“Three Little Words” is loosely based on the true story of songwriters Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby. Starring Fred Astaire as Bert Kalmar and Red Skelton as Harry Ruby, we start the movie with Fred as a song and dance man, engaged to his dance partner Jessie (Vera-Ellen). He keeps trying to interject some magic into the show, but she thinks they’re better off sticking with dancing. What she doesn’t know and what he doesn’t tell her is that he’s moonlighting at another theater as a magician. One night his regular assistant doesn’t show up, and he has to rely on a stagehand to help him with the props. That stagehand is Harry Ruby, and Harry messes up horribly and ruins Bert’s performance. Bert vows to make Harry pay, but Harry manages to escape the wrath of the furious magician.
Harry has written a song and wants to sell it. He takes it to an agent, who in turn pitches it to Bert. When Bert sees Harry, he nearly strangles him, but they end up working together to perfect the song. Harry’s lyrics don’t quite match the music, so Bert helps tweak the words a bit and make it right.
A knee injury takes Bert off the stage, and he turns to writing even more songs. When the song he wrote with Harry takes off, the two men realize that they’re a winning team, and they keep writing together. Together they produced such songs as “Who’s Sorry Now,” “Nevertheless,” and “I Wanna Be Loved By You,” a la Betty Boop. For a couple of songwriters I’d never heard of before, I sure did recognize their work.
Bert and Jessie marry and everything seems to be going well for the songwriting duo, but then a big fight nearly destroys their careers and their friendship. Jessie and Harry’s wife, Eileen, conspire together to bring the men back together, and they work together to finish a song Harry’s been trying to get Bert to accept for years, which song became “Three Little Words,” their biggest hit.
This was a fun movie. The acting was good, the dancing, as always, was wonderful, and the back and forth banter between Red and Fred was really entertaining.
This film was not rated.
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