It Happened to Jane (1959)

(On Cable TV, March 2021) I’m almost certain that I will forget the title of It Happened to Jane tomorrow, but I won’t so quickly forget that the film co-stars Doris Day and Jack Lemmon, or that its plot revolves around lobsters and trains. As a romantic comedy, it gets going when a lobster processing plant owner (Day) sees her shipment ruined by the neglect of a railroad company — the fun starts when she gets a friendly lawyer (Lemmon) to successfully sue the railroad and earns as payment… a train. The respective charms of both actors are well used, as they each play within their screen persona. The flip-side of this degree of comfort is that the film itself quickly becomes unremarkable. This is a middle-of-the-road effort for both of them, and it’s hard to say whether the finished film would have been better if it had played more seriously or more absurdly. (The smile we get in seeing Lemmon shovel coal in a train is a strong hint, though.) It’s pleasant to watch but curiously insubstantial, which is a weird thing to say given its plot elements and the quality of its stars. It doesn’t help that Day (an actress I find mildly likable but saddled with a bland persona) pales in comparison to Lemmon’s frequently-frantic antics. The final result is perhaps most interesting for its bucolic northeastern setting and winks at the burgeoning TV landscape rather than for how well it executes a lacklustre plot. If you accept that It Happened to Jane is an average comedy of its time, you also have to acknowledge that late-1950s comedies were in an odd place — too late for the golden era of musicals, but too early for the reinvigoration that the permissiveness of the 1960s would bring to the genre.