Reunited: 20th Century Foxes

I guess I just tended to be a rather dense kid (and still a sort of thick-headed adult!), but I constantly misunderstood the names of various people that I would overhear my grandparents discussing. There were Ellafitz Gerald, Yvonda Carlo and some gal named Donna Meechee. Only, they were actually referring to (as I would blushingly realize later), Ella Fitzgerald, Yvonne De Carlo and one Don Ameche!  I'm sure there were others, too. But today we're taking a brief look at Ameche, a 20th Century Fox contract player, and the way he was reunited with one of his fellow performers across the decades.

To some readers, Ameche may only be familiar for his Oscar-winning role in 1985's Cocoon (or perhaps in a latter-day guest role on The Golden Girls, in which he played the long-lost father of Rose Nylund.)

You wouldn't be too off-base if you figured this post concerns Ameche and his costar in half a dozen films, Alice Faye. She is the one who first springs to mind as a romantic co-lead with him. However, it's another gal who we'll be looking at, one who has a more longstanding - if less heralded - association with him.

In 1941, Ameche was cast in what was to be a Fritz Lang film, co-written by Samuel Fuller. Confirm or Deny was based upon the real bombing of Associated Press offices in London during WWII. Ameche was a correspondent who falls for a teletype operator played by Joan Bennett. This was the first pairing of these stars. Released on December 12th, mere days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, it ought to have been a smash, but perhaps it was "too soon." Today the movie is barely-remembered (though fondly so) by only tried and true fans of classic movies.

Ameche was given some rapid-fire Sam Fuller dialogue to spout in his pursuit of the pretty Bennett.

Bennett had surely been involved in the film though her association with Lang, the initial director, as her husband and she had formed a production company with him and did Man Hunt earlier that year. But he took a hike after about a week when the studio imposed changes to the tone and the story line of the movie. She did work for him three more times, however, in The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945) and Secret Beyond the Door... (1947.)

Raven-tressed Bennett was a switch for Ameche from the more familiar light-blonde Faye. Ironically, Bennett was a natural blonde and had been working for years as one until Trade Winds (1938) when director Tay Garnett convinced her to go dark. She kept it brunette virtually all the time thereafter.

In 1942, Ameche and Bennett were teamed again, this time in a mistaken identity comedy called Girl Trouble. She played a rich girl whose funds are tied up in England, thanks to the war, and must rent her upscale apartment to Venezuelan rubber magnate Ameche. He mistakes her for the maid and she allows it, staying on in her own home as a result.

The farcical bit of wartime escapism wound up annoying about as many audience members as it entertained and it, too, sank out of most moviegoers' memories as time marched on. This might have been the end of Ameche and Bennett's association, but there was more to come after all.

In 1957, the two were paired once again as the parents of young Carol Lynley in an episode of The Dupont Show of the Month. Junior Miss had been a series of stories in The New Yorker, then collected into book form, then a Broadway play, then a 1945 film starring Peggy Ann Garner and now a TV musical, broadcast in color! Burton Lane and Dorothy Field penned six songs for the show, one of which ("Let's Make It Christmas All Year 'Round") was sung by the two stars and their TV daughters, Lynley and Jill St. John.

The 1950s for Ameche and Bennett were a far cry from their earlier big screen successes. Ameche only made one minor film appearance the entire decade and had turned to the stage for employment. Bennett's career had been derailed by a 1951 scandal when her husband shot her agent, thinking them to be involved in a love affair. She only managed a handful of films after that. But 1958 found them seated side-by-side as panelists on To Tell the Truth.

Among the guests they were impelled to sort out was Theodor Geisel, better known to millions of readers as Dr. Seuss. (Neither one of them selected the actual Geisel.) At the time of this show, Ameche was 45 while Bennett was 43. Seventeen years after their initial movie together, this, too, might have served as the end of their professional association. But it still was not.

You can certainly be forgiven if you don't recognize this person or project...! Monie Ellis, a briefly employed starlet of the 1970s, was selected to essay the title role in Gidget Gets Married (1972.) Sandra Dee had first played the part in 1959's Gidget while Deborah Walley took over for Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961) and Cindy Carol did Gidget Goes to Rome (1963.) Sally Field played the part in a 1965 sitcom and then Karen Valentine inherited it for the TV-movie Gidget Grows Up in 1969. (Caryn Richman took over the oft-played part in 1985's Gidget's Summer Reunion and even though the role had never been played by the same gal twice, she did so in 1986's ludicrously-titled The New Gidget! Please. There was ALWAYS a new Gidget....!) The very latest incarnation (and I am not making this up) is from a transsexual porn performer named Julie Bond who performed (and how, I'm sure!) in 1990's Gidget Goes Bi!

Anyway.... In this rendition of the old warhorse, Gidget finally marries Moondoggie, played by Michael Burns. Imagine my delight when watching the ceremony and seeing Poseidon's Underworld's favorite extra, leoda Richards, as a featured guest. She's even in the receiving line in-between the father of the bride and the groom (but she's not Gidget's mother.)

He's fresh out of the service and takes a job in a new town. The owner of his company lives in an elegantly-appointed mansion. The newlyweds pay a call on the big cheese and await his arrival in the wood-paneled study.

The CEO is played by Don Ameche, and as his wife we find Joan Bennett! At this point it had been 30 years since their initial movie together.

Now 64 and 62 in real life, they are depicted here as the parents of a preteen son! Ameche had six kids in real life, but was 39 by the time of the last one. Oddly enough, Bennett, who had first wed at 16 and had a child at 17 was a grandmother at 39! She proceeded to have three other children, the last one when she was 38, making her fourth child and her grandchild only about one year apart.

The chief crux of conflict in this feather-weight (and often feather-brained) TV-movie/potential pilot (?) is the fact that the town where Gidget lives is divided into three separate "classes" and Ameche prefers that they don't mix! She unwittingly hosts a no-no dinner party with a variety of people and he gets miffed... Notice Elinor Donahue in the red dress. She's one of many guests stars who appear in the movie, along with Bob Cummings, Macdonald Carey and Paul Lynde. Gidget's initial home is the Father Knows Best house, a series in which Donahue starred as a youth!

Bitter and practically alone, Ameche has some decisions to make about his employees and the village built around his company.

This marks the final collaboration between Ameche and Bennett. He enjoyed a comeback with Trading Places (1983) - despite the director having been told prior to casting that the actor was dead! - and continued to work right up until his true demise in 1993 from prostate cancer. He was 85. Bennett, who by this time had already enjoyed renewed fame from Dark Shadows, worked several more times up through the early-1980s. She died in 1990 of a heart attack at age 80.

And with that, this edition of Reunited is a wrap! Till next time.