On Our Merry Way (1948)

hyped garbage

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

This movie is done in sequences and cobbled together later which makes it different than most films. It has 4 Directors listed including some top ones and an A-List cast that includes some folks from the silent era as well as some top stars.This has a scene with William Demarest and Fred McMurray which reminded me of all the scenes they do together in MY Three Sons much later. Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda in the same film is a rare thing, we have that here. Harry James from the big band era, and a young Burgess Meredith as a reporter.This movie is rich with character actors and the script is written by some top screen writers. So is it perfect? It is an experiment back in this era and because of the cast it is worth a view. Each sequence varies in quality and you will like some of them better than others. At least that is what I did.

This review is for the version without the Charles Laughton sequence, as this was the one shown by Turner Classic Movies recently.The film stars and was co-produced by Burgess Meredith. Considering that he mostly got supporting roles after this and only a few other producer credits, it is probably safe to assume this film was responsible for this.The film consists of various small films that are tied together by an overall theme. You see, Meredith wants to get a job working as a reporter and each time he interviews someone, their story is dramatized. The question he asks each of the people is "how did a child influence your life?". Surprisingly, the vignettes have various big-name Hollywood stars, such as Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda and Dorothy Lamour--perhaps Meredith and his wife/co-star Paulette Goddard got a lot of their friends to be in the film.The first stars Fonda and Stewart. It's about a small-time traveling band that is stranded and puts on a talent show to get the money to get their bus fixed. However, the contest is fixed, as the mayor only let them put on the show if his son (who is a no-talent) is given the award. The film features Alfalfa Switzer (from Our Gang) as the no-talent as well as a surprise cameo at the end by big band leader, Harry James. The film is supposed to be kooky and was an odd waste of the talents of Stewart and Fonda, as the acting and writing were too broad to be taken seriously.The next stars Dorothy Lamour and Victor Moore (an odd combination). They are both struggling actors who have a run-in with a bratty child actor. The kid deliberately ruins their scene they are working for in the film and she thinks this is funny. However, when Moore and Lamour are fired, the kid feels bad and vows to help them with a screen test. The producers love Lamour but are less thrilled about Moore. In the end, however, she hires Moore as her agent. The segment ends with a long dance number. Yes, it did relate to Meredith's question but the style seemed odd and ended very abruptly. Also, the song and dance number seemed out of place.The final segment starred Fred MacMurray and William Demarest (who, you may remember, co-starred together on "My Three Sons" on TV). The film begins with the two being thrown out of town by the cops. The are a couple of grifters in search of some new pigeons (i.e., con-men who want to cheat some unsuspecting people). Oddly, their first potential victim is a little kid with a piggy bank! The kid turns out to be a devilish little prankster, as he makes their lives miserable. In many ways, the story is a lot like a slight reworking of O. Henry's "The Ransom of Red Chief" and the film makers neglected to credit him for the story idea. It is fun watching the kid tormenting the two men but I just wished they'd stuck closer to the original story or just made a film of the O. Henry story--and not all the rest of the vignettes.In the end, Meredith writes his human interest story and goes to see the editor--at which point, the response is not at all what Meredith had expected! But it all works out fine in the end.Overall, not a terrible idea for a film but the film never worked because the first two stories didn't work out well. The biggest negative is bad writing and the only good part was stolen from a famous writer (William Sydney Porter, also known as O. Henry). It's a curious film and is watchable but don't expect it to be much more than a time-passer.

There is a mystery here somewhere: Why was this film made? It is a terrible embarrassment for fans of all the otherwise great actors involved. I saw it the other night on TCM and could not believe my eyes. The "comic" scene between Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart is surely one of the weaker moments in Hollywood history! Fonda playing drunk and Stewart with an apple stuck in his mouth are not exactly hilarious. As for the babe supposedly playing trumpet (it was, of course, Harry James really playing), someone might at least have told her that the mouthpiece smears one's lipstick. At the conclusion of this scene, the Harry James band files off the stand--quickly. One can understand why! Burgess Meredith and Hugh Herbert are not at all amusing. And as for Dorothy Lamour, well, she should have stuck with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. On her own she best belongs in a small town chorus. You get the picture: At all cost avoid this movie. Why was it made? In one shot we see written on a wall: "Kilroy Was Here." Explain that in 1948! In fact, explain anything about this production.

The overall plot of On Our Merry Way concerns Burgess Meredith who works in a dead end job in the want ads section of the local newspaper in Los Angeles. He cons his way into his editor's office, pretending to be an emissary from the big head of the newspaper chain. Meredith is convinced he can do a better job than the roving reporter they've got doing human interest stories. Armed with a question that wife Paulette Goddard has given him which is the title of the review, Meredith goes out and finds three human interest stories told him in flashback for his efforts.The first one stars James Stewart and Henry Fonda and its always cited, I think a bit unfairly, as being so much the superior of the others. It's very good though, especially Fonda who had not been this funny on the screen since Tales of Manhattan. There are quite a few laughs in store as you see Fonda trying to play a trumpet to Carl Switzer on stage. He's playing it from a rowboat under a pier and the results are similar to Debbie Reynolds lipsynching Jean Hagen in the finale of Singing in the Rain. The 'baby' here is six foot tall Dorothy Ford who plays a mean trumpet herself and really impresses Harry James.The second one involves former silent screen star Victor Moore and movie extra Dorothy Lamour and a spoiled child star turned out to be responsible for her big break at the studio. Any chance to see Dottie in her trademark sarong is never to be passed up.The last segment involve a pair of roguish con men, Fred MacMurray and William Demarest being taken in by a pint sized conman themselves in the person of young David Whorf. As the other reviewers remarked, the last one is definitely ripped off from Ransom of Red Chief. I'm surprised the heirs of William Sidney Porter didn't sue. Still a lot of good laughs here with city boys MacMurray and Demarest out in the woods with country kid Whorf making them look like fools.On Our Merry Way is a pretty funny film which was co-produced by its nominal star Burgess Meredith who at the time was married in real life to Paulette Goddard. Meredith was part of the Princeton Triangle Players which is why he was able to get classmates Stewart and Fonda to play in that first segment. It was their first joint venture, it would be another twenty years or so before they did another.All turns out well in the end for Goddard and Meredith and it turns out she's got a personal interest in those answers.