Janie

This was a very comical film starring Edward Arnold, (Charles Conway) who owns a newspaper in Hortonville and he has two daughters Janie Conway, (Joyce Reynolds) who is a pretty teenage girl of 18 years and she has a little sister named Elsbeth Conway, (Clare Foley) who is seven years of age and a great actress in this picture. Janie is a very liked girl in her town and she has many girl friends and one boy friend she grew up with. Charles Conway finds out that the Army are going to be stationed in their town and he is not in favor of this idea and writes editorials about this subject in his paper. The Army does arrive and this creates plenty of problems for the local town folks. However, Janie is always finding ways to have parties and eventually she gets involved with an entire base marching into her house for a party. Clare Foley gave an outstanding performance along with Edward Arnold, Robert Hutton, (Pfc Dick Lawrence). This was a film made during World War II and was a morale builder for the American Fighting men and was very well produced.

For me, the real star of this movie is Clare Foley, Janie's seven-year-old little sister. She is tremendously funny, ALMOST at a level equal to child actress Margaret O'Brien (Noted for the terrific movie, Meet Me In St. Louis.) Sadly, Clare Foley died at only 39 years of age. A DuckDuckGo search gives little information about her. As far as I can tell, she was only in the two Janie movies.

In an effort to compete with the popular family pictures being produced by MGM during the World War II era, like the Andy Hardy series, studio mogul Jack Warner charged his staff with creating a wholesome entertainment which would incorporate patriotism, small-town Americana and romance into an audience-pleasing film. The result was Janie (1944), a light romantic comedy about a 17-year-old year who decided to support the war effort by opening her home to every enlisted man stationed nearby. The accent is on humor in Janie with the central premise of adolescent girls developing crushes on visiting soldiers being treated in a charmingly naive way, devoid of any lewd suggestiveness. We will briefly see a very young singer Andy Williams (with his brothers) providing entertainment at a party scene.

Janie became one of Warner's biggest hits of 1944 grossing nearly two million dollars domestically! Pleased with Janie's success, Warner reassembled most of the cast for the inevitable follow-up, Janie Gets Married (1946), but replaced the engaging Reynolds with the studio's favorite all-American (Drop Dead Gorgeous) girl, Joan Leslie, (Joan Leslie's best role is in the movie, The Male Animal.) Also in Janie Gets Married is the very attractive Dorothy Malone.

The movies (Janie and Janie Gets married comes on the same disc.) comes on a burned (purple) DVD, not a longer lasting pressed (Silver) DVD.

According to TCM, "Janie" was made by Warner Brothers to try to cash in on the success of MGM's Andy Hardy series. Like the Hardy films, "Janie" features a goofy teenager, a well respected father who is often flummoxed, a mother, a sister and a housekeeper....though the father here, Charles Conway (Edward Arnold) seemed a bit more flummoxed as "Janie" seems a bit more likely to make it to second base than Andy.

Joyce Reynolds stars as the title character. She only made about a dozen films, so it's safe to say that the series never caught on. In fact, they only made one other film in the series...but with Joan Leslie playing the character. The film's main plot involves Janie's two romances--with her classmate, 'Scooper' as well as a soldier waiting to be shipped out, Dick.

To me, "Janie" is only a bit like the Hardy films. Yes, the family constellation is similar but much more shrill and chaotic...sort of like if the Hardys were all crack addicts!! So, the emphasis is less on charm and more on barraging the audience with crazy antics. I am not saying it's necessarily bad...but it's not the Hardys. Some of this is due to the super-bratty little sister...a plot device that wears thin after a while. The sing-a-long in the second half of the film is also problematic--making it seem more like an overtly patriotic film instead of the subtle Harady-style film. And, unlike Andy, you can imagine Janie making it way past first or second base--especially with all those lusty soldiers hanging about during the party sequence! Overall, the film is a moderately enjoyable time passer and nothing more.

Joyce Reynolds seems a might grown-up for the role of Janie, a boy-crazy sixteen-year old in small town America who ditches her steady guy for a visiting soldier AND winds up on the cover of Life magazine (smooching at a blanket party) all in the same week! Non-stop barrage of wisecracks, put-downs, bull talk, and unfunny bits of business such as Janie's little sister bribing family members, Hattie McDaniel (as the maid) constantly scuttling after sassy kid sis, Janie's mother involved with the Red Cross, and Janie's father trying to write an editorial on the problems with today's teenagers (as the parents, stuffy, sexless Edward Arnold and pert, chatty Ann Harding make an unlikely couple, even for 1944; he looks incapable of helping to conceive a child much less raising two of them). Nominated for an Academy Award (!) for Owen Marks' editing, Warner Bros. followed this in 1946 with "Janie Gets Married". Reynolds must have outgrown her co-horts by then--she was replaced by Joan Leslie. *1/2 from ****

"Janie" is a nothing of a movie. It's a bit of fluff clearly marketed to the teen crowd of the time.

But it's also an incredibly cynical bit of WWII propaganda, advertising a version of America that's never existed so that soldiers would feel they had something worth fighting for. Everyone's innocent, everyone's happy. Everyone's affluent, except those who aren't and who never appear in movies like this. Everyone who matters is white, and everyone who's not white is just happy to be of service to white folks. The naughtiest things soldiers and their girls get up to is a bit of necking in the woods, because our boys are wholesome and our girls are virginal.

I did enjoy the writers' attempt to make up for the saccharine grossness of this film by planting double entendres all over the place in the script. For example, when a soldier has been trying in vain to get time alone with Janie in her house: "I couldn't get in through the front so let's see if I can get in the back." Or when Janie is throwing a party for a horde of soldiers with hot dogs for everyone, the maid says something about the house being full of boys and weenies. It's like even the writers couldn't take it and had to throw in some real world stuff just to get through making this picture.

"Janie" was nominated for a Best Film Editing at the 1944 Oscars, which has to go down as one of the most random nominations of all time.

Grade: C.