BY JOHN M. WHALEN
“The
Second Time Around†is a 1960 comedy-western starring the late, great Debbie
Reynolds as a city widow with two children who decides to follow her and her
late husband’s dream of living out West. A friend of her deceased husband tells
her to come with the kids out to Arizona Territory where she can work in his
general store. She goes out alone at first only to find that by the time she
gets there the friend who owned the store has been killed. The sheriff (Ken
Scott) seems more interested in picking Debbie up literally at the train
station and carrying her off to the saloon than catching the killer. He tells
her that the store owner was killed by a man with a tattoo of a dagger on his
arm. Dum de dum dum. Remember that.
Debbie
tries to find work in town but ends up working out on Thelma Ritter’s ranch.
You remember Thelm-a she was in dozens of films back in the fifties/sixties
playing the role of the good friend/landlady/confidante who always befriends the
female lead. We also meet Steve Forrest as a slick gambler; Andy Griffith, as
the bashful 35 year old son of a lady ranch owner (he’s more like Gomer than
Andy in this one); and Juliet Prowse as Steve Forrest’s girlfriend.
It’s
a nice cast and director Vincent Sherman does a pretty good job keeping the lightweight
story based on a Richard Emery Roberts novel moving. (Screenplay is credited to
Oscar Saul and Cecil Dan Hansen—a pseudonym for Clair Huffaker). There are two
main conflicts in the plot. The first is a romantic triangle between Debbie,
Andy, and Steve. Sharpster Steve keeps getting the best of poor Andy all
through the story, but Andy keeps plugging along. At one point Steve salts a
river with gold nuggets and gets Debbie to go out there with him and prospect
for gold. His main intention is to get her to fall in the water so she’ll have
to take all her clothes off to dry. Forced to spend the night wrapped in a
blanket, Debbie sort of melts to Steve’s charm but of course not all the way.
It’s 1961, after all.
Nevertheless,
an irate Andy rides out there in the morning and socks Steve on the jaw, and
when Debbie finds out that Steve salted the river she slaps both of them in the
face and walks off in a huff. Of course you know what happens next. Steve socks
Andy and he falls in the river. It’s that kind of comedy, folks.
The
second conflict is between Debbie and crooked sheriff Ken Scott. She starts a
recall petition to force him to run for re-election. She’s convinced he knows
more than he’s saying about her dead husband’s dead friend. Scott calls in
reinforcements to help him stop her, one of whom turns out to be a guy with a
tattoo of a dagger on his arm. Dum-de-dum-dum. And somehow it is very
satisfying to see that this particular baddie is played by none other than the
great Timothy Carey. Carey was an actor whose weird looks and hulking size made
him a villain extraordinaire in such films as “One Eyed Jacks,†“Revolt in the
Big House,†“The Killing,†and dozens more. He’s just as scary in this film. In
cahoots with the sheriff he and two other no goods rob a bank and steal the $200
Debbie just borrowed.
Fighting
mad (that was basically Debbie’s thing, wasn’t it?) she gets people to sign the
recall petition and runs for sheriff herself. Guess what? This inexperienced,
tenderfoot female, who had never fired a gun before, and could barely lift feed
sacks into a wagon when she first got there, wins the election. You just
couldn’t keep Debbie down back in the sixties.
As
ridiculous as it sounds this is actually an entertaining 99 minutes. It’s
almost a time capsule of movies from that era—the kind of movie housewives and
mothers would go with their kids to watch at a summer afternoon matinee. You
could learn more about what the Sixties were really like from watching this
movie than you could watching 20 episodes of “Mad Men.â€
It’s
a 20th Century Fox Cinemascope presentation, and the sound was
recorded using Fox’s then state-of-the-art stereophonic sound system. I don’t
know the technical aspects of how they recorded movie sound back then, but in some
ways it was a much better system than the current, digital high def soundtracks
in vogue today. It almost seems like they only used right, left and center
microphones to pick up all the sound. Hence the soundstage on my Bose Cinemate
II Home Theater was incredibly lifelike—much like watching a play on stage. You
could actually hear the dialog. Even more vibrant, without being intrusive, was
Gerald Fried’s music score.
Incidentally
the movie gets its title from the song that Bing Crosby sung in Fox’s “High
Time†which was released the same year. Henry Mancini did the scoring for “High
Time†but the producers wanted a tune for Bing to croon and hired Sammy Cahn
and James Van Heusen to write it. Nobody sings it this time around—it just
swells up suddenly for the first time in the middle of the movie during a love
scene between Debbie and Steve. I guess Fox wanted its money’s worth from the
song.
This
DVD from 20th’s burn on demand Cinema Archive division has good
picture quality along with superb sound, but no special bonus features. But that’s
okay, seeing Tim Carey in a comedy was bonus enough.
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John M. Whalen is the author of "Hunting Monsters is My Business: The Mordecai Slate Stories" . Click here to order the book from Amazon)