I love girls' summer camp movies. They're like minor league women's prison pictures, which I'm a sucker for, and The Under-Pup  doesn't disappoint. The film was Joe Pasternak's answer to Deanna Durbin's growth spurt and 13-year-old (they said she was 11) Gloria Jean's debut.

Here's the gimmick: Toney girls' camp, Camp Happy Warrior, decides to open its silken tent flaps to a poor city girl by granting the spot to the girl who writes the best essay on trees. "What's an essay?" ask the disadvantaged girls amongst themselves, but Pip-Emma (Gloria Jean), the kid with the angelic voice and hardscrabble street smarts (she starts a junior turf war on the way home from church) is already dreaming of trees and sunshine.

I like this kid. She calls her dad "onion" and her mother "sweet potato" (which is also happens to be what I call my son). She knows how to run a shell game, thanks to an uncle, and is planning to have her grandpa (C. Aubrey Smith) compose the essay for her so she can rub elbows with little millionaires. It's in the ag-bay. Of course, she can't go through with cheating, writes the essay herself, and wins the contest anyway.

Turns out Cecilia (Shirley Mills), the rich kid who thought up the contest, and her friend Letty Lou (Ann Gillis) are class-A stinkers and a bullies. They run the Purple Order of the Penguins, kind of a Skull and Bones girl's auxiliary, and make a point of marginalizing Pip-Emma at every opportunity. But one girl, little Janet Cooper (Virginia Weidler, her excellent, softer self), likes her moxie and the two become friends. Poor Janet has the kind of parents who are too rich and too unhappy with each other to pay any attention to her, a fact snotty Letty-Lou teases Janet about all the time. Of course, none of these girls seem to have parents who make time for them, unlike Pip-Emma's close family with the grandpa, and the parents, and the little brother (Dickie Moore), and the endless supply of character uncles.

On accounta the poor are truly the rich ones.

As an exclusive club, the Penguins have complicated rules and requirements, thereby letting the rules do the bullying for them. Non-members can't wear the uniform, or the swim suits, or the gym clothes, or the riding gear that members wear, for instance, and of course, Pip-Emma has none of these things of her own. Eventually, the kid's natural goodness and spirit makes her more popular than the mean girls and a particular favorite of the staff: Camp Director, Beulah Bondi; Camp Ingenue, Nan Grey; and Camp Heartthrob, Robert Cummings. 

Lessons are learned. Friendships are made. Parents are reunited and relationships bloom. It's a fun, engaging, and entertaining picture. Personally, I could do without the singing, but I'm cold-hearted that way.

I think Beulah Bondi is a marvelous actress whose spinster camp director Miss Thornton could have been a disastrous caricature in less skilled hands. She and Joe Pasternak stable performer Nan Grey were the biggest surprises of this film and I recommend you see it if you can. Then tell me why Nan Grey didn't do more.

When you looked up "strapping" in Webster's dictionary cerca 1960, was it James Garner's picture you saw? If not it should have been. Oklahoma-born James Garner had that all-American, non-douchey-jock good looks and likability, bestowing those traits on some of my favorite television men: Bret Maverick, Jim Rockford, and Mariette Hartley's "husband" on those awesome Polaroid commercials of the 1970s and 80s..

The youngest of three boys, James was born to a carpet layer father and part-Cherokee mother. His mother died when he was five years old, and James and his older brothers were sent to live with relatives until their father remarried in 1934. The new Mrs. Bumgarner was a horrible woman who beat and humiliated the children at every opportunity. A final terrible fight with 14-year-old James finally broke up the marriage. James went into the merchant marine at age 16 and his father moved to Los Angeles, where James joined him to finish school at Hollywood High School.

After a brief stint modeling bathing suits (um...eBay ad collectors?Anyone?), Garner joined the National Guard and served in the army during the Korean war, where he was wounded twice. A friend from high school suggested he should try his hand at acting, which he did, first on Broadway, then in television commercials, small TV roles, then his breakout starring role in the excellent Western series, Maverick.

Throughout the 1960s, Garner had solid leading man roles in both dramas and comedies, though frankly, I prefer him in the latter, especially with Doris Day. I came to know him as Doris Day's "other" husband (the anti-Rock) and to adore him through The Rockford Files, which my mother, sister, and I watched every Friday at 9:00 p.m. until it was stupidly taken off the air.

Garner has been acting steadily and constantly on small screens and large for the thirty-odd years since the end of Jim Rockford. My favorite thing about him, though, is that he met his wife, Lois, at an Adlai Stevenson rally in 1956, married her two weeks later, and has been married to her ever since. 

What a man!

Happy 86th Mr. Garner.

There will be much written about Mickey Rooney over the next few days, and I won't have anything spectacular to add. I was never a huge fan of the madcap, singing, dancing Mickey Rooney, but preferred the quieter, brotherly, small town entrepreneurial Mickey Rooney.

I liked the guy who was sweet to Virginia Weidler (Young Tom Edison), Freddie Bartholomew (Captains Courageous), and drunk Frank Morgan (The Human Comedy) and I *always* cried when he did.

