Once Upon a Time *** (1944, Cary Grant, Janet Blair, James Gleason, Ted Donaldson) – Classic Movie Review 8404

Director Alexander Hall’s 1944 black and white satirical comedy Once Upon a Time stars Cary Grant as Jerry Flynn, a canny but cash-strapped theatre producer about to go bust, and story is about the hit the producer makes from promoting a nine-year-old boy named Pinky (Ted Donaldson) and the dancing caterpillar called Curly that the boy carries around in a shoe box.

Out of fairly unpromising material (from a radio play by Norman Corwin and Lucille Fletcher) Columbia Pictures create a funny, fantasy film, starring a frantic-to-please Grant as the down-on-his-luck but ever optimistic producer and charmingly played by the attractive cast.

Once Upon a Time is thin but amusing, and it is performed and directed with just the requisite light touch. It is advertised as DIFFERENT (well you don’t get many films about dancing caterpillars), WHIMSICAL and CHUCKLESOME, and that is what it is, so no false advertising there. It is unusual in being a more or less forgotten Cary Grant movie.

The 11-year old child actor Donaldson (born on August 20, 1933 in New York City) gives a good performance and he won the Critics Award in 1944 for Once Upon a Time. He said: ‘From my very early twenties I wanted to be the first male child actor to become a leading man’, but by the late Seventies he was working in a bookshop. He is known for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), The Return of Rusty (1946) and Rusty Saves a Life (1949).

Also in the cast are Janet Blair, James Gleason, Howard Freeman, William Demarest, Art Baker, John Abbott, Paul Stanton, Mickey McGuire, Edward Gargan, Harry Strang, Billy Bevan, Cliff Clark, Emory Parnell, Torben Meyer, William Austin, Isabel Withers, George Eldredge, George Davis and Pedro De Cordoba.

The all-important screenplay is by Lewis Meltzer, Oscar Saul and Irving Fineman (adaptation), based on a radio play by Norman Corwin and Lucille Fletcher.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Classic Movie Review 8404

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com