Geraldine (1953) User Reviews

Stan Freberg On Screen

[boblipton · 6/10 · 14 December 2023]

John Carroll is a teaching assistant in music at a small college, with a snobby attitude towards popular music and a snobby fiancee. His specialty is the folk song, and he's working on his thesis and performing with a student choir. Pop singer Stan Freberg is in town and hears one of the numbers. He wants to perform it, so he tells producer Jim Backus to get it for him, who tells assistant Mala Powers hat he wants John Carroll, who has a good voice, on a standard Tin Pan Alley song. Miss Powers convinces Carroll he'll be cutting an album of folk songs, which he agrees to. They slip in a modern love song, which they release as a single as by "The Mysterious Traveler" and it's a hit. Then ensues complications between Carroll and the two women.

It's not the first time this plot has been used, and this hits all the standard notes. The high points are the comic relief provided by Backus' smarmy, avaricious producer, and by Freberg's full-blown satire of teen rock and roll singers of the period; this was the period when his satires of "The Yellow Rose of Texas" and "Cry" were selling like mad, and it's interesting to see him here in person; most of his career was spent in radio work, or producing insane but very popular television and radio commercials.

To enjoy this movie, you need to know the popular music of the era, which I do. If you do, you'll enjoy this with a big smirk on your face. If not, well, Backus' character is still with us. He never goes away.

Freberg is better than Ray.

[horn-5 · 23 November 2005]

Janey Edwards (Mala Powers), working for Cambria Records, is managing the personal appearance tour of sobbing songster Billy Weber (Stan Freberg, as a parody version of pop-singer Johnny Ray), and Janey is disgusted when Billy leaves her at Santa Fe College with orders to get the rights, by hook or crook, to a folk song they had heard sung by Grant Sanborn (John Carroll), music instructor at the school.

Posing as a co-ed, Janey gets Grant to give her a recording of the folk song which he has made, and then takes it to her boss, Jason Ambrose (Jim Backus), in New York. Ambrose is unimpressed by the folk song, but is sold on Grant's voice and he assumes that Grant has been put under contract. Janey returns to the college to get Grant to sign a contract but not telling him that Cambria Records only wants him to record popular songs and is not interested in his folk music. Along with dummy recordings of his folk songs, Janey gets Grant to record one new song, "Geraldine", which immediately becomes a big hit.

Janey refuses to bring Grant back to New York to make more records because the company hasn't marketed his folk music, as promised. Ambrose tells her the folk-music album has just been ordered into release and, feeling now that Grant will get a fair deal, she returns to Santa Fe with the album. What she does not know is the album has been faked by Ambrose, and one of the records, included by mistake, is that of Billy Weber singing the folk song stolen from Grant.