George Washington Slept Here (William Keighley, 1942)

Jack Benny, Ann Sheridan, and Hattie McDaniel in George Washington Slept Here

Cast: Jack Benny, Ann Sheridan, Charles Coburn, Percy Kilbride, Hattie McDaniel, William Tracy, Joyce Reynolds, Lee Patrick, Charles Dingle, John Emery, Douglas Croft, Harvey Stephens, Franklin Pangborn. Screenplay: Everett Freeman, based on a play by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman. Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Art direction: Max Parker. Film editing: Ralph Dawson. Music: Adolph Deutsch.

One of the running gags on Jack Benny's radio and TV shows was about how terrible his movie The Horn Blows at Midnight (Raoul Walsh, 1945) was. But that film, more a box office failure than a bad movie, has more to be said for it than George Washington Slept Here, a retread of one of Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman's lesser comedies, a play so forgotten -- except by amateur theatrical groups -- that it has never received a Broadway revival. When it came to performing in movies, Benny was always handicapped by his familiar radio personality, the skinflint who, when challenged by a stickup man, "Your money or your life," could be counted on to pause for a well-timed moment and say, "I'm thinking it over!" In adapting Kaufman and Hart's play for the screen, Everett Freeman actually switched the lead characters' roles to accommodate the Benny persona: In the play, the husband was the one eager to renovate a rundown 18th-century farmhouse, and the wife was the one who came up with wisecracking comments whenever the project teetered on disaster. But in the film, Benny is the long-suffering, wisecracking (and a little too frequently pratfalling) victim of his wife's passion for the antique. There's even an interpolated allusion to Benny's radio show when his character comments that something sounds worse than Phil Harris's orchestra -- a reference to the ongoing feud between Benny and his show's bandleader. Unfortunately, the whole film is a rather frantic spin on the familiar "money pit" comedy about building a dream house -- subsequent films like Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (H.C. Potter, 1948) and The Money Pit (Richard Benjamin, 1986) borrowed heavily from it. This is one of those films in which ordinarily sensible performers are forced to play characters who verge on idiocy -- poor Ann Sheridan, an underrated actress, has to behave like a nitwit in her efforts to keep the renovation happening, and Benny has to pretend to be jealous of her involvement with the antique dealer helping her with the project. Several characters have been lifted from the play -- the bratty Raymond, the preening summer stock actors -- without much justification for their presence in the plot. In short, it's a mess.

Kings Row (Sam Wood, 1942)

Ann Sheridan and Ronald Reagan in Kings Row

Cast: Ann Sheridan, Robert Cummings, Ronald Reagan, Betty Field, Charles Coburn, Claude Rains, Judith Anderson, Nancy Coleman, Kaaren Verne, Maria Ouspenskaya, Harry Davenport, Ernest Cossart, Ilka Grüning. Screenplay: Casey Robinson, based on a novel by Henry Bellamann. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Production design: William Cameron Menzies. Film editing: Ralph Dawson. Music: Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

Fifteen years before the producers of Mark Robson's version of Peyton Place tangled with the enforcers of the Production Code, the producers of Kings Row went through a similar ordeal. Like the Grace Metalious novel on which the later film was based, Henry Bellamann's Kings Row was a sensational picture of small town sordidness and hypocrisy that had to be sanitized against the pecksniffery of the censors. Screenwriter Casey Robinson had to eliminate incest, a gay character, and any hint that the young residents of Kings Row were actually having sex and enjoying it. Robinson's evasions were artful, though sometimes at the expense of the characters: Dr. Tower's murdering his daughter, Cassandra, and then committing suicide seems a little less credible when the incestuous relationship of father and daughter is excised. Still, Kings Row holds up well enough, thanks in large part to solid production values, especially James Wong Howe's cinematography and one of Erich Wolfgang Korngold's best scores. Today, the movie is probably most remembered for giving Ronald Reagan one of his best roles, one that he was so proud of that he borrowed his most famous line from the film, "Where's the rest of me?", as the title of his autobiography. He's well supported by Ann Sheridan, and the cast also includes such always watchable character actors as Claude Rains, Charles Coburn, Judith Anderson, and the hammy but lovable Maria Ouspenskaya. Unfortunately the film's leading role went to Robert Cummings, never the most skillful or charismatic of actors. He's not terrible, but he brings no credibility to the role of Parris Mitchell, supposedly a gifted medical student and amateur pianist. It's this void at the center of the movie that perhaps makes people remember it as a Ronald Reagan film.