Search - Freckles Comes Home on DVD

Something for Everybody, Sort of

Laughing Gravy | Sacramento, CA United States | 11/14/2004

(2 out of 5 stars)

"Okay, ya have to hand it to Monogram Pictures - they made rotten movies, but at least they had good intentions. I mean, they TRIED to please.

Take FRECKLES COMES HOME. Some Monogram exec read this script and said, "This is a musical comedy gangster murder mystery! EVERY audience will love it!" He probably only cursed himself for not having the budget to throw in a few hunchbacked dwarf synchronized swimmers.

Freckles (Johnny Downs) returns from college to his little town; it seems his best friend is in some kind of trouble. On the bus back to Hicksville, Freck (you don't mind if I call him Freck, do you?) meets a very nice man who just happens to be a bank robber on the lam. Freck paints such a rosy picture of the quiet, secluded burg that the bank robber decides he'll hole up there until the proverbial heat is off. When Freck arrives in town, he discovers that his friend is going to lose the family hotel unless he comes up with money to pay the mortgage, and the friend needs to have the state's two feuding road commissioners patch up and agree to build a highway through the town so that the hotel will do a booming business, and the way the movie explains this plot, it seems that all this can be done in a day or two. There's a lot more plot, but isn't this enough for any of us?

Comic relief, such as it is, is provided by Mantan Moreland, who is trying to unload a phony "gold detector" on the unsuspecting Laurence Criner, who plays a chauffer named "Roxbury Barbeson Brown III."

"Why da third?" Mantan asks.
"Because I's de third person in my family wif dat name," Roxbury replies.
"What's the matter?" Mantan asks. "Ain't dey got no imagination?"

The other comedy relief is supplied by Irving Bacon as the town's feeble-minded constable, and he's about as funny as a blowfish suppository.

Music and charm are supplied by Gale Storm, who plays Freck's old girlfriend, who for reasons unknown doesn't like him anymore, and who instead falls in love with a con man who is out to rob the town's bank, and I'd tell you more, but then we'd be getting back into "plot" territory, and I promised I wouldn't. You either like movies like this or you don't (assuming there ARE other movies like this).

You'll find 15 minutes of entertainment packed into the film's 60-minute running time, and the Alpha DVD (who else would release stuff like this?) is one of their better ones. FRECKLES COME HOME would make a great double feature with... with... well, with a good movie.


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