Dreamboat (1952)

Clifton Webb is fun in this rather daft caper about a rather fastidious English literature professor "Sayre" whose blissfully routine existence is shattered when television starts showing re-runs from his silent film career. His onscreen characters, very much in the vein of Douglas Fairbanks or Ronald Colman, garner ridicule and upset both his daughter "Carol" (Anne Francis) and his college principle - "Dr. Coffey" (the enthusiastically smitten Elsa Lanchester) so he sets off to New York to have these things banned. Upon arrival, he discovers that his erstwhile co-star "Gloria Marlowe" (Ginger Rogers) is insistent on their continued airing, and so a court case looms with both increasingly vitriolic towards each other. Meantime, his somewhat prim daughter hooks up with "Bill" (Jeffrey Hunter) and, delicately, he begins to open her eyes a bit too! Webb is on good form, and Claude Binyon offers us a rather engaging retrospective of the silent film era, with "Bruce Blair" just about everything from a musketeer to Zorro. It is a bit over-scripted, but towards the end there is a lovely scene in the courtroom with a television demonstrating just how "educational" such a piece of kit was in 1950s America and we watch a good dose of sweet vengeance as we are introduced to another Webb staple - "Lynn Belvedere". Very enjoyable, this.