Texas Carnival (1951)

User Rating:

5.4/10   

Director:

Charles Walters

Writers:

Dorothy Kingsley (screenplay)
Dorothy Kingsley (story)

Release Date:

5 October 1951 (USA)

Genre:

Romance | Musical | Comedy

Tagline:

FOR THE MILLIONS WHO LOVED "THE GREAT CARUSO" AND "SHOW BOAT" ANOTHER BIG MGM MUSICAL!

Plot:

A showmen team is mistaken for a cattle baron and his sister. |

Plot Keywords:

Beautiful Woman

Cast

Esther Williams	...	Debbie Telford
Red Skelton	...	Cornie Quinell
Howard Keel	...	Slim Shelby
Ann Miller	...	Sunshine Jackson
Paula Raymond	...	Marilla Sabinas
Keenan Wynn	...	Dan Sabinas
Tom Tully	...	Sheriff Jackson
Glenn Strange	...	Tex Hodgkins
Dick Wessel	...	Concessionaire #1
Donald MacBride	...	Concessionaire #2
Marjorie Wood	...	Mrs. Gaytes
Hans Conried	...	Hotel clerk
Thurston Hall	...	Mr. Gaytes
Duke Johnson	...	Juggler
Wilson Wood	...	Bellboy

Runtime:

77 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Sound System)

Certification:

Finland:S | Sweden:15 | USA:Approved (PCA #18274)

Company:

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)

Movie Connections:

Featured in That's Entertainment! III (1994)

Soundtrack:

Whoa, Emma!

Not one of Esther's more lavish aquacades!

This brash and often noisy Technicolor trifle is definitely not for those expecting to enjoy a series of Esther's more elaborate water ballets. She spends a minimal amount of time in the water in this one and there's only one trademark production number, a dream sequence in which she floats sinuously about in Howard Keel's darkened hotel room, trailing yards of diaphanous white veiling, that comes close to what her fans might have lined up at the box-office hoping to enjoy.

Esther, however, looks wondrously healthy and pretty throughout, the very picture of an All-American Girl, acting with her usual pert insouciance. Howard gets to unleash his rich bass-baritone in two or three forgettable songs, though he certainly looks convincing as a lanky ranch foreman. Red Skelton contributes his usual shtick, at some tedious length here and there, and even manages to amuse today's audiences with a skillfully executed pratfall or two. Ann Miller, ever the most energetic in the cast, seems to come out on top in this pastiche, tossing off a couple of her patented leg-tossing, tippy-tapping dance amazements, choreographed by the reliable Hermes Pan.

M-G-M touted this as 'Another Big MGM Musical' but it appears to have been rather thriftily produced, with some minimal location work that looks notably cobbled together, especially in a concluding and very extended chuck wagon race, which involves some dangerously risky stunt work, by the way.

Keenan Wynn lends some very sour support, as a Texas millionaire, overly fond of his bourbon. Skelton also is supposed to imbibe a prodigious amount in one drawn-out sequence, and we're meant to find it riotously funny, something that may have been acceptable back in the early 1950s but which fails to amuse as easily today, with our greater awareness of the very deleterious effects of excessive alcohol intake.

It's also amusing to note how very much inflation has devalued the American dollar in the more than half-century since this film was released. A multi-room hotel suite large enough to fill one of M-G-M's average soundstages is quoted as costing what would be the usual price in today's dollars for a single, modest hotel room in a smaller U.S. city. A doctor makes a house call, to tend a briefly ailing Ms. Williams (She's fainted from hunger, poor thing!), for a fee that wouldn't cover the charge for administering an aspirin anywhere in a U. S. health facility today. A beautiful Lincoln Cosmopolitan convertible is smashed into a tree (mercifully, off-camera) and the quoted estimated tariff for its repairs (supposedly including a ruined dashboard) is so laughably minuscule that the total wouldn't cover a six months' insurance premium assessed for an ultra-safe contemporary driver with no traffic citations on his/her record over many prior years of accident-free mileage. What price progress?!?