The key is making the family involved just as cute as pie. The small fry here aren't given much to do except follow their older siblings around and fill out the compositions on staircases and at the dinner table. (among them is precocious-looking Jimmy Hunt, who would become immortalized the next year in Invaders from Mars.) Most of them are unbilled, along with familiar faces like Robert Easton (as a hick from Atlanta) and major player Martin Milner ("I'll be seizin' ya!"). You can see why Milner would take the job even if he had to pay for the privilege - it's a great showcase.

Robert Arthur (Kirk Douglas' acolyte in Ace in the Hole) is the safe and sane eldest brother, and the namesake of the author of the original book. It must have been a close family for him to perceive all of these relationships, or maybe his sisters all confided in him later.

Part of the formula is music. It's the 1920s, nobody has a radio and everybody sings as social entertainment. Naturally, they sound like professionals and beautiful Debra Paget (looking great in her "impoverished" costumes) dances on the dock. She and Jeffrey Hunter share high billing as Fox hopefuls; although she got lots of work as Indian maidens (Broken Arrow) and South Sea maidens (Bird of Paradise) she didn't go as far as Hunter did, with his perfect blue eyes and disarming smile.

Myrna Loy has always been a charmer and segue'd into "mother" roles much more smoothly than many a top glamour star of the 30s. Considerable screen time is given to the interesting idea that she and her engineer husband had been a scientific team, but when he died, a woman engineer alone was an unemployable embarrassment. She shames an industrialist into giving her a chance and succeeds, although we never really see her at work. She turns out to be an efficiency expert, a work role often alotted to females, although probably not in the 1920s. There's a groundbreaking scene where she's refused admittance to a guild dinner where she was supposed to speak, when it turns out they thought she was a man and the club doesn't allow women. A "liberated" script would have Loy shame them all and prevail or at least extract satisfaction, but Belles on their Toes has her go off in a tizz and crack up her tin lizzie automobile. It's more than credible.

The film squanders the women's rights theme with a pointless bit where Edward Arnold publicizes Loy with a comic newsreel, showing her family being "efficient" by filming them at jerky high-speed.

The last act mines the not-too-convincing chestnut of having top-billed Jeanne Crain jeopardize her future happiness with hunky Hunter, to take care of her younger siblings. Hunter gets in some good jabs about giant, tight families like the Gilbreths locking out outsiders and keeping the eldest daughters as unpaid domestics. With a twist a bit too reminiscent of Meet Me in St. Louis, all is resolved at a gala dance. Hunter gets his bride, poor Edward Arnold gives up on his romantic ideas about Myrna Loy (fans would revolt at the dishonor to the Clifton Webb character) and all ends on a happy note. A flashback wraparound format concludes the show with a grey-haired Loy watching her youngest graduate from college, as if she's fulfilled her mission and can now die.

Belles on their Toes probably wouldn't have made a good 50s TV sitcom because of the stiff payroll and child labor laws - the biggest TV families had at most three kids. It is indeed "Good clean fun", and compared to the vile comedies that pass for Family entertainment now - the Cheaper by the Dozen remake included - it's charming enough.

Fox's DVD of Belles on their Toes has obviously come out as a marketing adjunct to the new remake. The Technicolor film only looks so-so on DVD because it was mastered from a composite color negative that has imperfections, mostly mismatches on the color matrices that make the picture look soft and occasionally introduce color fringing, as in the main titles where the black lettering is ringed with a green tint. None of it is so bad that'd you'd eject the disc, but it never looks as good as one of the rare digitally composited Tech restorations (wildly cost-prohibitive) or a well-preserved Eastman negative.

The audio is also a little crunchy and slightly muffled, and I'd guess the reason is a lack of a good source track. Perhaps the optical track of a print was all that was available. The packaging does say it was remastered in Stereo, however. There's an English mono and a Spanish mono on board as well.

The only extras are some trailers. The original Cheaper by the Dozen appears only in B&W. The cheesy photo on the back shows Debra Paget and Jeffrey Hunter posing in the flashy red car driven by Martin Milner in the movie. No image of Myrna Loy appears anywhere on the packaging.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Belles on Their Toes rates:
Movie: Good
Video: Good -
Sound: Good --
Supplements: trailers
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: March 14, 2004