Good Sam

One joke movie, the jest being that altruist Sam never met a schnorer he didn't like, whose endless variations on it become stale after about 30 min and downright dull after an hour, which is when I bailed. Some of Ken Englund's dialogue produces a chuckle but the dearth of physical humor is hard to understand from the director of "The Awful Truth" who cut his comedy teeth on Hal Roach two reelers. Plus Coop is even stiffer than usual and Anne Sheridan is given virtually nothing risible as the long suffering wife other than a couple sarcastic rejoinders. Give it a C.

This film was a box office flop when it debuted in 1948 and part of the reason was that the chemistry between Ann Sheridan and Gary Cooper was just not there. This picture was the typical holiday feel good movie in the attempt of "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town," (1936) or "Miracle on 34th Street." (1947). The theme of the film is the basic good qualities of people and how you have to take a chance on them. Of course, the Gary Cooper character goes overboard as the do-good person; he sacrifices almost everything for good quality people at the expense of his own family. Ann Sheridan is impressive here going between her laughter at her do-good husband and anger when things don't go their way. The end of the film reminded me somewhat of the classic- "It's A Wonderful Life," (1946) where everyone rallies around our protagonist at a time when things couldn't appear to be bleaker. This film is basically the fulfillment of the American dream by doing good to your neighbor. It fails to reach its height because after a while you get tired of Cooper's constant good deeds and his drunken scene near the end gives us a necessary break from all this and shows the human frailty.

This is a classic James Stewart movie. You can just hear George Bailey saying, "How can you ever have too much faith in people?" as his reason for continuing to loan money to his friends and neighbors. In fact, Good Sam is very similar to It's a Wonderful Life, but without the visit of Clarence the angel. It even ends at Christmastime! With two leads I don't normally like, it's quite something that I liked this movie. It's one of my favorite Ann Sheridan performances. My heart went out to her situation and how she always made the most of it. In fact, there's a scene where something terrible happens and she bursts into uncontrollable laughter! She plays the long-suffering wife of Gary Cooper, a man who takes Good Samaritan to the next level. He's constantly loaning money to people, friends or not, at the expense of his own bank account and family comfort. Ann's been longing for a home of her own, and while she constantly tries to scrimp and save (with the exception of getting a job herself or firing her maid, Louise Beavers) her husband gives their house fund away. The two main troubles are that his patrons never pay him back, and that he genuinely believes he's doing the right thing. He just can't stop. He believes in the goodness of human nature, and neither his wife nor his pastor, Ray Collins, can talk sense into him. Rent this one if you like the James Stewart Christmas classic. Jimmy would have been better in this movie, but Gary's not that bad. He and Ann have great chemistry together, and you can really feel their partnership in their marriage. Plus, any movie set during the holidays has an extra heartwarming factor to it.

Sam Clayton (Gary Cooper) is going the extra mile to be a good Samaritan. His wife Lu (Ann Sheridan) is starting to get annoyed. He loans his car to the Butlers which keeps getting worst. He's letting her no-good brother Claude to live with them. He keeps helping no matter what it costs him and it rarely goes well. Critics are a little too hard on this film. It's a fun light-hearted take on the feel-good sentimentalism of the era. Certainly, Cooper is deadening his performance. He's almost playing it as a clueless rube but his character knows more than he's letting on. On the other hand, I love Sheridan's performance. She never lets her character fall out of love with him despite her conflicting feelings. The bus is a fun setup and I love the woman rushing into the store. The 'It's a Wonderful Life' ending is a bit tacked on. I would be more happy with the brother and Shirley Mae as the emotional climax and ending. In a way, that's the most important gift Sam ever gives. That's the emotional heart because it's probably more important to Lu. The story makes the house more important by placing it at the end.

