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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A congenial musical with Fred Astaire as Bert Kalmar and Red Skelton as Harry Ruby, 27 Sep 2007
Three Little Words is like a mother's cooking. It may not be haute cuisine, but it's tasty and it's nice sitting around the table with friends and family. The movie, in my opinion, has no great highs and no great lows; it's a genial, comfortable musical with a strong performance by Fred Astaire as Bert Kalmar and a low-key one from Red Skelton as Harry Ruby.
The two met in 1918 and formed a song-writing partnership that lasted until Kalmar's death in 1947. Kalmar wrote the words; Ruby wrote the music. They were successful as Tin Pan Alley writers, on Broadway and in Hollywood. Perhaps what makes the movie so easy going is that in real life the two never had any major conflicts. They liked each other and worked well together. Hollywood, of course, thought some tension was needed to make the movie interesting so some minor issues have been added. These are so soft-pedaled that we hardly notice them as important. And there is always a wife or two to help smooth things over. What we're left with is Astaire and Skelton, Vera-Ellen playing Kalmar's wife and Arlene Dahl playing Ruby's wife, and an ongoing number of Kalmar-Ruby songs sung and danced to. The two stand-outs for me are the Astaire and Vera-Ellen pairings in Where Did You Get That Girl, a fast, funny vaudeville routine, and Thinking of You, a romantic, elegant waltz which ends with a latin beat. Among the songs featured are such Kalmar-Ruby standards as Who's Sorry Now?, I Wanna Be Loved By You, Three Little Words and one of their best, Nevertheless.
Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong,
maybe I'm weak, maybe I'm strong,
but nevertheless I'm in love with you.
Maybe I'll win, maybe I'll lose,
and maybe I'm in for crying the blues,
but nevertheless I'm in love with you.
Somehow, I know at a glance, the terrible chances I'm taking.
Fine at the start, then left with a heart that is breaking.
Maybe I'll live a life of regret,
and maybe I'll give much more than I get,
but nevertheless, I'm in love with you.
We ought to remember, although it's just briefly touched on in the movie, that Kalmar and Ruby provided the songs for three of the Marx Brothers great, early movies, Animal Crackers, Duck Soup and Horsefeathers. Try not thinking of Groucho when you hear this one:
"Hooray for Captain Spaulding!
The African Explorer!"
"Did someone call me shnorrer?"
"Hooray, hooray, hooray!"
Fred Astaire not only provides the creative focus with his dancing, but he gives a strong performance as a confidant guy always thinking of ways to do more. He may overshadow Red Skelton's Ruby but I think that was the nature of their partnership. Skelton plays Ruby as a lovable, slightly naive big lug. He does a nice job of it. Vera-Ellen, as always with her movies, had her singing dubbed, in this case by Anita Ellis. A legend seems to have grown about how awful a singer she was. As far as I know there is only one recording that contains Vera-Ellen singing her own songs. This is the CD of A Connecticut Yankee, the 1943 Broadway revival where Vera-Ellen played the comic second female lead. She does a fine job. She has no vibrato, sings flat out and comes perilously close to missing a note now and then, but her personality shines though; she's funny, sexy and endearing.
The DVD of Three Little Words looks and sounds great. Among the extras is a short feature about the two song-writing partners.
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