IF YOU KNEW SUSIE

US, 1948, 90 minutes, Black and white.
Eddie Cantor, Joan Davis, Allyn Joslyn, Charles Dingle, Sheldon Leonard, Bobby Driscoll.
Directed by Gordon Douglas.

If You Knew Susie is a light-hearted comedy with music. It is a film of its time – or before its time, pre-World War II. It is a tribute to vaudeville and burlesque and a nostalgic look back. It actually starts with white singers and dancers in black-face, which seems rather embarrassing in retrospect.

However, it is a cheerful film, especially with the comedy of Joan Davies, who can sing, dance, has good comic timing as well as an ability to mug. She had a career on stage, on screen and in the 1950s, on television. But top billing is given to Eddie Cantor, a very popular entertainer of the first half of the 20th century – some years after this film there was a biography film, The Eddie Cantor Story, starring Keefe Brasselle.

While Cantor was popular on stage and in some films, he does not make quite such an impression now. He could sing popular songs like the title for this film, but had a limited manner, a lot of hand-clapping and a kind of running-jumping on the spot. And this recurs often during this film.

It starts with the performance, the farewell to show business, the hopes of the family to settle down, mother and father with two children. When Cantor impersonates Paul Revere in a commemorative ride, he takes the opportunity to advertise a new inn which will serve colonial food. The mayor is dead against this and forbids the townspeople to come. He has a snobby attitude towards the Parker family and insist that their letter about an ancestors assisting of George Washington is a fake. When the Parkers decide to sell their house, they find a document authenticating their claim.

Most of the rest of the film is set in Washington where the couple go to verify the claim. There is a great deal of comedy about bureaucracy in Washington as the claim is investigated and found to be authentic, an enormous amount of accumulated interest bringing the national debt to the Parkers of some billions. They are helped in their search by a conman, Allyn Joslyn, who accommodates them in his editor’s luxury apartment, then persuades the editor that they have a top story, then persuades him that they are a top story when their claim is denied. The headlines against them make life difficult and they are embarrassed. Their helper decides to set up an abduction so that they will get headlines again – but the plan is overheard by rival gangsters who take them on. There is some drama as well as some comedy with the gangsters – and a touch of the Damon Runyon style with one of their guards who is over-eager to hurt them and to bump them off.

When the Parkers withdraw their claim to the money, they return home happily, meet up with their children and grandma again, and the son of the mayor who is in love with the daughter (and to have an opportunity to sing and dance in the middle of the film). The inn opens, everybody patronises it, and all is well.

Of interest, the son is played by Bobby Driscoll, on loan from Disney, who is to appear in The Window as well as be Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island. The film is directed by Gordon Douglas, a veteran from 1935 who came into his own and with more up-market films in the 1960s and 1970s.