On Our Merry Way (1948)

Oliver Pease (Burgess Meredith) works for a newspaper, transcribing ads for lost pets. His wife (Paulette Goddard) of 7 months thinks he's the paper's "roving reporter", asking the man on the street a different question each day. She thinks the questions are terrible, so she came up with one of her own for him to use.

Pease also is about to have his furniture repo'ed, because he bought what a top-level reporter could afford to sell his lie. He also likes to play the ponies, so he's in hock to a big goon for 180 smackers. Set to lose his furniture, his wife, and his teeth, Pease bluffs his way into the publisher's office and gets to be the roving reporter for a day.

The movie is really a series of three vignettes, connected by Pease meeting these people while he's running from the leg-breaker. The first is the tale of how two jazz musicians (played by Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart) lost control of their band when their bus broke down in a certain little town. It has an extended bit where they try to rig a contest for a spot in the band so the mayor's kid wins, but Fonda is playing in a rowboat under the pier and he and his music get seasick as the boat gets more unstable.

In the third, a couple of card sharps (one played by Fred MacMurray) stumble across this hellraiser of a kid, nephew to a wealthy guy, living in a cave in the woods. They figure to get a reward for bringing him back, but find themselves outmatched by the kid at every turn, though it's the rich uncle (a nervous wreck from the kid's pranks) who gets a lot of laughs with his overwrought reactions.

The second one, though, Pease interviews a famous actress (played by Dorothy Lamour) who explains how her career took off after she gave a verbal dressing-down to some spoiled brat of a child actress for being so rude to an aging actor. The kid reflects on what Lamour told her and helps them out, which is fine, it fits with Pease's actual question (more so than Stewart and Fonda's story, though that owes to how Pease phrased it to them.) It doesn't fit with the other two in terms of tone, or with Meredith meeting all these people during his clumsy escapes of the legbreaker. Unless I was supposed to laugh when we see the kinds of movies Lamour's character makes now. She's doing a song-and-dance number as some "island princess" trying to avoid all these buff dudes wanting to woo her or something. Perhaps I'm underestimating the popularity of such movies in the 1940s.

But Stewart and Fonda always play well off each other, and the MacMurray story isn't bad. Meredith is alternately funny and pitiable. Despite being a liar, you can tell he's trying to get this one thing right for a woman he's accepted he'll lose.