Butt News Movie Club #33: Here Comes the Groom

In Which Bing Crosby Human Traffics French Orphans, but Hey! No Blackface!

[Hi, dear ones, it’s me, Lindy! I’m sooooooo excited to welcome you to the first ever SPECIAL EDITION SPECIAL VIP GUEST BUTT NEWS! I knew Meagan Hatcher-Mays was the funniest person alive from the moment we met in the Garfield High School gym in 1999. But I didn’t know that our whole friendship was leading up to this moment, when she would guest-write a holiday Butt News about her favorite creepy non-holiday holiday movie, 1951’s Here Comes the Groom!

If you enjoy this Butt News, which you will because it’s literally a masterpiece, go subscribe to Meagan’s new Substack, Swamp Person! And listen to our podcast, Text Me Back!

Also, if you’re looking for a last-minute INSTANT holiday gift, have I mentioned lately that I’m on Cameo? I’ll be banging out a ton of Cameos today and tomorrow so people get them in time for Christmas! You could be one of the people! I’m also teaching an online master class in February called “How to Be Funny When You’re Sad,” if you have any aspiring memoirists in your life whom you really really love! Anyway, now please enjoy this extremely insane “comedy” about the buying and selling of war orphans!]

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Hello blessed Butt News Subscribers! I am not Lindy, I am her friend, podcast co-host, and non-film newsletter haver Meagan Hatcher-Mays, and Lindy has asked me to write a post about a Christmas movie. Instead of doing that, I have selected a movie that is in no way a Christmas movie, but became one in my family because it was always on Turner Classics in the early Christmas Day hours, right about when parents (mine) had just finished putting all the gifts under the tree and assembling the stockings and whatnot.

It is directed by Frank Capra, though! It’s a 1951 classic called Here Comes the Groom, and it stars Caucasian Christmas Crooner Bing Crosby alongside Jane Wyman, who is also known for wisely leaving her marriage to handsome antichrist Ronald Reagan.

The film opens with Boston Morning Express Managing Editor George Degnan (Robert Keith) defending Pete Garvey’s most recent piece, “WANTED: A MOTHER,” apparently the latest in a series of articles about war orphans that has led to 300 children being adopted in the Boston area alone! For some reason the publisher has called George to complain about this? Because it’s “sob stuff”?? Sir, THREE HUNDRED WAR ORPHANS have been adopted due to Pete’s journalism??? WHY ARE YOU SO MAD ABOUT THIS! The publisher wants to fire Pete for being maudlin. George balks! Fire Pete Garvey???

Actually, George kinda does want to fire Pete, for being annoying. George is very mad because he told Pete to return to Boston, but he hasn’t come home yet because he’s too busy matchmaking orphans in France. And now it’s costing George an overseas phone call to tell him to get his hiney back to Massachusetts, and I assume an overseas call in 1951 was probably $800 million dollars? But then again the newspaper industry was also solvent back then so maybe it wasn’t that big of a deal.

Anyway, Pete can’t be bothered with whatever George is hollering about because he’s surrounded by his best friends (French orphans). He simply can’t return to Boston. The kids love Pete’s ass and think he’s the most interesting person on earth, and honestly I think that might be true. Bing Crosby (evil) might actually be the most charismatic person who ever lived, and the moment he appears on screen it truly does feel like nothing else matters. Especially not “work” at “a newspaper.”

Meanwhile, Pete’s two best orphan friends, Bobby (Jacques Gencel) (the subject of “WANTED: A MOTHER”), and Susie (Beverly Washburn) are fighting the other children over who gets to deliver Pete’s mail to him. A literal physical fight. This is interrupted when two Americans show up to adopt Bobby! Because they saw him in Pete’s article! Because apparently the newspaper industry was SO SOLVENT they were sending editions of the Boston Morning Express to Paris!!!

Bobby doesn’t want to be adopted by these two weirdos, so he and Susie make a break for it. Pete rounds him up and tries to make the sale to the Americans, Walter Godfrey (Alan Reed, the VOICE OF FRED FLINSTONE) and “Mrs. Godfrey” (Minna Gombell), who doesn’t get to have a first name. Bobby is rude and runs away and Walter admits he doesn’t even want kids, or even like them at all, it’s just that his drag of a wife insists on it.

