My Dream Is Yours (1949)
My Dream Is Yours (1949)
Doris Day’s second film was this Technicolor remake of Twenty Million Sweethearts (1934) which had featured Dick Powell and a story by Paul Finder Moss and Jerry Wald. This comedy musical was produced and directed by Michael Curtiz adapted by Laura Kerr and Allen Rivkin and features a screenplay by Harry Kurnitz (What Next Corporal Hargrove? (1945)) and Dane Lussier; I. aka Friz Freleng directed an animated dream sequence which feature Bugs Bunny Tweety and the voice talents of Mel Blanc (uncredited). But the star of this film’s story is Jack Carson (also top billed in Day’s screen debut Romance on the High Seas (1948)) who plays a never-say-die talent agent Doug Blake that goes out and discovers Martha Gibson (Day) when his first singer discovery Gary Mitchell (Lee Bowman) gets too big for his britches. Mitchell had refused to sign a new five year deal with Doug’s agency run by Thomas Hutchins (Adolphe Menjou) to secure sponsor Felix Hofer (S.Z. Sakall); Selena Royle plays Mrs. Hofer. But Doug couldn’t have succeeded in finding Miss Gibson a war widow with a five year old son without the financial support of another in Hutchins’s employ the selfless Vivian Martin (the always wryly humorous Eve Arden); she begrudgingly allows enthusiastic Doug (and everyone else) to walk all over her.
The apt title song is sung at least three times during the course of the film first by Gary (Bowman dubbed by Hal Derwin) by Martha when she takes over for him after his drunken binge then by the two of them together after Doug has selflessly arranged a second chance audition for an ungrateful and suspicious Gary with a Coconut Grove audience that includes Hofer and Hutchins because Martha is inexplicably in love with the egotistical singer; Doug believes that Martha’s son Freddie (Duncan Richardson uncredited) needs a father. Edgar Kennedy plays Martha’s Uncle Charlie who’d helped Doug discover her back east in Dave’s Green Room. Sheldon Leonard plays Grimes the “hands on” owner of the seedy L.A. club Babita that first gives attractive Martha a job. Franklin Pangborn plays the manager of an enterprise that no longer exists in today’s world a company that spins records in a central location for bars and other remote businesses before jukeboxes were available; Uncle Charlie and the Green Room’s bartender (Carson’s older brother Robert uncredited) had arranged for Doug to hear record spinner (an uncredited Sandra Gould plays a coworker) Martha sing an impromptu accompaniment to some “elevator music”.
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