hollywood fanfare with rich playboy Farley Granger sentenced to 30 days for speeding in a tiny hick town. Engaged to Ann Miller, he protests his sentence to no avail, but gets the judge's daughter to get him out of the slammer for one night.Ann Miller does two nice dances but her talents are largely wasted here along with Billie Burke, who plays Granger's mother. Missing in the film is that usual high-pitched voice of hers. Instead, she plays the wealthy mother without much fanfare on her part either.Constant interruptions while saying grace come about due to the presence of the boyfriend of the judge's daughter, an aspiring dancer, who yearns for such a career on Broadway. Even his dad S.Z. Sakall is subdued here and only confuses the word pardon with something else.

dougdoepke Small town America (Duck Creek) battles big city New York in this generally entertaining musical. Big city boy Rick (Granger) discovers the virtues of small town living, especially when it includes winsome Cindy (Powell). While small town boy Ludwig (Van) yearns for career opportunities on the Broadway stage. Getting it all straightened out takes about 90-minutes.Nobody could idealize small town America like MGM. Here everyone in Duck Creek is neighborly, polite, and God-fearing— all in squeaky-clean candy-box Technicolor. Fortunately, the cast blends in nicely— a sparkly Powell, a dreamy Granger, and a perky Ann Miller tap-dancing her way as usual into everyone's heart. Also, mustn't overlook a gangly Bobby Van stealing the show with a 5-minute bunny hop through town-- I'm exhausted just thinking about that.Unfortunately, the vocals are pretty forgettable, with the exception of Handel's Messiah that closes the film. Too bad Nat King Cole didn't get to croon one of his signature tunes, like Mona Lisa. Nothing special here, just a lot of entertaining eye candy, courtesy that old dream machine, MGM.

tedg This is so unremarkable as a film to be worth avoiding. But there is something interesting about it. There is a social compact any film makes with its viewers that sets the narrative conventions. Quite separately, viewers of another kind want to simply be entertained with music, dance and often jokes. How these relate to narrative is not trivial and over time some clever techniques and conventions have been developed.You can have the world of the film be designed so that people just burst into song to move the narrative.You can have people sing to each other, usually with endearmentYou can have shows within that simply are nested, so the main story stops while we watch the show. This movie has every technique that had been developed up until that time, mixed helter skelter. There are at least four inner types of show, for instance: a church choir; a home town show; a night club act (Nat King Cole) that characters visit; and a night club act that includes a character.You have songs within the story itself and about the story. You even have a character who wants to be in show business so dances in real life, in imagined shows and in two variations in between.The whole mix is challenging and requires the viewer to participate in maintaining an interactive fictional foreground that shifts unexpectedly.This plot was later re-used in the Andy Griffith Show of January 15th, 1962 used this plot and long before, Don Knott's deputy character drew from the deputy here: Happy, played by Chill Wills.Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

Isaac5855 SMALL TOWN GIRL was a 1953 musical from the MGM stable about a rich playboy (Farley Granger) who gets arrested for driving too fast through a small town and falls for the sheriff's pretty young daughter (Jane Powell). Nothing really special here, Granger and Powell are charming enough, but this film will always standout in my mind because of two musical numbers performed by supporting players Ann Miller and Bobby Van. Both of these numbers would later be featured in different installments of THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT. "You Gotta Hear that Beat" was a sizzling production number featuring Ann Miller dancing amongst a disembodied orchestra where you only see the arms/hands of the orchestra playing various instruments. The second number "Take Me To Broadway" featured Van as a human pogo stick, bouncing his way all over town, greeting people and interacting with people and places in town, but he never stops hopping. It's just an amazing number and because of these two musical highlights, SMALL TOWN GIRL is a film I will always remember.