Pete realizes that Walter Godfrey is THE Walter Godfrey of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and boy, does he have an orphan for him! Her name is Theresa (Anna Maria Alberghetti) and she HAS THE RANGE, baby. Pete Garvey, who is also Bing Crosby so he knows how to play the piano, sits down to jam out “Caro Nome,” an aria from the opera Rigoletto. Okay, bitch! Walter is initially wary of Theresa’s skills. Idiot! Because she fuckin’ whips it!

Walter’s gob is smacked to the max. Sure, he hates kids, but THIS kid can make him a LOT OF MONEY!! But, uh-oh, Theresa steps forward to hug Walter and Mrs. Godfrey and she stumbles. Theresa’s BLIND. That’s why she’s still in the orphanage! No one wants her, even though they could literally be making millions of dollars off her pipes! Walter and Mrs. agree to adopt her after about 8 minutes of extremely awkward silence. Mrs. Godfrey says, “Walter, let’s take her home!” To which Walter replies, “Home?! She will be in the Metropolitan and Carnegie Hall!”

Another successful Orphan Match by Pete Garvey! And congrats (?) to Theresa, whose fundamental needs I doubt will be met by the Godfreys!

Pete and the rest of the orphans celebrate Theresa’s good fortune by singing what is the first of many Bing Crosby songs in this movie that fucking rock. Every single song is an intergalactic banger and I’m not kidding in the slightest. This one is called “Your Own Little House,” and as I actually review the lyrics and context I realize this song is insane but anyway it’s about how even though none of these kids have a home, they all have their “own little house,” which is themselves. Your eyes are the windows! Your brain is the attic!

After a long day of schmoozing the absolute shit out of these kids so that they’re no longer depressed and all their problems are solved, Pete returns to his room to finish packing, because, alas, he has told George he’s coming home.

Bobby and Susie are despondent. Bobby, who speaks English, is trying to figure out why Pete is leaving. Susie, who does not speak English, keeps saying “qu'est ce qu'il dit??” in such a way that you can tell that was the only French phrase the American actress who played Susie could deliver.

Anyway, Pete explains to Bobby that George is like a father to him even though I think they’re the same age, and he has to go. But he and Bobby will always be big time bros 4 lyfe and good luck with post-war France and all. Bobby stoically shakes Pete’s hand and says goodbye. Pete reminds him that “we always leave them singing,” and Bobby tries to join him in a duet of “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” before bursting into tears and running off with Susie.

Pete does not follow him, although Bobby leaves behind that piece of mail Pete got earlier. It’s a VINYL RECORD that Pete’s paramour Emmadel Jones (Jane Wyman) recorded a sassy message on and then air-mailed to France! I bet you didn’t even know you could do that! Pete puts the record on to listen, and discovers Emmadel was apparently so irritated at Pete’s gallivanting that she went to a recording studio, recorded an absolute face-melter of a message about what a shitty boyfriend he is, then went to the post office to mail it internationally! Pete, you pissed her off BAD!

This scene is fun as hell, by the way. Obviously this movie came out about 50 years or so before CGI, so if you wanted to do something like, say, make it appear as though a very tiny Jane Wyman was standing on top of a record player speaking her message to Bing Crosby, you’d probably have to glue two negatives together or something, and end up with something like this:

Emmy delivers her scorcher, complaining that Pete has left her alone, made her get a job, when she’s meant to “be a mother, not a poised pencil!” If Pete was half the man he said he was, she’d be “the mother of a brood by now,” including at least one kid in the 5th grade. But the real fun here is when the record skips and tiny Jane Wyman has to keep saying the same lines over and over again -- “I DO NOT still love you -- still love you -- still love you -- still love you” -- and gets so mad she kicks the needle off the record and falls down. Sensational moviemaking magic!

Anyway, Pete discovers that -- gasp! BOBBY is in the 5th grade! His creepy little wheels start to turn. He sends a message to Emmy to tell her the wedding is on, and he’ll be returning to her on “Flight 7” the following Tuesday. I’m dying at this flight number, by the way. How many flights total do we think were popping off every day from Paris to Boston in 1951? Like 12? Alas, Pete is not on Flight 7. Emmy is furiosa and storms off.

Meanwhile, back in France, Bobby has literally been diagnosed with acute melancholia at the loss of Pete. But Pete’s back! It turns out he didn’t go to America! He was scootin’ all over France TO GET BOBBY’S BIRTH CERTIFICATE! BECAUSE HE WANTS TO ADOPT BOBBY! And make Jane Wyman raise him! We love to surprise women with a random French child!

