Directed by Richard Fleischer / 1952

While waiting over a year for mercurial RKO head Howard Hughes to sign off on his B-picture breakthrough, The Narrow Margin, journeyman filmmaker Richard Fleischer anxiously dreamt of moving up a rung or two in the Hollywood racket. The opportunity finally came when Stanley Kramer offered Fleischer the chance to direct The Happy Time for his eponymous production company at Columbia - a project that Fleischer giddily described as "no melodrama, no murders, no evil wooden puppets, but people, warm, human, alive, and funny." Based on a Robert Fontaine novel that had already been imported to Broadway by Rodgers and Hammerstein (oddly, not as a musical - that would have to wait for the Kander & Ebb version of 1968), The Happy Time is a curious effort to bring together the sentimental coming-of-age story and the ever-so-slightly-blue sex comedy. (The original tagline: "Finally a Film on That Touchy Titillating Topic!") Disney mainstay Bobby Driscoll stars as Robert 'Bibi' Bonard, a French-Canadian kid growing up in Ottawa in the mid-1920s. Surrounded by a family of aspiring rou?s (uncle Louis Jourdan, "the Casanova of Canada"), aging carousers (grandp?re Marcel Dalio), and unaccountably level-headed folks (father Charles Boyer), Bibi develops a crush on magician's-assistant-turned-housemaid Mignonette (Linda Christian) and learns to stick up for himself. (KW)

94 min / Stanley Kramer Productions / 35mm from Sony Pictures Repertory

Short: "Your Thrift Habits" (Coronet Films, 1948) - 11 min - 16mm