"The Voice" Makes Metro Music

Sinatra Serenades Grayson in It Happened In Brooklyn (1947)

Where this gets most magical is a scene early on when Frank Sinatra arrives to home turf of Brooklyn and salutes the fabled bridge with song, him and the location before us with Manhattan skyscrapers for backdrop. It's dazzling appetizer for when MGM would return with Sinatra and Technicolor cameras to do On The Town three years later. Frank is here a gentle presence swallowed by uniform and timid of girls as would be the case until shark-suit and hipster days that would come. His was image change reminiscent of Dick Powell's, only Frank's was less calculation than circumstance of offscreen behavior that made his shy-guy persona impossible to sustain. Brooklyn finds him pal'ed up with Peter Lawford, who'd become a whipping boy to Sinatra the entertainment force, but that was years off and into their Rat Pack era.

Lawford plays reticent here as well; you don't expect either of the two to get girls, let alone trilling Kathryn Grayson as music teacher to tenement kids among whom, natch, is a musical genius. Sinatra as counsel and good influence to youth is advanced from start he'd made with The House I Live In, an RKO short wherein he preached tolerance and got probably his best-ever press for doing so. Frank still was boyish himself and plays off peers appreciatively, most of all Jimmy Durante, their together-songs a highlight of It Happened In Brooklyn. But Frank was said to have feuded with Durante, and disobedient to Metro bosses, who were known to spank hard for offenses less than his. Stronger and more lasting placement in musicals were scotched for Sinatra's willful ways, rescue when he later needed it not forthcoming because of ill will he left at Culver.

MGM had made success enough of tuners to add units devoted to them; Brooklyn's was headed by Jack Cummings, who along with Joe Pasternak, produced musicals generally a tier down from Arthur Freed's. Most from Cummings and Pasternak missed classic status, but cost less and often grossed better than the Freeds. It Happened In Brooklyn, however, lost money. Negative cost of $1.8 million was met with the same amount in domestic rentals, and foreign that was needed to go into profit came to mere $796K, an outcome that might have been expected, as what did those markets care about what happened in Brooklyn? Similar indifference was possibly felt in America's heartland, for that matter. It Happened In Brooklyn is available on DVD, and plays HD on Warner Instant.