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Texas journalist Eddie (Guy Madison) inherits a few thousand Dollars -
just enough to give up his job and move to New York with plans to become a
Broadway playwright. On the way there though, he has an accident but is
saved and nursed back to health by Perry (Diana Lynn), who thinks he's a
criminal on the run, but she helps him anyhow and even accompanies him to
NYC, where they part ways and she wants to become a stable girl in
Brooklyn - but with little success. She struggles to get another job, but
the one job she does get, as a Coney Island Water Nymph, she loses due to
Eddie's well-meant but ill-placed interference. She does pick up and
reform an aging female pickpocket (Florence Bates) though and tells
everyone she's her and Eddie's mother. Eddie meanwhile finds it
impossible to place his play on Broadway, and after a series of failures,
he's ready to give up ... when he runs into barkeep Mike (James Dunn), who
after a drunken night leads him to Gaboolian's (Michael Chekhov) Riding
Academy, basically a warehouse full of mechanical horses, camels,
elephants and the like with each having a certain theme and backdrop to
them. He figures working at Gaboolian's would be the perfect job for
Perry, and since Gaboolian simply cannot afford to pay an assistant, he
secretly pays her wages out of his own pocket. However, his money
eventually runs out and he decides to go back to Texas - but upon saying
good-bye, he and Perry (finally) confess their love to one another, and
they end up buying Gaboolian's Academy - and at first lose tons of money
on it, until on Christmas Eve, they find the perfect the perfect pitch for
it involving a bunch of drunk Santa Claus's and the police. Once the place
it's making enough money to sustain itself though, Eddie and Perry sell it
and go back to Texas to buy a ranch. In his first role, Audie Murphy
plays a copyboy in one of the first scenes of this movie. There
are likeable characters in this movie, witty dialogue and a few enjoyably
absurd plot elements ... and yet, Texas, Brooklyn and Heaven just
doesn't fall together. Basically, the film is short on central conflict
(even for a romantic comedy), too many of the more interesting subplots
are underdeveloped, the more colourful characters (especially Lionel
Stander's hilarious bellhop/bookie) seem to fade into and out of the story
at random, and the happy ending comes far too expected (even considering
this is strictly a formula movie). Not a total tranwreck of a movie,
there are many good things here and there (as mentioned above), but a
major rewrite would have done the film loads of good!
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