Wednesday, September 11 @ 7:30 PM / NEIU — The Auditorium at NEIU — 3701 W Bryn Mawr Ave
Tickets: $10 at the door
Directed by Mitchell Leisen • 1944
As he embarks on a suicide mission over the Pacific, US Navy pilot Dan Bellamy (Fred MacMurray) radios thoughts of his beloved “Piggy” to a nearby comrade. His stirring farewell, recorded by chance, is broadcast on the radio back home as comfort to an exhausted nation. Except Dan survives the attack and learns that his epitaph has been misinterpreted: Piggy is actually his pooch, but his coworkers at the Prudential Typewriter Company believe his confession referred to office accountant Peggy (Claudette Colbert). Dan’s furlough lasts only two weeks, so surely he and Peggy can keep up the rom-com ruse until he ships back, can’t they? Earlier that summer, Preston Sturges had managed to thread the needle and skewer homefront hypocrisy in palatable fashion with Hail the Conquering Hero, but director Mitchell Leisen and scripter Norman Krasna’s Practically Yours met a much harsher critical reception when it debuted in December 1944. “It has the ugly contours of a most callous and inhuman jest … This is no time to joke about grief,” concluded Bosley Crowther in the New York Times. Leisen himself dismissed the film in later years, recalling “it’s supposed to be a brilliant comedy and it was about as funny as a crutch to me.” Yet Practically Yours became a box office hit. Though its popular reception hasn’t endured, it remains ripe for reassessment. Maybe eighty years is long enough for us to come around to James Agee’s original appreciation of this “interestingly nasty” satire of super patriotism: “Lurking in a great many odd corners of the show there is a really remarkable amount and variety of receptive hatred.” (KW)
88 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from Universal
Preceded by: “The Atom Goes to Sea” (True Boardman, 1954) – 12 min – 35mm
NEXT UP: CHRIS + HEATHER’S 16mm BIG SCREEN BLOWOUT! on September 17 at the Music Box
