Patrick the Great (1944)

Director: Frank Ryan
Writers: Bertram Millhauser and Dorothy Bennett, based on a story by Jane Hall, Frederick Kohner and Ralph Block
Stars: Donald O'Connor and Peggy Ryan

Index: 2025 Centennials.

Donald O’Connor is fairly best known for his Make It Laugh routine in Singin’ in the Rain. It’s one of the all time great scenes to drop the jaw of everyone watching in astonishment at what a human being can actually do. However, that was a result of a lot of work over a lot of years, going back to his days in vaudeville, starting at a mere thirteen months of age, as part of the O’Connor Family, the so-called Royal Family of Vaudeville, as they toured the nation.

By that point in his career, he’d become the sidekick but he got to that point playing leads for Universal in smaller pictures like this one. I’ve seen a few of them, but that one that blew my mind was Curtain Call at Cactus Creek, which I watched for Vincent Price’s First Thirty. It’s hardly a great movie and it ends horribly, but O’Connor is simply amazing in it, as the entire crew of a travelling troupe, doing every single behind the scenes task, often all at once.

While I’m a huge fan of Singin’ in the Rain, an impeccable musical in the style I prefer where songs and routines are inherent to the story, I never warmed to its star, Gene Kelly. He could act, sure, and he was an incredible dancer who seemed like he could defy gravity, but I always appreciated O’Connor more because it seemed like he earned it. He’s great when he’s playing the star who made it, but he’s also thoroughly believable as the nobody trying to become the star and putting in all the effort to do so. He’s much quicker and sassier. When his character makes it and he turns on the class, he’s just as smooth, but the fun for me is all found in the process of getting there.

And that brings me to Patrick the Great on his centennial, because it’s one of those Universal movies where he did all of that but as the lead not the sidekick. It’s also frustratingly obscure and so unjustly underseen. It’s not available in any commercial format, it’s not streaming on any platform and it’s not even easy to find on the grey market. I ended up finding an awful 360p VHS rip from a Russian site that’s gold if you’re trawling for obscurities.

He’s Pat Donohue but not the Pat Donohoe who’s on stage for the final successful night of Gypsy Love after three hundred nights. That’s a different Donald, namely Donald Cook. Donald O’Connor is watching in the audience with his girlfriend, Judy Watkins. That’s Donohue, with two Os, and Watkins with an S, whatever other online sources might suggest. I saw the movie.

Pat Donohue Jr. is an entertainer too, but he has to make do with performances put on by the Red Barn Theatre Workshop. Pat Donohue Sr. is a bona fide star, albeit an aging one, an observation that triggers this story.

Also in the audience at Gypsy Love is Prentis Johns, producer of stage musicals, because he has Sr. in mind for his next one but he realises that he’s simply not young enough any more. He needs someone younger and he realises he just found him when Jr. puts on an act to talk fellow producer Max Wilson into directing the next Red Barn show. The problem, of course, is in telling Sr., who really wants the part.

Somewhat ironically, it’s for the lead role in Everything Goes, a pun on Cole Porter’s Anything Goes, a 1934 musical whose 1956 adaptation to film starred Bing Crosby and Donald O’Connor, by then playing the sidekick not the lead.

As a situation comedy, the fun starts with Jr. getting the part but having to keep it secret, as they haven’t told Sr. yet. Jr. doesn’t know that it was originally meant for his father, so heads up to the Pine Valley Lodge to study under his dad’s tutelage, leaving Judy behind. However, she follows and a writer, Lynn Andrews, sees a heartbreak and tries to help, only convincing Jr. that she’s in love with him, even with quite an age difference; Lynn isn’t old, but she’s a lot older than Jr. Of course, she’s in love with Sr., not realising that he’s Jr.’s father.

Where this leads, after many shenanigans, is Jr. holding back his dream so that Sr. can lead Everything Goes, but Sr. holding back his love so Jr. can be happy with Lynn. It takes a couple of girls to figure that mess out and try to fix it.

Yes, this is hokey B-movie stuff and the big writing team, two writers adapting a story by three others, knew it and had fun anyway. At one point, Prentis Johns, seeing the situation and its solution, points out, “I used this part in a play once and nobody would believe it.”

I felt that, for hokey B-movie stuff, they did a great job. There are points where this is a lot more predictable than it ought to be, but there are also a few scenes that stand out because of how they’re written. Otherwise, it’s a knowing and delightfully dry Eve Arden, playing Lynn’s secretary, and O’Connor who shine brightest.

Maybe why he shines in roles like these, the sort that went to Mickey Rooney at MGM, is a believability that stems from his own reality. He did work especially hard, because he was a hoofer who grew up and learned on vaudeville stages. He looked good but he wasn’t properly trained so, when he started acting in musicals, he had to re-learn everything. He pointed out once that hoofers “dance from the waist down and I had to learn to dance from the waist up.”

His first movie was 1937’s Melody for Two, as part of his family act. He was eleven. However, he also appeared in It Can’t Last Forever and was then signed by Paramount and put to work. He played younger versions of leads and younger brothers and racked up roles and experience. He was Huckleberry Finn in 1938’s Tom Sawyer, Detective and was only three credits down from Betty Grable in Million Dollar Legs.

His most vibrant work for me came after the shift to Universal in 1941. The films were samy and hokey B-movies but he was the lead, their version of Rooney, with Peggy Ryan their Judy Garland. Patrick the Great ended that era, as the war had come and O’Connor was drafted. They had enough of his films in the can that he was on his second year in the U.S. Army Air Forces by the time it came out.

After his return, he had a big hit with Francis in 1949, which prompted a long string of films where his co-star was a talking mule. They got in the way of his musicals, but his sidekick role in Singin’ in the Rain helped with that. Anything Goes and The Buster Keaton Story followed, along with The Donald O’Connor Show on TV, where he did a lot of important work. However, he kept performing on stage and bought a theatre. His final role on film was Out to Sea in 1997 but he was still doing thirty weeks a year on tour.

He died in 2003 after a hard working life.