Lovely to Look At

Neither the RKO 1935 version of Roberta or MGM's 1952 Lovely To Look At are anything like the original show on Broadway. RKO eschewed a male lead singer opposite Irene Dunne and went with Randolph Scott. In and of itself that necessitated change as the vocal chores got divided up between Irene Dunne and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers who were the secondary leads. In that version it was Scott who inherited the Parisian dress shop and romanced a woman who managed the place named Stephanie played by Dunne.

Stephanie played by Kathryn Grayson is still running the dress shop known as Madame Roberta's. But here it's Red Skelton who inherits half the place from his late aunt. He's partners in an act with Howard Keel and Gower Champion and they want him to sell his half so that they can get the money for a Broadway show. The three of them have to cut Ann Miller in on the deal just to get passage over to Paris.

Of course it's Keel who Grayson pairs off with and in doing so the film comes into balance vocally as the stage show did. Getting the dance numbers are Marge and Gower Champion, Marge playing Grayson's younger sister.

I think I can see the way the minds worked at MGM. In 1950 they copped the Best Picture Oscar for An American In Paris with a nice Parisian setting. Then the following year, Keel, Grayson, and the Champions were in a remake of another Jerome Kern classic Showboat which did very well. What to do, but combine all that in a Jerome Kern show that's Parisian based in Roberta. Besides why let all those expensive sets recreating Paris go to waste.

Also the fashion show finale was absolutely inspired by the fantasy ballet from An American In Paris. But the fantasy of Kelly in that film is replaced by a surreal reenactment of Jimmy Durante's famous line of 'everybody's getting into the act'.

Sometimes these things work and sometimes they don't. In this case the sum was definitely not greater than its parts. Howard Keel in his memoirs said that he felt that Mervyn LeRoy did not do right by him in this film that he had to make up his own interpretation of his character. Maybe LeRoy had too loose a hand and the film needed an overall creative genius like Gene Kelly.