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Down To Earth

1947, Movie, NR, 101 mins

Down To Earth: Review

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The color is lush and dazzling, the cast is impressive, and the story is about as ridiculous as they come. In one of the most idiotic musicals ever conceived, Hayworth is put through her choreography like one might prod a reluctant cow, rendering this usually fine dancer awkward, clumsy, and graceless as she attempts to dance to numbers that would baffle the Ritz Brothers. In this takeoff of HERE COMES MR. JORDAN (produced by Columbia in 1941), Hayworth is the Greek muse Terpsichore, who descends to earth to help out an ailing Broadway musical (the film being infected by the same disease, stupidity) in which the nine Muses are being ridiculed in swingtime jazz--heresy to the gods, of course. She immediately begins to battle producer Parks, trying to convince him to retain the classical Greek dances. She not only fails, but is converted to performing in a modern jazz version of the production, which creates quite a stir on the film's version of Olympus. Culver plays the Mr. Jordan role made famous by Claude Rains, but he is simply too British and stuffy to give it the wry interpretation embodied by Rains. Gleason does a reprise as agent Max Corkle and provides the only real entertainment in this otherwise yawning vehicle for Hayworth. The songs are wholly lackluster. (Hayworth's singing is dubbed by Anita Ellis; Kay Starr dubbed the voice of Adele Jergens.) When Hayworth falls in love with Parks, she loses her immortality and becomes human, staying on earth, one might presume, to appear in one preposterous musical after another to torment the gods. DOWN TO EARTH utterly collapsed at the box office, a lead dumpling no one could digest. It soured Columbia's mogul Harry Cohn on doing similar films ever again. Years later George Axelrod proposed doing a fantasy he had written with Columbia but Cohn shuddered at the mere thought of it, snarling: "Fantasies don't make money." Axelrod countered, "But, Harry, you made a brilliant picture right here at your studio, HERE COMES MR. JORDAN. It was a fantasy and it made a lot of money." Cohn answered with the kind of logic unique to Harry Cohn: "Yeah, but think of how much more it would have made if it hadn't been a fantasy!" Remade in 1980 as XANADU. leave a comment
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