Rose Marie (1954)
Rose Marie Lemaitre, an orphan living in the Canadian wilderness, falls in love with her guardian, Mike Malone, an officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The feeling is mutual. But, when she leaves to learn proper etiquette, Rose Marie meets a trapper named James Duval, who also falls for her. Further complications arise when Native American Chief Black Eagle -- a rival of Duval's -- is murdered.
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I guess there's more than one Mountie that doesn't get his man (or woman)...

Bears little resemblance to the (better) MacDonald/Eddy version, at least what little I can remember of it. Very much in the style of musical that MGM would do for the better part of the 50's, for better and worse. As such, it was fine. Would have improved had they cut the entire Duval/Wanda subplot and just focused on Howard Keel and Ann Blyth. Busby Berkeley worked on the staging of the musical sequences --his last major theatrical film until 1962's Jumbo-- but there was really only one short sequence which clearly bore his fingerprints: the one involving the Native American medicine man (Thurl Ravenscroft, best known…

This whole thing is a weird love triangle, but I'm a bit surprised that even in the context of this (with this being from the 1950s) it is pretty direct, o at least Rose Marie herself is, in finding something creepy about Howard Keel taking such a strong romantic interest in someone that he's also in a form of a guardian-child relationship with to begin with. It's unnerving, but I've feel like I've seen other movies that really didn't see an issue with that at all (it may not have been reciprocated, but it wasn't called out as creepy at all).

For me, the standout part of this is the dated but well produced number Totem Tom-Tom. I really liked…

Bert Lahr was the reason I watched this; as part of my July 2022 list of films featuring my fav supporting players

Lahr was a consummate vaudevillian-style performer. It's too bad he didn't get many other roles as he did in MGM's 1931 "A-level" musical Flying High (and Lahr was the lead performer in this $600,000 budget musical). It's probably his best performance on screen ever (better than his performance in The Wizard of Oz 8 years later. He had the timing of a stage performer and delivered his lines accordingly. His expressions before and after speaking were likewise choreographed well.

Lahr (as a Canadian Royal Mounted police sergeant) is jovial in this and hams it up while singing "I'm…

Before I put this on today I told myself, “I adore both Ann Blyth and Howard Keel to the moon and back, so aside from Fernando Lamas and maybe a weak plot, I don’t see how this could go wrong.” Well, Fernando Lamas and a weak plot is exactly what went wrong.

I fell asleep halfway through but I still woke up and caught myself up because I absolutely love Ann Blyth and Howard Keel and I wanted to believe this would be a good film. It is in a lot of respects: Ann Blyth is stunning and actually makes an effort to sound French Canadian, which I didn’t expect but shouldn’t surprise me as she went above and beyond…