When My Baby Smiles at Me

If I am honest, I don't really get Betty Grable. She and Dan Dailey made Mother Wore Tights (zzz) and then they made When My Baby Smiles at Me a couple years later, and it's the old burlesque-dancer-loves-burlesque-comic routine, and, y'all, it's old. I get annoyed because this old song and dance is literally a diegetic musical in which we are enjoying old burlesque numbers and laughing at old burlesque jokes (well, supposed to be laughing, anyway), and yet we're also supposed to understand that we should look down on burlesque as a form. These musicals traffic in nostalgia for burlesque, and ask us to enjoy it, while simultaneously insulting it (and insulting our intelligence). 

When My Baby is even worse than this because most of it is unhappy. Dan Dailey is a terrible alcoholic in this one, and Grable sends him off to Broadway to become a star but he has no support system in New York so he drinks himself into a stupor and, star though he is, gets too wasted to keep his job.

But When My Baby's high point is an extraordinary confrontation between Dailey and Grable and a bunch of their friends in which Dailey is absolutely fucking plastered and totally losing his mind about Grable marrying another dude. He's incredible in this sequence, and it's shocking and devastating and really awesome.

Of course, it all ends how you'd expect it to, but When My Baby sure does go to some dark places that I was not expecting.