"Here Comes the Groom" in DVD-duo pack

Two Bing Classics! In "Just For You," widower Jordan Blake (Bing Crosby) has had wild success as a Broadway producer, but not much as a father. To win back their affection, he decides to take one last vacation with his kids. (Bob Arthur, Natalie Wood) before they're not "kids" anymore. But that's when Blake discovers that his son may have grown up sooner than Dad anticipated--he's fallen in love with his father's girlfriend, a musical-comedy star (Jane Wyman)! This lively film also stars Ethel Barrymore and features the Oscar-nominated tune "Zing A Little Zong." And when Bing zings, everyone has a great time.

"Here Comes the Groom": With the legendary Frank Capra in the director's seat, the inimitable Bing Crosby stars as an overseas reporter with a song in his heart...and room left over for two war orphans. They are his to adopt, if he can find a bride in just five days! His former fiancée is the perfect candidate, but she's destined to marry millionaire Franchot Tone. Or is she? Among the highlights of this sparkling musical romp is Der Bingle's crooning of the Oscar-winning song, "In The Cool, Cool Of The Evening."

In Here Comes the Groom, Crosby is a journalist who has come back from his World War II European post with a pair of orphans. He's been a dog to his girlfriend (Jane Wyman) and she is preparing to marry an obscenely wealthy man (Franchot Tone) after waiting for far too long for a proposal. Crosby needs her to marry him though, and who knows if he really loves her that much, but he can't adopt his young charges without her. So he harasses her, and her fiancée, until he bends her to his will.

The best non-musical scenes in the movie are between Crosby and Tone, who have fantastic chemistry. I don't think this has anything to do with the leading lady either. Der Bingle just tended to be a lot better onscreen with other men.

Franchot Tone is amusingly sly and Alexis Smith shows off some very silly physical humor in a rare comic role as Tone's distant, and smitten, cousin.

In the film Crosby is a successful Broadway producer and Wyman is his star. This time around there's not much romantic turmoil between the leads, most of the drama revolves around his troubled relationship with his kids.


There's a smattering of musical numbers, all of which feel spontaneous to the point of seeming entirely unrehearsed, and one in particular where Crosby attempts to show a leading man how he wants a number performed while appearing perfectly polished and completely nonchalant at the same time. There's also some lively lakeside footage that opens up the movie and gives it a bit of air. This is a good double feature for Crosby completists and devoted musical lovers and will likely hold some appeal for most other classic movie fans. Source: www.aclassicmovieblog.com

Like Jean Arthur in You Can't Take It With You, Emmadel (Jane Wyman) is a secretary who becomes engaged to her boss; in the Riskin version her boss, Wilbur Stanley, is a notorious slumlord Pete exposes in his paper as part of his campaign to win back Emmadel. Capra made Wilbur (Franchot Tone) over into a fairly decent chap who treats her much more kindly than Crosby does. Capra also hewed to the conservative counsel of Connolly in stressing the virtues of domesticity by having Emmadel "housebreak" the roving Pete.

Here Comes the Groom represents the culmination of the growing sexist trend in Capra's postwar work, mocking Emmadel's former occupation and having her succumb to Pete because of her emotional ambivalence toward the working world: "I'm gonna slow down. As a matter of fact, I'm gonna stand still! First egghead comes along can have me. I was born to be a mother, not a poised pencil." Her weary capitulation to the defeat of "security" is accomplished with an unconvincing change of heart, in a scene Capra added to the script: "I used the walk down the wedding aisle that was straight out of It Happened One Night,'" he recalled, "and I decided that if I was having to steal from my own pictures, it was time to take a long rest."

At the fade-out, Crosby croons, "Now, if a wedding is nigh—" and Wyman responds, "Bring your own FBI!" The intrusion of these unfunny elements into an attempt to make a light comedy showed how obsessive Capra had become about his own growing fears of governmental persecution ("This is still a democratic country," Crosby hopefully asserts at one point) and how impossible it was for him, that fall and winter of 1950-1951, to dismiss those fears with satire—how impossible, indeed, it had become for him even to make a comedy. Capra did not make another feature film for more than seven years.

During the shooting of Here Comes the Groom, he told Alexis Smith, whose playing of Wilbur's spinster cousin Winifred is one of its few delights, that he did not want to make any more movies because "It isn't fun anymore." "I was shocked," she remembered. "I thought he was kidding at first, he seemed to be enjoying himself so much on the set, but he said, 'No, I'm serious. I don't mean it isn't fun here, I mean the pressures that come from the schedule and from money.' That drove him crazy. He said he wasn't used to the banks moving into a position of creative control. This was before the drastic changes in the industry became apparent, and he was probably ahead of a lot of people in realizing what was happening. But I remember being very disturbed by it, because I didn't think Frank Capra should just walk away from it." -"Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success" (2011) by Joseph McBride