January 17 movie: Three Little Words. What fun! Fred Astaire and Red Skelton star in a biopic about Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, the songwriting team who wrote "Who's Sorry Now?" and "I Wanna Be Loved By You" among others. Vera Ellen costars as Astaire's wife, and they do a sublime dance number together called "Thinking Of You." Also features a very young Debbie Reynolds singing "I Wanna Be Loved By You," although she was dubbed by Helen Kane, who originated the "boop-boop-a-doop" thing.
I don't know anything about Kalmar and Ruby, but I read on the Wikipedia page about the movie that the portrayal of their relationship was fairly accurate. I loved how Astaire's character was a magician, and they had him doing magic tricks throughout the movie, even when it wasn't relevant to the scene. That's a nice touch of character development.
My only disappointment with the movie is the arrangements of the songs: lots of schmaltzy string-heavy stuff, not at all the way the songs would actually have sounded in the 20s. But I've long been resigned to the fact that Hollywood in the 50s and 60s just did not value historical authenticity in costume, props, song and dance styles, etc. That's one thing the movies do better now (although it sometimes becomes almost a fetish, with the costumes more important than the script).
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