The 1949 Doris Day Show Business Musical It's a Great Feeling is a Delight
When Doris Day died at 97, only a few years short of a hundred, at the close of an epic, quintessentially American life, she had not appeared in a movie for a full half-century, since 1968’s With Twelve You Get Egg Roll. Day’s endless absence from a big screen that adored her certainly was not due to a lack of offers or options.
Albert Brooks famously offered the role Debbie Reynolds ended up playing brilliantly in Mother to the long-retired Day and Nancy Reagan. And a year before her final film Day turned down the Anne Bancroft role in The Graduate. It seems safe to say that Day’s career and legacy would be decidedly different had she taken that iconic part.
Day conquered the worlds of music, film and finally television on her eponymous show, which ran for five seasons in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Day had everything society tells us we should strive desperately for: money, fame, celebrity, power and a staggeringly successful career in multiple fields that made her a household name long after she fled the spotlight to become a semi-recluse.
Yet Day walked away all the same because there were things more important to her than fame, more important to her than money, more important than the superficial, crazy-making world of celebrity.
Day’s retirement from the big screen lasted two and a half times as long as her relatively brief yet auspicious twenty year long film career.
Day became as famous for turning her back on fame as she was for earning it. This lends a distinct irony to the charming young ingenue gushing more than once to director-star Jack Carson (playing a comically exaggerated version of himself), “If I ever get a chance to sing and act I’ll be the happiest girl in the whole world” in the delightful 1949 inside-showbiz musical comedy It’s a Great Feeling, which re-teamed Day with Jack Carson for a third consecutive film.
The ambitious young actress-singer playing Judy Adams, a small-town girl from Goerke's Corners, Wisconsin, certainly got her chance to sing and act in front of an adoring world, but it does not seem to have made her the happiest girl in the world.
In other ways, however, the role of Judy bore an unmistakable resemblance to the actress playing her: both are small town Midwestern girls with great big voices hellbent on making it in the Darwinian world of Hollywood through talent, moxie and unrelenting determination.
It’s a Great Feeling gets off to a wonderfully meta start, with Raoul Walsh, King Vidor, Michael Curtiz (who discovered Day and directed many of her earliest films) and finally David Butler indignantly refusing to direct a period musical for Jack Carson on the grounds that he’s an incorrigible ham.
Butler is the actual director of It’s a Great Feeling, one of an endless series of clever post-modern gags that reward knowledge of Golden Age Hollywood and/or access to a computer and the trivia section of IMdb and Wikipedia. Carson needs his friend, foil, and frequent co-star Dennis Morgan (also playing himself), to sign onto the film in order to get it made with a giant liability like himself in the director’s chair. Morgan, a light romantic type to Carson’s beefy wisenheimer, previously costarred opposite Carson in buddy comedies like Two Guys from Milwaukee and Two Guys From Texas, both of which were also directed by Butler.
No director wants to work with Carson, including Morgan, who needs to be tricked and manipulated and coerced into costarring in the seemingly doomed period musical but beautiful, radiant young waitress Judy Adams (Day) wants nothing but to work with the Mildred Pierce costar.
Adams wins over the feuding costars with her mega-watt talent and charm but Carson and Morgan need to convince Arthur Trent (Bill Goodwin), an exceedingly neurotic producer, to take a chance on an unknown and give her a screen test. Carson and Morgan decide to trick Arthur into thinking that Judy is his discovery, a la Lana Turner getting discovered at the soda counter at Schwab’s Drugstore, by having the hungry young actress/singer pop up everywhere Arthur goes in a different costume and profession, including soda jerk, optometrist's assistant, taxi driver and elevator operator.
Only instead of convincing the frazzled producer that he’s spotting an incredible discovery who DEMANDS to be elevated to feature film stardom the poor schmuck just begins to feel like he is losing his mind and spiraling into a nightmare world where every woman inexplicably has the same face, body and disturbingly overly enthusiastic facial expression.
Every time Day-as-Judy sees Arthur she shoots him a creepy expression combining crazy eyes with a chattering smile that suggests the nightmare-inducing grin of a malfunctioning ventriloquist’s dummy. Day somehow manages to be charming, adorable, gorgeous and dazzling enough that stardom seems less inevitable than her inalienable birthright yet annoying enough for Arthur’s mounting exasperation and anger at her for popping up in any number of crazy-making different guises, each seemingly more artificial than the last, to feel justified and earned.
The clever script, from a story by future Billy Wilder writing partner I. A. L. Diamond, keeps building and building in increasingly extreme, increasingly funny ways. Carson, Morgan and Judy’s accidental but intense assault on Arthur’s fragile senses climaxes with a crazy-eyed Arthur watching a screen test for Judy that goes horribly awry. The dubbing, color and editing all misfire wildly, creating a surrealistic waking nightmare careening wildly into pure, abstract madness more likely to land Arthur in the mental hospital than snag Judy her big break.
The dynamic between the wonderfully game Day and Goodwin favorably recalls the similar vibe between Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss in What About Bob? Day’s raw newcomer doesn’t want to freak out her would-be star-maker, or play havoc with his fragile, disintegrating sense of reality, but she does so anyway.
As their previous hit collaborations illustrated, Carson and Morgan made for a dynamic duo. Add Day to the mix opposite Carson, her frequent collaborator and sometimes boyfriend, and they become an even more inspired trio. It’s a Great Feeling gives the wonderfully unselfconscious physical comedienne a lot of inspired comic business, but she also gets to showcase her gifts as a singer, most notably on the Oscar-nominated title song from the songwriting team of Sammy Cahn and Jules Stine and the standout "That Was a Big Fat Lie," which is performed twice, once by Day in a contemporary interpretive fashion and then as an insufferable faux-French number.
It’s a Great Feeling’s primary claim to fame at the time of its release, beyond the re-teaming of Carson and Morgan, and, to a lesser extent Carson and Day, was its parade of self-deprecating cameos from some of the biggest movie stars of the day. It’s the kind of gleefully star-studded affair where a barber will take off a hot towel, revealing handsome B-movie hero Ronald Reagan!
Danny Kaye pops in for a nifty bit of physical comedy, Gary Cooper shows up at the Warner Brothers cafeteria, looking and acting every bit a laconic cowboy of few words and Edward G. Robinson spoofs his tough-guy image as a blustery phony primarily concerned with holding onto his reputation as a tough guy, whether he deserves it or not. Best of all, Joan Crawford delivers a hilariously melodramatic monologue, slaps Carson and Morgan in quick succession and then explains away her histrionic behavior by insisting, “I do that in all my pictures.”
It’s fitting that screen newcomer Day doesn’t seem intimidated by the parade of big-league Hollywood stars blessing this fiendishly funny comedy with their iconic presences. Even at this early stage in her career it was screamingly apparent that Day had what it took to be not just successful but legendary.
In a very short amount of time Day would rocket to the height of cinematic fame. That’s part of what makes It’s a Great Feeling so special. Watching it, you can pretty much feel Day becoming a movie star. Her talent was as explosive as it was undeniable. In a movie full of huge stars playing comic versions of themselves the best, most memorable performance belongs to a relative newcomer at the very beginning of what would be an extraordinary, if all too brief film career.
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