Remembering Double Dynamite

Some years ago I happened on the 1951 film Double Dynamite on TCM. It's one of those films that I find myself surprised to have not heard of before because the casting would by itself suffice to make it a curiosity--the movie starring Frank Sinatra and Groucho Marx and Jane Russell together.

Still, that was not the prompt to write this post. What really struck me was that while the film's plot is a silly bit of fluff (even if this allowed it to be as good-natured and funny as it is) the situation was substantially rooted in a genuine, everyday problem--the cost of living, and what it means for a young couple trying to start a life together--the starting point of the story the situation of two young bank employees, Johnny Dalton (Sinatra) and Mildred Goodhue (Russell), who would very much like to get married and start a family, but with Sinatra's character inhibited by the fact that he can't seem to work out how they will be able to get along on their earnings. Indeed, before anything else what arrested me as I watched the film was the way Sinatra's character tried to compute everything as he sat with Russell, which actually had me recalling a similar scene in Hans Fallada's classic Little Man, What Now?

While watching the scene I found myself wondering when was the last time that a major (or even minor) Hollywood film, especially a light comedy like this one, was so pointedly alert to the problems of everyday life. To be honest, I don't think that anyone in a position to have a major say in the making of such a production today has any idea what things cost, especially for people like Johnny and Mibs--and don't much care, either. After all, even our journalists don't, as the folks at the "liberal" New York Times tell America's working people (as prices explode and their life expectancies fall!) "You've never had it so good." Instead at this stage of things such persons have pretty much all lived all their lives within a bubble of extreme privilege--while snarling at working class people who dare suggest otherwise about their "entitlement."