Dailey, Dan

There's No Business Like Show Business

This 1954 dinosaur brings together two giants of Broadway, Ethel Merman and Irving Berlin, just as their moment was passing forever, to create one last hurrah: a celebration of the glories that were vaudeville. Still, it's hard to imagine that Broadway--or nightclub entertaining, for that matter--was ever quite this lavish and satisfying. The story centers on a married couple, the Donahues (Dan Dailey and Merman), who live on the road as vaudeville entertainers, and since they have children, begin incorporating the kids into the act. Eventually, the kids grow up to be Donald O'Connor, Mitzi Gaynor, and Johnny Ray, and they begin having interests of their own. Donald's is an ambitious showgirl (Marilyn Monroe), whose standoffish response to his romantic overtures drives him to drink. Best for its lavish, splashy production numbers built around some of the best of the Berlin songbook, including the title tune and "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody." --Marshall Fine

An all-star cast that includes Ethel Merman, Dan Dailey, Marilyn Monroe, Donald O'Connor, Johnnie Ray and Mitzi Gaynor sparks this tuneful Irving Berlin musical that depicts the trials and triumphs of a veteran vaudeville family. Molly (Merman) and Terry (Dailey) Donahue start out as a duo and keep adding kids to the act until they finally become The 5 Donahues. Their busy, sometimes tumultuous lives aren't always easy, but the Donahues have plenty of love to get them through the hard times and more than enough talent to keep them on top. Highlighted by one classic Irving Berlin song after another and an array of dazzling production numbers, this upbeat, utterly delightful tale of life on the stage proves, beyond and doubt, that There's No Business Like Show Business!

Ford At Fox Collection: John Ford's American Comedies (Steamboat Around the Bend / Judge Priest / Doctor Bull / When Willie Comes Marching Home / Up the River / What Price Glory)

This John Ford collection gathers six different comedies from the director including STEAMBOAT AROUND THE BEND JUDGE PRIEST DOCTOR BULL WHEN WILLIE COMES MARCHING HOME UP THE RIVER and WHAT PRICE GLORY.System Requirements:Run time: 525 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY/CLASSICS Rating: NR UPC: 024543483182 Manufacturer No: 2248318

The Wings of Eagles

Cmdr. Frank "Spig" Wead was a pioneer aviator renowned screenwriter (whose works included John Ford's They Were Expendable) and a man of war. The skies beckoned Spig to action; a crippling injury ultimately left him powerless to act propelling him to discover the power of his pen. He was talented driven flawed a friend of Ford and the subject of this compassionate biography. John Wayne plays Spig and Ford directs The Wings of Eagles which also offers a fascinating glimpse into the ways and world of Ford: Ward Bond plays moviemaker John Dodge a role modelled on Ford. Maureen O'Hara Wayne's five-time co-star (including Ford's The Quiet Man) and Dan Dailey (of Ford's 1952 What Price Glory?) play Spig's indomitable wife Min and cigar-chomping sidekick "Jughead" Carson.Running Time: 110 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DOCUMENTARIES/MISC. UPC: 012569798632 Manufacturer No: 79863

John Ford had a big emotional investment in The Wings of Eagles, and his favorite star John Wayne rewarded the director with one of his strongest performances. The subject is Frank "Spig" Wead, Naval aviation legend turned Hollywood screenwriter, who had written Ford's very good 1932 movie Air Mail and his magnificent WWII elegy They Were Expendable (1945). On the latter, Ford made the extraordinary gesture of putting Wead's screenplay credit on the same main-title panel as his own.

Ford was fond of exploring the theme of "victory in defeat." Wead's life was made to order for that. The hell-raising flyboy shenanigans, and his flailing marriage to a scrappy Irish redhead (The Quiet Man's Maureen O'Hara reporting for duty), were abruptly curtailed by a fall that left him with severe spinal damage. He should never have been able to walk again, but he fought his way back to limited mobility and built a new career as a writer. And when WWII broke out, Wead talked his way into uniform once more and made a key contribution to the Pacific air war.