But wait! Snag alert! Pete can only take Bobby, but not Susie. Because Susie is a little girl “and he can’t take a little girl to America” because “there’s certain things you have to do.” Umm what? Wh-what? Bobby is despondent. He cannot leave Susie! He found her under a bush where the Germans left her! He “owns” her, as he puts it! Pete puts his fedora back on. Time to find Susie’s birth certificate.

Somehow he does this, although I literally cannot imagine how, and the trio is off to America. Great news! It’s time for ANOTHER BING BANGER!!!

Bobby looks out the window of the airplane, sees America, and declares himself Christopher Columbus 2. Bing rises from his enormous and luxurious 1950s airplane seat immediately, and his fellow passengers grab their instruments from bulkhead storage. It turns out that Pete, Bobby, and Susie are on an airplane with Louis Armstrong, Cass Daley, Dorothy Lamour, and Phil Harris (Baloo from the Jungle Book), and they’ve waited until the seatbelt sign has been turned off to sing a deeply problematic but nevertheless insanely good song about Christopher Columbus discovering America. The lyrics ARE offensive! And the shit swings!

These children will never have a better day in this country again.

Pete, Bobby, and Susie arrive unannounced at Emmy’s home in Boston where she is, reasonably, taken aback that her deadbeat boyfriend has shown up with two kids, one of whom does not speak English. Pete, an idiot, thinks his wedding to Emmy is still on but NOPE! While he was running around trying to find the birth certificates of two kids she didn’t even know existed, Emmy got engaged to someone else! His name is Wilbur Stanley (Franchot Tone), he’s the scion of an Old Boston Family, and he’s worth $40 million in 1951 dollars which is roughly 40 billion quadrillion dollars in today’s money!

Pete finally realizes this and, instead of being normal about it, begins to devise a plan. I mean, the innocent children involved here are already calling Emmy “mother,” because he told them to, because he’s insane, so what else can he do but break up her marriage to Wilbur? Emmy’s mother is not happy about this, as the wife of a destitute alcoholic mackerel fisherman, although Emmy’s father, the aforementioned destitute alcoholic mackerel fisherman, loves Pete and chaos so he’s down to help with the plot.

But first, Pete needs to find a home for himself and Bobby and Susie. Emmy agrees to help him, because Wilbur is a landlord and his company owns many homes in the area. They head to the office to check out some listings and through exposition we learn these two crazy kids grew up together in Gloucester, where Emmy was a headstrong ragamuffin who called her parents Maw and Paw, sang, laughed loudly, and wrestled. But she’s different now. The new Emmy calls her parents Mother and Father AND she washes her face. Pete can’t believe it.

Pete tries to win over Emmy by dropping yet ANOTHER freakin’ banger, the song “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening,” which…don’t listen too closely to the lyrics and just bop, if you can.

Insane charisma absolutely oozing from this performance, but it doesn’t work on Emmy because Wilbur is hot AND rich.

Anyway, Pete finds a house he likes and due some of his own machinations related to his plot to break up Emmy’s marriage to Wilbur, it is already rented. But he tricks Emmy into leasing it to him anyway, arrives at the house with his orphans and his furniture, calls the press to try and make Wilbur look bad because he can’t take possession of the house for which he has a lease but which already has an occupant, which induces Wilbur to show up, and like an actual BDE legend, Wilbur says OF COURSE YOU CAN MOVE INTO MY ENORMOUS GUEST HOUSE BECAUSE I’M NOT SCARED OF YOU BING CROSBY!!

The game is officially afoot. Love is a game and the prize is Emmy! Romantic! Women love this shit!

The next day, Emmy is trying on an enormous and incredible and beautiful dress that I guess she’s planning on wearing to breakfast???

Emmy and Wilbur swan downstairs to meet his whole family, while Emmy’s parents eat breakfast in bed. Wilbur’s whole family is a bunch of ghostly, ancient caucasians who haven’t reproduced in ages because, as Emmy’s father points out, they all sleep in separate twin beds. Among them is Cousin Winifred (Alexis Smith), who is THIRTY YEARS OLD and ugly because she wears menswear and flats. The noted ugly costume.

Emmy is presented with a gift from the family and it’s literally a check for $500,000 and a bonus for every “colt” she produces, since their family tree is withering and covered in sexless dust. Emmy is just about to promise to birth 48 new Stanley children when all of a sudden a familiar voice comes wafting over the estate -- why, it’s goshdarn Pete Garvey and he’s in the dang gatehouse with the orphans! Paw is delighted; Maw and Emmy less so. Emmy sprints in her gown toward the gatehouse to let Pete have it.