Along with the James Stewart film, made at the same time, "Magic Town," "Good Sam" belongs to a sub-genre of movies that should be known as "Frank Capra films without the vaunted 'Capra touch.'" I hadn't seen "Good Sam" in several decades. I remembered it as leaden, tedious and unimaginative, utterly devoid of the humor, whimsy and social commentary that became the hallmark of Frank Capra's films, which this can only have aspired to being. After viewing it again I now have to add that it should have been a profound embarrassment to everyone associated with it. The film's full of talented actors, its director was responsible for wonderful films ranging from "Duck Soup," to "Going My Way" to "An Affair to Remember," but I have seldom seen a film made by skilled, accomplished people that hits so many wrong notes.

IN WHAT MUST be regraded as an in-betweener (that being a story that is half way between being a farce and a sort of serious story), we see Gary Cooper in this curious comedy from Leo McCarey. We can't say that it doesn't have a great deal to offer; yet it never really realizes its full potential. BEING A PRODUCT OF the great Director McCarey, it has a great lineage from which it inherited many of the traits that had been become common ingredients of a feature comedy by that time. "That time", in this case, would be the late 1940's. MANY OF THOSE very traits were developed during those "golden" years of the silent movie era; being the mid to late 1920's. Two of the mainstays of technique were developed in the Hal Roach Studios. These were the slowing down of the comic action to allow for the building of a gag to a climax and effect; instead of rapid fire barrages of punches, kicks, custard pies and pratfalls. THE SECOND PRINCIPAL, which is a sort of methodical outgrowth of this deliberate style, has been named, "Reciprocal Destruction". This sort of extended gag witnesses the back and forth, ever escalating loosing of mayhem and malicious mischief on the property of others; with each side, all the while, never doing anything to prevent the other side from destroying ones own property. Got It? THE MAIN EXPONENT of such comic principles are those silent film shorts starring Laurel & Hardy. Mr. Leo McCarey is said to have been the main architect of these methods. IN THE FILM of which we are speaking, GOOD SAM, we have Mr. McCarey attempting to recapture some of the zaniness from by gone days by using generous portions of these now "old" reliables. Perhaps Leo was seen as having hit the zenith of his career in the Bing Crosby vehicles, GOING MY WAY and THE BELLS OF ST. MARY'S. THE RESULTNIG MOVIE comes out with what we must call mixed results in the final product. McCarey places a very contemporary, though highly idealized American family (Gary Cooper, Anne Sheridan, etc.) into a sort of latter day Laurel & Hardy comedy. AT THE VERY heart of the story is a spoof of what would happen if someone, e.g., the head of a typical, church going, God fearing, Judeo-Chrisyian household takes the Golden Rule to an extreme. It is in this that, we believe, is the crux of the problem. AND, JUST AS a word of caution, please do not confuse this picture with the Jack Lemmon starring comedy vehicle, GOOD NEIGHBOR SAM (); which we feel does a much better job of hitting the old bull's eye! WE HAVE TO believe that, while the feature is somewhat enjoyable, it is doomed to failure from the start. After all, how can you make the loving and good treatment of your neighbors into a fault and expect anything else?

The plot sounds pretty good -- an altruistic man who seems to be drowning in his own generosity. But something smells here...and in my view, it's the script's dialog and the director's pacing. And that's a little surprising, since the director is Leo McCarey, who usually directed some snappy comedies. Oh well, on this Capra-esque story, he just didn't meet the standard. Gary Cooper and Ann Sheridan seem uncomfortable in some of the scenes here, and Sheridan later admitted that the two of them had no chemistry. Cooper was good for this role, but seems to over do it in some scenes. Ann Sheridan is her usual snappy self, but seems uncomfortable. It doesn't help that the print shown on TCM is quite poor...particularly a fuzzy sound track. Production values here were so low that it looks like an early-1950s telepic. Bosley Crowther, upon the film's release said it was a satire of Capra-type films...as did one of our reviewers. But if it was, the ticket buying public didn't get it either...they stayed away in droves. So, if it was sincere, it was a flop. If it was a satire, it was a flop. This movie just plain stinks! One of those rare films that I watched all the way through, just to find out how bad a movie can be. And I say that as a viewer who usually enjoys both Cooper and Sheridan. This film doesn't belong on anyone's DVD shelf,

