My Dream is Yours (1949)

(On Cable TV, October 2022) It’s while digging into the lower tiers of Technicolor musicals that we find My Dream is Yours—a high-profile effort that nonetheless fails to distinguish itself. The plot will seem very familiar. Not necessarily because it’s a remake, but because it reuses very familiar elements that pop up all over the musical landscape: the frantic impresario, the new discovery, the self-destructive star, the peek at entertainment industries of the era… and so on. Properly mixed, those elements can be fun—but My Dream is Yours turns in the strict minimum and hopes we won’t mind. A few things keep the result from being overly bland—most notably acting performances from the dependable Doris Day, Jack Carson, Adolphe Menjou, S. Z. Sakall and Eve Arden. Then there’s a fantasy sequence that brings Bugs Bunny into a classic musical, which does remain noteworthy by itself. Finally, there’s the direction from veteran Michael Curtiz. The problem, though, is that while everyone does what’s expected of them, there’s no spark to the proceedings—everything is even slightly clumsy (Curtiz, how could you?) on the way to the kind of ending meant to be satisfying even when it isn’t. The touch of bitter realism of failed dreams is not bad, but it feels slightly out of place in a mode that didn’t know what to do with such elements. Stuck in the awkward middle between good and bad, My Dream is Yours will work if you’ve seen everything better in its principals’ filmography, but it’s not much of a highlight on its own.