Happy Landing was the third film Sonja Henie made for 20th Century Fox. She was a monster star in her day, the first female professional skater to become an international sensation. 20th Century Fox was a maverick studio in the 1930s that tended to make low-budget musical comedies that featured some unusual, and unusually good, bands. (The Glenn Miller Band are central characters in both Sun Valley Serenade and Orchestra Wives.) Don Ameche and Cesar Romero were part of their stable, and they’re both in this film.
Henie is a strange screen presence. I don’t quite get what audiences at the time saw in her. Aside from an eerie Aryan beauty, in most of her films she has the vibe more like a fairy than a human being. And not the cute kind — the Nordic kind. She’s unnaturally naive and fresh, but also inflexible and slightly menacing when she’s crossed. Beautiful Nordic psycho-fairies are barely distinguishable from stalkers. In Happy Landings, she becomes attached to Cesar Romero’s character, an airhead Don Juan who happens to be a famous songwriter-conductor, whose private plane is knocked off its course to Paris to a little Norwegian village — where a gypsy crone has predicted that the still-unmarried Sonja will meet her future-husband arriving from far away. Cesar delivers his usual sweet talk, and leaves her behind. But she follows him to New York.
It’s not very skillfully done, and has rough edges — and dark ones — that aren’t entirely resolved. Del Ruth was a prolific company director with a long career, who made some good comedies, but he’s evidently working with a very B-level budget here. Henie’s skating must have been very impressive at the time, but can’t come close to what contemporary Olympians can do. But it’s still fun. Romero is a delightful ham.
The beauties of the film aren’t the story and the skating, they’re in the music. The film features the Raymond Scott Quintette, which achieved some fame in the L.A. scene at the time. I can see why. Scott wrote several of the tunes, and clearly arranged some of the others (as Miller did in his films). The first time we see his band, it’s a gorgeous version of the Busby Berkeley neon-in-the-dark ensemble, but with much better music.
Ethel Merman steals the movie as Romero’s tempestuous badass lover (more dark edges). She gets two excellent Cole Porterish songs. — The first is “Hot and Happy,” by the songwriting team Pokrass and Yellen, whom I’d never heard before, and somehow got past the Decency League.
I never cared for Ethel Merman before, but I also never saw her in her prime. The showstopper for me is a Bullock-Spina song, “You Appeal to Me.” Check out what happens to the song musically when the Quintette walks through patio doors.
