Isn’t It Romantic ** (1948, Veronica Lake, Billy De Wolfe, Patric Knowles, Mona Freeman, Mary Hatcher, Roland Culver) – Classic Movie Review 11,101

Director Norman Z McLeod’s 1948 black and white Paramount film Isn’t It Romantic stars Veronica Lake as Candy Cameron, who has two sisters (Mona Freeman, Mary Hatcher) and prefers conman Rick Brannon (Patric Knowles), a city slicker who sells phony oil stock, to her fiancé Horace Frazier (Billy De Wolfe), in this mild comedy romance set in Indiana after the US Civil War. Roland Culver plays Major Euclid Cameron, a former Confederate officer, a widower raising his three daughters in genteel poverty in rural 19th-century Indiana.

Isn’t It Romantic? is notable for its pleasant cast and amiable performances, as well as the odd nice number, including the title song Isn’t It Romantic? by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (written for Love Me Tonight), though not actually sung in this movie, and De Wolfe’s comedy song ‘At the Nickelodeon’ (though the film is set years before silent movies were invented). Plus ‘I Shoulda Quit When I Was Ahead’ (performed by Pearl Bailey), ‘Miss Julie July’ and ‘Indiana Dinner’.

There is no peekaboo bang hair style for the 4′ 11″ Lake (she was even nicknamed The Peek-a-boo Girl), aka Constance Frances Marie Ockleman, and the 6′ 2″ Knowles seems twice as tall as her.

After seven good years at Paramount studios, Lake was unceremoniously dropped and not much was heard of her thereafter.

The US Defense Department pressured Paramount during World War Two to make Lake change her hairstyle because female workers in defence plants were copying it and their peekaboo bangs kept getting caught in the machinery.

Also in the cast are Pearl Bailey, Richard Webb, Kathryn Givney, Larry Olsen, Charles Evans, Jeff York, Eddie Johnson, Dick Keene, Olin Howlin and future director Hall Bartlett in his film debut.

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 11,101

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