Reynolds to the Rescue

The Unsaleable Molly Brown is a massive song-and-dancer derived from Meredith Willson's also-ran Broadway musical of 1-960. Defying the laws of levity, it follows an ebullient, money-grubbing Irish lass who marries a miner and gets rich so she can sashay in Denver's high society. When the bluebloods snub her, she flounces off to Yurrup to bring home some dukes and duchesses, finally earns her place among the snobs and saves her marriage--for reasons clear only to musical comedy authors--by surviving the Titanic disaster.

Plot, though vaguely based on reality, is only one of Molly's handicaps. The sound track seems to amplify every commonplace tune into a fugue for trip hammers. The red plush trappings of old Colorado, as Hollywood sees them, produce instant antipathy. And Broadway Leading Man Harve Presnell repeats his stage role with little more than stiff, strong-lunged precision.

But despite this freight of handicaps, Molly does not go under--mainly because of Debbie Reynolds. Having browbeaten MGM's executives into letting her play the part--a plum better suited, they thought, to Shirley MacLaine--Debbie Mollyfies the audience with all the raucous charm and irrepressible high spirits of a girl who is out to win the Derby astride a dead horse. As a comedienne, she spurns subtlety but makes the shortcoming seem a solid gold asset in a character who boasts: "I'm a vulgar, extravagant nouveau riche American!" She even works slick, if slightly unnerving, pathos into a moment of pining over her wedding ring, a jewel-encrusted cigar band bearing the fond inscription: "Always Remember Two Things--That I Love You, and the Name of the Bank."

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