Emmy and Pete troll each other and Pete realizes he can use Winnie as part of his nefarious plan to break up Emmy and Wilbur by hooking Winnie up with Wilbur. Sure, they’re cousins, but technically they’re KISSING cousins so it’s totally cool. And makes a lot of sense for the “we need new babies” problem this family is having. Anyway, luckily for Pete, Winnie shows up to the gatehouse for various reasons, and the pieces fall into place. It turns out Winnie is tall, has hot gams, and is a major babe. AND Winnie TOTALLY has a crush on Wilbur and has her whole life. This’ll be easy! Pete agrees to take Winnie under his wing and make her Winnie THEE Stallion. Meanwhile, Wilbur fills Emmy in on the reason for Pete’s presence on the grounds and she becomes adamant that she will never marry his stankin’, poor ass. Emmy runs off to I guess change into a different, larger dress.

Unbeknownst to Emmy, Wilbur meets up with the immigration official who is overseeing Pete’s efforts to adopt Bobby and Susie. Pete needs to be married by Saturday or the children will be deported back to France. Wilbur, realizing that Emmy has already been emotionally blackmailed into serving as a mother for these waifs, offers to “put in a bid for the little Frenchies” since he is, in fact, getting married on Saturday. And I guess this was how immigration worked in 1951 because the immigration guy is like, sure. Good enough.

Wilbur makes his way to the gatehouse, where Pete is teaching Winnie how to walk like a sexpot, laugh like a human being, and, naturally, how to wrestle. Emmy wrestles, and Cousin Winnie might need to win a ladder match against her for Wilbur’s heart, you see. Pete encourages Winnie to show Wilbur what she’s learned and she puts Wilbur in a headlock immediately. Unfortunately this is the most sexy thing that’s ever happened to either of them and Winnie runs off in humiliation.

But the next morning, Winnie is hot!

Emmy is displeased -- she’s trying to transform into a blue-blooded Stanley, while Winnie is trying to transform into a dirty-talking fisherman’s kid with hot legs, every man’s dream, literally.

They head to the wedding rehearsal where Winnie continues to be devastatingly hot. Long story short, Emmy gets jealous, loses her cool, and beats the brakes off Cousin Winnie with several well-timed People’s Elbows. One day of wrestling training simply won’t be enough to take down THE Emmadel Jones.

Emmy runs off, furious. Wilbur assures her that he loves her whole deal, even the rather terrifying wrestling skills. With one day until Saturday, and no bride successfully tricked into marrying him, it appears Pete’s about to catch an L and lose the kids.

Later that evening, Pete, Paw, and George are commiserating when Wilbur comes in to tell him not to worry -- he’s taking the frenchies. They’ll “make a wonderful wedding present” for Emmy! This doesn’t sit well with Pete. Those are his fake kids! But they’re out of ideas. All he can do is sing one last song to Bobby and Susie, which I don’t particularly care for, which is called “Bonne Nuit” and it’s about sleeping if you’re French.

The next day is wedding day! Pete is a loser! Go get that money, Emmy!

But alas, something strange is going on. George, Emmy, and Paw let it slip: Pete has kidnapped the Frenchies and now the FBI is after him!

Emmy is distressed, but walks down the aisle nevertheless. The vows are about to commence when a kerfuffle arises at the back of the venue. It’s Pete! And the kids! And the FBI! The FBI has orders to personally return Bobby and Susie to Wilbur and there was simply no better time or place to do this besides in the middle of his televised nuptials! Wilbur tries to take the kids and they go apeshit. There is simply nothing else to be done. Emmy has to marry Pete. Wilbur pulls Pete up to the altar and due to the transitive property of marriage licenses, this is all legal! They get married! Okay! I think this is one of those core memories they’re always talking about.

Anyway, you guessed it, this was all a ruse. The FBI guy was actually Pete’s colleague. There was no danger! But Wilbur doesn’t seem to mind, because Winnie is hot now. “Wanna wrestle?” he asks, unbelievably sexily, as Pete runs off with Emmy and the kids. A happy ending for all!

Is this movie good? No. Is it nevertheless fun as hell? Yes. Do I watch it every year because I’m blinded by my own nostalgia and family traditions? Absolutely. Should you watch it? Yes, dude. It rocks. I’m so sorry. And unlike some other explicitly Christmas-y Bing Crosby movies, no one shows up in blackface! You can’t lose!