Delightfully Young

Delightfully Dangerous stars Jane Powell as a teenage music student. She is an orphan who idolizes her older sister, whom she believes is a Broadway star. When she pays a surprise visit, she discovers her sister, Constance Moore, is a star, but a star on the burlesque stage. She is scandalized, and the comedy (such as it is) revolves around her schemes to get her sister to go legit, and her coming to understand that burlesque has its own charm. Ralph Bellamy is the legit impresario who gets messed up in the scheme, and Morton Gould plays himself in the Jose Iturbi role.

You may not recognize the Jane Powell. She belongs to a peculiar sub-genre along with Gloria Jean and Deanna Durbin: Post-pubescent sopranos. They sing classical or lite-classic pop, and their movies often exploit their innocent, youthful beauty and approaching womanhood. "Exploit" may be too strong a word, depending on how sensitive you are to skeeve. I really like these movies - the girls are sweet and charming, their singing voices beautiful (song choices are generally horrid), and the underage romance themes just kinky enough to appeal to my mild sense of the perverse.

Jane Powell's most famous film was Royal Wedding, but I really liked her first movie Song of the Open Road (not available on DVD/VHS, but sometimes seen on AMC). She played herself, a child singing sensation who runs away to a US Crop Corps work camp. The movie is really a propaganda film for the Crop Corps, a strange WWII sort of communist enterprise, where teenagers volunteer to pick fruit to replace the cheap labor that has gone to fight the war (or the Japanese labor that has been interned). They sing solidarity songs and engage in self-criticism and discussions of dialectal materialism. Clearly the work of communists in the State Dept.

As the movie progresses, Jane stops being a stuck-up capitalist and joins the people in their victorious struggle to pick the fruit that feeds the anti-Fascist army. She ropes some Hollywood liberals to promote the camps in a radio propaganda scheme: W.C Fields and Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy. So Jane Powell stars as Jane Powell in a propaganda film about a radio propaganda broadcast, all revolving around ... volunteer youth fruit picking. Delicious.

I could go on to discuss my favorite Deanna Durbin movies (One Hundred Men and a Girl? or the later Lady on a Train?), but you're probably getting the wrong idea about me. I'm really not obsessed by these child-women with angel voices. But I do find myself strangely interested...