Good Sam is about a good samaritan, and how a couple has to deal with the troubles that the husband gets into doing all these good deeds. Kind of the testing of "Job" in the bible. The leads, Gary Cooper and Ann Sheridan, do a fine job, but I think the script and the direction are the weak links here. it's not the happy go lucky fluff story i was expecting. they belabor certain things, and drag them on too long, at least in the first hour: -- at breakfast, a scene about asthma goes on way too long; gets annoying, and they keep making fun of the one who has it. -- on the bus, a woman complains about the bus driver over and over and over and... -- at the store where Sam (Cooper) works, one worker thinks another co-worker is about to commit suicide. -- Lu laughs as she hears all of Sam's troubles. I think it's out of exhasperation with Sam's self-sacrificing, but she continues laughing even when the Butlers talk about a car accident, and the ensue-ing lawsuit, all of which which comes back on the Claytons. It was odd that she kept on laughing so hard and so long, as someone has already pointed out in the comment section. if it was supposed to be a hysterical laugh, it wasn't put across very well. This wasn't the best work for either Sheridan or Cooper. I loved Sheridan in "Man Who Came to Dinner", and ANY of Cooper's westerns beat this. It's entertaining, and there ARE some clever lines. Watch for Bill Frawley as the bartender, wearing a wig! There's also a weird edit about 90 minutes in. At one moment, Sam is walking down the street, and suddenly we see him nursing a bump on his head, being helped by someone. From the cast list on IMDb, we can see all the deleted scenes, so clearly things had been cut. Directed by Leo McCarey, who directed everything from the Marx Brothers to An Affair to Remember.

It took three years for Leo McCarey to get back to the screen after directing Bing Crosby in that double barreled triumph of Going My Way and The Bells of St.Mary's. Sad to say, Good Sam didn't quite live up to the standards of those two films. Leo took no Oscar nominations home for this one. Gary Cooper is a fine upstanding citizen with wife Ann Sheridan and two small kids and a mooching live-in brother-in-law played by Dick Ross. He's an impulsive do gooder, an easy touch for a sob story and a handout. He drives poor Ann to distraction. A sermon by minister Ray Collins at the beginning of the film on the virtues of charity put Cooper's generosity into overdrive. It's a nice film, maybe a bit too unbelievable. I can't believe that Ann Sheridan hadn't taken Coop in tow by this point of her marriage. Two noted baseball immortals, Babe Ruth and Dizzy Dean, had in common the fact that they both married strong willed women who took charge of the finances lest their hubbys give it all away. Still I did like the message of the film which is delivered by Harry Hayden who has a small role as a banker. Coop's generosity not only with cash, but co-signing loans for various people has put him as a credit risk. When he needs the money he can't get a loan from the bank. But later on Hayden comes over to the house and tells Sheridan that he changed his mind and approved the loan for their new house. Character and decency should count for something. It was a very similar message to one that was delivered in a far better film, The Best Years of Our Lives when Fredric March as a veteran who returns to his job as a bank loan officer, approves a loan to a veteran on the strength of his character. Character and decency should count, but Coop's pants pockets still needed a lock put on them.

Leo McCarey's Good Sam, the story of a suburban good guy who can't say no to his friends and neighbors, should have been a masterpiece. It has many of the same ingredients as It's a Wonderful Life, and was directed and co-written by a man who was at his best Frank Capra's equal. McCarey directed the best Marx Brothers picture, Duck Soup, plus the splendid Ruggles Of Red Gap, the heartbreaking Make Way For Tomorrow, the enormously popular (if overlong) Going My Way, and its sequel, The Bells Of St. Mary's. He was even in a partnership with Capra, to produce films independently, but lost his touch after the war. Good Sam shows McCarey's brilliance with actors, all of whom (Gary Cooper, Ann Sheridan, Ray Collins, William Frawley) are excellent, but the script is convoluted and the story, an inspired idea, is, as told, hard to follow. It's worth watching, for McCarey's directorial "touches", which are wonderful, but the film is plodding and episodic, and seems to go on forever.