1950-07-01
N/A
76 min
Professor Brookfield along with daughters Peggy and Susan move to small town Pasadena, California. Their new neighbor Mrs. Fielding helps them move in, and urges the girls to participate in the annual Rose Bowl beauty pageant. Meanwhile Mrs. Fielding's son Tom makes eyes at Peggy but she's smitten with a famous football star so she tries to redirect his interest to Susan.
Perhaps it's a testament to her acting skills, but I found the performance of Charlotte Greenwood as the interfering neighbour "Mrs. Fielding" extremely annoying! She imposes herself on the newly arrived folks next door - the "Brookfield" family consisting a bookish professor (Charles Coburn) and his two daughters "Peggy" (Diana Lynn) and "Susan" (Barbara Lawrence). Thing start to get complicated when this bossiest of women insists on enrolling the girls in a local beauty contest and even more so when her son "Tom" takes a shine to our eponymous girl unawares that she's already got eyes for the all-American boy "Scat" (Rock Hudson). Looks like "Tom" (Charles Drake) might have to shift allegiance to the other sister? I like Coburn, he had a gift as a curmudgeonly comedy actor, but here his character is just overpowered by Greenwood's and I found him rather underused. The last fifteen minutes are quite fun, though, as the hapless father finds himself unsure as to which, if any, of his daughters is married - and to whom, as well as discovering that the future of his long-term research project is now in the hands of his neighbourly nemesis. It doesn't hang about, and takes quite an interesting swipe at the whole pageant mentality that must have been pretty popular in 1950. I am not sure I'd ever watch it again, but it passes the time ok.
