Thanks - or because of - *Citizen Kane*, virtually every revue of a Marion Davies movie involves a discussion of whether she could act, and whether she was in fact as terrible as the Susan Alexander character in Wells' movie. It's hard to avoid revisiting at least the first of those two points when reviewing this movie, because it all revolves around Ms. Davies' performance. There isn't much else to it.
The plot is a modified version of Dickens' *Great Expectations*: poor child comes into a great fortune but must desert their birthplace to be *educated* in a fine but cold household. The script here is the real weak point: it's so obvious, and so uninteresting, that the cast gets nothing to work with.
So we have Davies, who is charming when delivering dialog. But this movie also asks her to dance and sing. Her dancing, while certainly not like Ginger Rogers' or Eleanor Powell's, is passable for an actress. But the woman couldn't sing. And that doesn't help things here, because she is given several songs and doesn't do anything with them. (The producers clearly knew this, because they stuck in male singers with fine voices, especially the Irish tenor with the accordion in two of them, who take over for Davies and do a fine job.)
The other actors are all undistinguished, or at least are given nothing distinguished to work with here, so they are all quickly forgotten.
And so, after viewing, is Davies, because while she isn't terrible here, she does nothing in a memorable way.
She evidently didn't enjoy doing these costume pieces, and this was the last of them. I can't recommend it, though it does have a few nice songs.
The plot is a modified version of Dickens' *Great Expectations*: poor child comes into a great fortune but must desert their birthplace to be *educated* in a fine but cold household. The script here is the real weak point: it's so obvious, and so uninteresting, that the cast gets nothing to work with.
So we have Davies, who is charming when delivering dialog. But this movie also asks her to dance and sing. Her dancing, while certainly not like Ginger Rogers' or Eleanor Powell's, is passable for an actress. But the woman couldn't sing. And that doesn't help things here, because she is given several songs and doesn't do anything with them. (The producers clearly knew this, because they stuck in male singers with fine voices, especially the Irish tenor with the accordion in two of them, who take over for Davies and do a fine job.)
The other actors are all undistinguished, or at least are given nothing distinguished to work with here, so they are all quickly forgotten.
And so, after viewing, is Davies, because while she isn't terrible here, she does nothing in a memorable way.
She evidently didn't enjoy doing these costume pieces, and this was the last of them. I can't recommend it, though it does have a few nice songs.