It's a Most Unusual Day

Pleasant entry in the Screen Director's Playhouse series with Fred MacMurray and Marilyn Erskine most compatible as a long married couple taking a walk down memory lane via musical interludes.

The songs, all Jimmy McHugh compositions, are lovely and nicely performed to set the proper mood for each little vignette. If only they hadn't decided that they needed the composer to provide commentary for several of them. He has the personality of a lemming. A bonus to these little interludes is that one of the singers is Darla Hood from the Our Gang comedies all grown up.

But it's MacMurray and Erskine who make this worth watching, they have a nice natural somewhat spiky flow to their interactions making it seem as if they have been together for many years.

Best bit when Erskine walks in on a compromising but innocent situation where Fred is lighting two cigarettes for himself and a future female client and they are arguing about it later, Erskine says "You never lit a cigarette like that for ME!" and MacMurray comes back with "But you don't even SMOKE!" It's the little things.

Clever way to showcase several decades of composer Jimmy McHugh's popular songs. In a nightclub, husband and wife Terrance (MacMurray and Erskine) hear McHugh standards and reflect back on stages of their life together, from courtship in the 1920's to hardships in the 30's to wartime in the 40's. It's all very pleasant without anything heavy, though the McHugh ballads are likely not as familiar today. My only reservations are IMDb's lack of the song roster which they usually provide, and Fred MacMurray's eyebrows. Looks a little like Groucho Marx did that make-up. Otherwise, a pleasant, undemanding half-hour, with Leave It To Beaver's Jerry Mathers in a small role.

Fred MacMurray and Marilyn Erskine go to a show at the Mocambo. It features songwriter Jimmy McHugh at the piano, playing his old hits. As he does, MacMurray and Miss Erskine reminisce at the events of their lives together.

This episode of SCREEN DIRECTORS PLAYHOUSE is an effort by Claude Binyon, a competent if rather unremembered screenwriter and director. Like most of his work, it's derivative, with a structure that suggests George Stevens' PENNY SERENADE -- if you're going to steal, steal from best, say I.

McHugh was a very popular songwriter from the 1920s through the 1940s, with several songs among the Great American Songbook. Several of them show up here.

"It's a Most Unusual Day" is a surprisingly bad installment of "Screen Director's Playhouse". I've seen quite a few episodes of this old TV show...and I generally loved the show...but this one is tragically bad.

An older couple, Peter and Margie (Fred MacMurray and Marilyn Erskine) go out to a nightclub. While the singers do their numbers, these old songs from yesteryear get the couple thinking about the big milestones in their lives.

The episode suffers for two big reasons. First, you are expected to believe that this couple is as old as about 20 in the first flashback scene...and Fred is 48 and looks at least that age. Seeing him wearing a letter sweater and talking about the big football game he played in was just embarrassingly bad. I think had they cast young actors and used makeup to make them look old in some scenes would have worked so much better. Second, the nightclub singers were all pretty bad....and having good singers would have helped tremendously. Overall, a clear misfire for obvious reasons.

Fred MacMurray and Marilyn Erskine play a long-married couple who go to a nightclub to hear songwriter Jimmy McHugh (playing himself) play a medley of his old standards, sung by a bevy of pretty young singers. As the show progresses, the couple remembers back to when they were young and what certain of McHugh's songs meant to them over the years of their marriage. It's kind of a syrupy premise, but director Claude Binyon--who also wrote the episode--makes it even syrupier by his handling of it. It's not particularly well-written and, other than MacMurray, not very well acted. The direction is stiff and perfunctory, and for some reason Binyon has McHugh address the TV audience directly rather than the "nightclub" audience; "breaking the fourth wall" usually doesn't work out well--Oliver Hardy in the old Laurel & Hardy comedy shorts could do it and pull it off, but few others could--and it doesn't work well here.

Overall it's a rather undistinguished episode, with little going for it other than some nice McHugh songs. Worth a watch, maybe, but nothing to write home about.