Two Weeks with Love

One of Jane Powell's more popular musicals was this turn of the last century classic, Two Weeks With Love. With music and atmosphere set in the Theodore Roosevelt era, Two Weeks With Love is good entertainment and marked Debbie Reynolds's breakthrough film.

The Robinson family headed by Louis Calhern and Ann Harding are taking their annual two weeks outing in the Catskills, circa 1905. Apparent to all, but Ann Harding, her daughter Jane Powell is developing a figure. However we've got a firm rule in this family, no corset until her 18th birthday.

Another person stymied by the 18th birthday rule is Carleton Carpenter who is 17 and still in knickers. Father Clinton Sundberg owns the hotel that Robinsons stay at and will not give him long pants.

Though Powell and Reynolds can still play as teenagers, Carleton Carpenter is positively ridiculous playing a 17 year old. He's quite a bit over 6 feet tall, but that's good in a way, because that's part of his gawkiness. Where in the name of the Deity were they finding knickers back in the first decade of the last century for someone over 6 feet tall beggars the imagination.

There's a nice mixture of period, public domain music that MGM didn't have to shell out for the rights that Powell, Reynolds and Carpenter perform. Debbie Reynolds as Powell's younger sister sang Abba Dabba Honeymoon with Carpenter here and it became the hit and the song had a revival in popularity in 1950. Powell's best number is in an imaginary sequence singing Come, Hero Mine from The Chocolate Soldier. Again, MGM owned the rights by dint of purchasing that property for their Chocolate Soldier film from nine years before where Rise Stevens and Nelson Eddy duet ed this one.

Powell also dances a mean tango with Ricardo Montalban the object of her youthful crush and why she's so anxious to show her figure off.

Ann Harding as a mom is nice and loving and doesn't have a clue. She dresses her boys, Tommy Rettig and Gary Gray, in Reynolds's and Powell's old hand me down nighties. Mom, get real.

Two Weeks With Love is a nice trip down memory lane and back when it was released people actually did have memories of the turn of the last century.