It would be satisfying to report that The Wings of Eagles is a triumph--that the broad comedy of the early reels cuts brilliantly against the raw pain of the Weads' marriage, the grief of a family broken and mended and broken again, the film's specters of death and deep frustration. There are powerful moments--especially the complex, scalding scene of the newly injured Spig dismissing Min (O'Hara) from his life. But the low comedy is very low, the visual style sometimes stark but more often just drab, and the screenplay is very choppy about the passage of time. Ford-Wayne pal Ward Bond turns up as a crusty movie director with a walking stick full of booze, an office full of Western memorabilia, and the nudge-nudge moniker "John Dodge." --Richard T. Jameson

Ziegfeld Girl

An elevator operator, a wife of a struggling concert violinist, a born-in-a-trunk vaudevillian: they're three different women on three different paths of life, yet they soon share one dream: to become a Ziegfeld Girl. Lana Turner, Hedy Lamarr and Judy Garland play the respective three trying for stardom in this sumptuous extravaganza. James Stewart adds to the star wattage, playing the jilted truck-driving beau of Turner's footlight diva. And legendary innovator Busby Berkeley brings his imaginative camerawork and pacing to numbers that include Garland's massively scaled and calypso-infused Minnie from Trinidad, plus a lavish, showgirl-revue finale that reprises the rhapsodic You Stepped Out of a Dream. Sweet dreams, movie fans.

What Price Glory?

James Cagney and Dan Dailey are soldiers during World War I, fighting for the same lovely French woman. Phoebe and Henry Ephron wrote the script.

The Girl Next Door

Twentieth Century Fox produced The Girl Next Door, an interesting 1953 musical about an unusual romance and its effects on the happiness of a young boy. June Haver stars as international stage sensation Jeannie Laird, who returns to America a major star after singing and acting in Europe. Her accountant (Dennis Day) has purchased a house on her behalf, and soon Jeannie finds herself neighbors with a widower, Bill Carter (Dan Dailey), a cartoonist raising a young son, Joe (Billy Gray). Despite her fame, Jeannie falls for the low-key Bill, and he feels the same, causing a crisis of jealousy for poor Joe. The film pretty much follows the course of their relationship and Joe's struggles to deal with the reality of a woman in his life. Between domestic crises in Bill's house, The Girl Next Door offers some lavish song-and-dance numbers featuring its two leads. The lanky Dailey is fun to watch, with his ever-present smile and gazelle-like movements, while Haver steams things up with her adventurous dancing and staging of different songs. Dennis Day is charming as an unlikely beau for Jeannie's best friend (Cara Williams), and his lovely voice makes one think of Irish tenors from glory days past. Special features include a brief documentary on Billy Gray, who later played Bud on Father Knows Best and whose career took a hit when he was popped for marijuana possession. --Tom Keogh

It's Always Fair Weather

Musical comedy about three World War II buddies who reunite ten years after their discharge and discover they have nothing in common.Running Time: 102 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: MUSIC DVD/DOCUMENTARY Rating: NR UPC: 012569678606 Manufacturer No: 67860

The third collaboration between Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, It's Always Fair Weather falls short of the classics On the Town and Singin' in the Rain, mostly due to a slow plot and middling songs by Andre Previn, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green. In a story reminiscent of On the Town, Kelly, Dan Dailey, and Michael Kidd play three GIs who return from the war vowing to stay buddies forever. When they reunite 10 years later, however, they find they have little in common, other than having given up on their dreams. Best known as the choreographer of such MGM evergreens as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, the diminutive Kidd proves adept at kicking up his heels in front of the camera. Cyd Charisse plays a scheming television producer (an unusually down-home character) and Delores Gray is the toothy TV show host. (Gray gets to sing and Charisse dances a little, though not with Kelly.) The best moments, of course, are the dance numbers Kelly choreographed, including the three GIs' trash-can-lid dance, Charisse's solo supported by a crew of boxers, and Kelly's number on roller skates, "I Like Myself," which combines some of the free spirit of "Singin' in the Rain" with the stunt footwear made famous by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in 1937's Shall We Dance. Enjoyable, but not quite a classic. --David Horiuchi