Mickey Rooney was probably the last of the working vaudevillians we'll ever see again. He did everything it was possible to do in show business and was a massive success at it for 90 years. To me, his greatest achievement was his marriage to Ava Gardner, because, really? And he'll always have a soft spot in my heart for being the winning answer to one of my sister's Daily Doubles on Jeopardy in 1987.

I suppose we all knew this would happen one day, but I'm still very sad to see him go.

May you rest in peace, Mr. Rooney. You did a marvelous job.

[Repeat of last year's greeting, but...] Doris Day was born Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff 90 years ago today. Hard to believe, isn't it? I don't know what more I could add to the great body of information there is out there about her (including Doris Day: Her Own Story), except to express my admiration for her talent and perseverance in the face of stupid marital and professional choices.

I think she's a lovely human being with a beautiful voice who has had to navigate complicated roles and a messy personal life for at least six decades. I could listen to late 1940s Doris for hours. She just melts my heart.

I used to sing this song to my son when he was a baby, just like Doris did to her little guy in My Dream Is Yours (1949).

Enjoy "Someone Like You."

Charmed as I've always been by the late Deanna Durbin, I came late to the singing child star party. I have, therefore, been woefully remiss in appreciating Gloria Jean, Maybe it's because so few of her kind of films are shown on television anymore, nor are they readily available on DVD. Or maybe it's just that my memory of her is clouded by whatever else was distracting me in the films of hers I have seen: too busy hating Jerry Lewis, for instance, in The Ladies Man (1961); missing the rest of the Marx Brothers in Copacabana (1947); or just blocking out any operatic number that tended to turn up in Hollywood musicals for a time (whither Kathryn Grayson?).

But Gloria Jean was a sweet performer with a lovely voice, pretty good comic delivery, and some fancy dancing with the likes of Donald O'Connor. She was the ideal adorable young charge to whatever larger star dominated a picture. In other words, you could see why someone like W.C. Fields would give a damn.

She was born Gloria Jean Schoonover in Buffalo, New York, but her parents, a music store owner and a former circus bareback rider (guess which was which), moved the family to Scranton, which she thereafter considered her hometown. Young Gloria's singing talent was evident early on, and she became a local singing sensation by the age of five. When she was twelve, Gloria auditioned for Joe Pasternak, "the King of Musicals," who was looking for another little opera singer to replace (or to put contract pressure on) Deanna Durbin, who had the effrontery to grow up and get itchy to try something new.

Gloria became an instant, if short-lived sensation with her first picture, The Under-Pup, the story of a poor city girl (Gloria Jean) who goes to summer camp with a bunch of rich girl bullies, teaches them a thing or two, then wins them over. She made a succession of similar, charming vehicles, but by the early 1940s, was being pushed into jalopy and jitterbugging teenage B-pictures, and her career never quite recovered.

She made a few television appearances in the 1950s on popular shows, but quite the business altogether when she got married in 1962. The marriage lasted only a short while, but Gloria and her son built a happy life together and she enjoyed a new career with a cosmetics company until her retirement in 1993. New interest in her life and career emerged when a number of her public domain films were being bought and sold on eBay. Gloria's sister and good pal, Bonnie, made Gloria Jean memorabilia a hot commodity with a little online store of their own.

Why the hell not, I say?

I hope the renewed interest prompts more DVD releases of her work. Gloria Jean is certainly worth the effort.

Born Suzanne Burce in Portland, Oregon, Jane Powell was a talented dancer and performer from the age of two. She became a local radio celebrity and was chosen at age 12 to become Oregon's "Victory Girl." The title had her traveling around the state, singing and dancing for the war effort and appearing on two weekly radio programs.

While on vacation in Hollywood at the end of her tenure as Victory Girl, Jane entered a talent contest (as you do  on vacation) on Janet Gaynor's radio show, Hollywood Showcase: Stars Over Hollywood and won. This earned her an audition at both MGM and Selznick International Studios and she was signed by MGM to a seven-year contract. Her first picture was the fun little musical, Song of the Open Road  (1944) in which she played a precocious performer with an overbearing stage mother who runs off to join the Civilian Conservation Corps. The studio gave her the name "Jane Powell," the name of the character she plays in the film.

Thus at age 15, she began a steady career in movie musicals that lasted for a little over 12 years. The parts began to dry up as musicals became less of a draw and her "girl next door" image began to fade; by then she'd been married twice (of an eventual five times) and had three children. Powell left pictures and embarked on a very successful stage and television career throughout the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Her most recent appearance was on an episode of Law & Order: SVU (the new Murder She Wrote) in 2002. Ms. Powell has been happily married to former child star Dickie Moore since 1988. 

I got to see Jane Powell interviewed on the recent Turner Classic Movies Cruise last December. At 84, she was charming, delightfully candid, and beautiful. She spoke frankly about the hard work and relative loneliness of being a child actor and contract player in the studio system, but only by way of explaining that that was the job and that's how it was done then. No complaining; strictly work ethic. 

She also had a few choice words about Howard Keel's ego. 

So a very happy birthday to Suzanne Burce; she said she always preferred the name Suzanne and wondered why the studio wanted yet another Powell. Ah well.

Many happy returns.