Always in My Heart (1942)

Despite the Warners fanfare and Warners leading lady Kay Francis, it has influences of other studios. There's the multi-ethnic-music-making a la MGM; the also Metro-like mixing of highbrow and lowbrow music; the attempt to launch Gloria Warren as the studio's answer to Universal's Deanna Durbin (she's not bad, but she's not Deanna); "funny" musicians led by Borah Minevitch, sort of like RKO's Kay Kyser, or Spike Jones; and a melodramatic premise that would embarrass anybody. The small-California-town ambiance, with everybody nice to everybody, and smiling mailmen and ice cream men and such, is so dated it seems to belong to another planet. The plot, with Kay Francis planning to marry rich but unlikable Sidney Blackmer, then finding out that her convict husband Walter Huston is still alive and paroled, is absolutely ridiculous. And yet, and yet. Huston, one of the three or four best actors American movies ever had, underplays everything so beautifully that you're hooked. Watch him watch his unsuspecting kids who don't know he's their dad, or singing the appealing title song in that high, heart-tugging voice of his to his daughter, I got teary. The director pitches the emotions too high and cuts too rapidly (at times it approaches MTV pacing), and the ethnic stereotypes are grating--lots of "ot'sa fine" Italians, and just guess which harmonica player in Minevitch's band swings it hot. Not a good movie, and yet, thanks to Huston, and, to a lesser extent, the ladylike Francis (who sure knew how to wear a hat), I couldn't stop watching.