My Blue Heaven

Hidden Hollywood - Treasures from the 20th Century Fox Vaults

The proper title isn't so much Hidden Hollywood as Cool Stuff We Found in the Vault at Twentieth Century Fox. This grab bag consists of segments snipped from Fox pictures for reasons of length or content, and the results are uneven but fascinating. Musical numbers abound and provide some fun, but Fox wasn't exactly MGM (and remember, this is the material deemed expendable). The jewels in the first volume include two routines from Café Metropole, starring the graceful dancer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, and a bizarre patter song by Bert Lahr that qualifies as authentic American surrealism (as host Joan Collins admits, the studio cut the song because they were completely bewildered by it). There's also an entire, self-contained sequence from the omnibus film We're Not Married, featuring an irascible Walter Brennan in an amusing Tobacco Road-style vignette. Plus, Edward Everett Horton does a pantomime of Gypsy Rose Lee: a golden 10 seconds. --Robert Horton

Take an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at rare and exciting musical and dance sequences deleted from classic Fox films! Vital to an age devoted to film preservation and restoration, this collection of rarities offers behind-the-scenes stories about the cutting of major footage from movies and shows these outtakes as they would have originally been seen. Includes: "Hop, Skip and Jump" performed by Shirley Temple (deleted from "Little Miss Broadway"); a dance number performed by Betty Grable (deleted from "Footlight Serenade"); "The Woof Song" performed by Bert Lahr (deleted from "Love and Hisses"); two dance sequences featuring Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, cut from the film "Cafe Metropole," including the original opening sequence; "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better" performed by Ethel Merman and Dan Dailey (deleted from "There's No Business Like Show Business"); Katherine Hepburn's first appearance on film in an early screen test made in 1932, in which she performs a scene from "The Animal Kingdom."

Hidden Hollywood, Vol. 2 - More Treasures from the 20th Century Fox Vaults

Comedy is king in this second collection of outtakes from the Fox studio vaults. Some former vaudevillians are captured in rare clips, including behind-the-scenes footage of Buster Keaton instructing Alice Faye in the proper method for taking a cream pie in the face. W.C. Fields holds court in a legendary sequence from Tales of Manhattan, cut from the film's release but restored here to something like its original shape (alternate takes show Fields's incorrigible genius for improvising). Danny Kaye shines in a brilliant bit from On the Riviera, parodying an off-key singer manhandling "Begin the Beguine." The musical numbers tend to be so-so, with the notable exception of the Nicholas Brothers tearing through an athletic dance routine in a harem. Skating enthusiasts will welcome the footage of Sonja Henie, whose somewhat mysterious popularity is examined. The spectacle of Victor Mature as a singing star is mercifully (and amusingly) brief. --Robert Horton

See a cavalcade of legendary actors and actresses at the top of their form in this stunning collection of rare musical and comedy sequences excised from classic Fox films! The history behind each deleted sequence blends with fascinating interviews, recently discovered dailies, and rare archival footage and stills to offer a comprehensive story of Hollywood's Golden Age! Includes: W.C. Fields, Margaret Dumont and Phil Silvers in the 13 minute restored comedy sequence from "Tales of Manhattan;" rare outtakes of Buster Keaton and Alice Faye rehearsing comedy gags for "Hollywood Cavalcade;" "I'll See You in My Dreams" performed by Alice Faye (deleted from "Rose of Washington Square"); a restored version of the "Sheik of Araby" musical sequence from "Tin Pan Alley" featuring Alice Faye and Betty Grable, including never-before-seen alternate takes of a dance routine performed by the Nicholas Brothers; "The Old Army Game" performed by Kay Francis, Mitzi Mayfair, Martha Raye and Carole Landis (deleted from "Four Jills and a Jeep"); the Ritz Brothers perform a hilarious comedy sequence cut from the film "On the Avenue."