#38 The Trouble With Girls

February 6, 2021
The Trouble With Girls (1969) **
TCM/Google Play
Free/$2.99
Wildcard

A second day of no Disney, but with an even better excuse than the other day, and that this movie contains my father, Bill Zuckert, and it’s expiring off the TCM app tomorrow! Also, I have never seen it! So obviously, there’s nothing else to do but to watch The Trouble with Girls, a.k.a. The Chautauqua, which was its original title.

This is a movie that takes place in 1927, populated almost exclusively by people dressing, talking, and acting like people from the 1960s. Was there a time machine that sent them back with their bubble hairdos and sideburns?

The cast includes the world’s youngest Dabney Coleman, and both Anissa Jones and, briefly, Susan Oleson, so all of the curly-ponytailed child actresses of the era were represented.

Here’s the thing, though. It is unwatchable. It’s so unwatchable that I rented it for $2.99 instead of continuing to watch it for free on TCM, because you can’t fast forward scan on the TCM app and after watching 25 minutes, I just wanted to scan forward to catch my dad’s scenes and Vincent Price and John Carradine and the musical numbers and maybe a little of the plot. So I’m cheating a little bit today, but I think I ended up watching more than half of it, so it counts. And it was worth paying $2.99 to not have to watch every moment of this thing.

I know that Elvis movies aren’t all that great, but this one is such a corny drag. Daddy is also in Kid Galahad, I wonder if that one is better?

(Daddy does have one of the only funny lines in the movie. After pissing and moaning for the whole film that his daughter, Lily-Jeanne, didn’t get the lead in the children’s pageant over Anissa Jones, when he sees Anissa perform, he cheerfully tells his wife, “This kid is MUCH better than Lily-Jeanne!” I laughed out loud.)