After you watch Lucky Me, you'll realize that Doris Day didn't only make silly movies in the 1960s. Luckily for us-pun intended-the silly movies of the 1950s aren't that bad. This one has one cute song in it, "The Blue Bells of Broadway". The other ones are pretty mediocre, and you'll join good company-yours truly-if you get this one confused with Starlift and The West Point Story, two other Doris Day movies with similar play-within-a-play plots.The story is pretty similar to the delightful comedy Happy Go Lovely, starring Vera-Ellen and David Niven. A wannabe actress in a struggling, small-time theater group meets a rich playboy and doesn't know who he is. As the pair falls in love, her theater friends try to milk him for all he's worth. Happy Go Lovely is a much more endearing movie, but if you liked it, you'll probably be drawn to watching a similar flick.Co-starring Phil Silvers, Robert Cummings, Eddie Foy, Jr., Nancy Walker, and Martha Hyer, you'll have plenty of entertaining moments to carry you through. However, I doubt Lucky Me will reach the top of anyone's favorite movie list.

The first time I saw this film I was distracted for a few minutes and missed the intro credits. Being in a lazy mood I just sat down to watch and if it hadn't been for the setting (Miami) and the star (Doris), I'd have sworn this were one of the early MGM CinemaScope films, since someone was obviously emulating a certain kind of Arthur Freed approach. But while elaborate visually at times, no, it was Warner Bros., but for what it was, not bad. In fact, the only real debit I can make against LUCKY ME remains its very conventional and predictable plot conventions. That, and the one-note roles of Phil Silvers (a ham) and Robert Cummings (handsome but bland nice guy). Songs? Okay, nothing special, perhaps, but serviceable. So for anyone who simply wants an old, spiffy if brainless musical, they still can't go wrong here, even if someone like Howard Keel might have brought more to the Cummings role (for better and worse). As for the film process itself, did this film really need such elaboration? Probably not, but Scope does continue to lend it a certain novelty.

Doris Day had fourteen films under her belt when she made this one, including three dramatic roles, and was still a major star so why Warners couldn't scare up a better leading man for her than Robert Cummings is a mystery. Cummings had paid his dues in things like King's Row and Dial M For Murder and was an accomplished leading man but by no stretch of the imagination was he a musical comedy leading man. There was absolutely no chemistry between him and Day and as it happened Phil Silvers could have played the leading role twice as well as Cummings. It's one of those films that on paper can't miss; a great cast - Silvers, Eddie Foy, Nancy Walker, Marcel Dalio - eight tuneful songs by Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster (who had served Day excellently on Calamity Jane the previous year) which were effective on screen but had no life in the jukes, so that the sum of its parts is all it really is.

For the film Lucky Me, Doris Day was reunited with composers Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster who wrote the score for Calamity Jane and gave Doris one of her biggest hits, Secret Love in one of her biggest film successes. Unfortunately none of the songs from Lucky Me was ever any kind of hit for Day and the film is a very ordinary backstage story.With some establishing shots in Miami Beach done in Cinemascope, Lucky Me is also the name of the show composer Robert Cummings is writing the score for. Doris is part of a quartet act that consists of Phil Silvers, Eddie Foy, Jr., and Nancy Walker. Through some of the usual Phil Silvers shenanigans, the group has to work to pay off a debt to restaurant owner Marcel Dalio.Cummings is staying at the hotel that Dalio's restaurant is at and again through shenanigans, Day and Cummings meet. Day thinks he's garage mechanic and Cummings keeps up the pretense as has been done in more movies I can remember. That's because he's romancing daughter of bankroll, Bill Goodwin in the person of Martha Hyer.If you can't tell where this is all going you haven't seen too many films let alone musicals. It would have been nice if Doris and the gang had been given some hit songs from this film, but Fain and Webster who won Academy Awards for Secret Love and Love Is A Many Splendored Thing came up short in the score for Lucky Me. Eddie Foy, Jr. and Nancy Walker came up short in footage as well. Especially Nancy Walker who is one of the funniest people around. I believe there is some moments for her in the Warner Brothers vaults if anyone wants to do a director's cut for Lucky Me. Oddly enough Phil Silvers and Nancy Walker within the next 10 years would co-star on Broadway in Do-Re-Mi which was a big success, but never made it to Hollywood.Doris's fans will like Lucky Me, others can take or leave it and be considered lucky either way.