On Our Merry Way Reviews

This multi-segment film revolves around the question,"How has a child changed your life?" asked by Meredith, a classified ad salesman for a newspaper who has but one lifelong ambition: to be the paper's "Inquiring Reporter." Meredith and Goddard are married (as they were in real life while making this film), and he's fibbed to her that he's the man who asks the questions for the paper. Now he has to actually do that or lose the love of his new wife. Lamour and Moore are Hollywood bit players, and she is advised by a child star to don a sarong. She does and becomes a household word in a satirical episode. Fonda and Stewart are a pair of itinerant jazz musicians, and their "child" is a voluptuous jazz-baby, Ford, who altered their lives by winning a "fixed" music contest in the slapstick segment. Demarest and MacMurray are two con men who come up against a brat, Whorf, and have their lives changed in the "O. Henry irony" chapter. The picture doesn't merit much attention but there are several interesting sidelights to note. Stewart and Fonda had their choice of writers and author John O'Hara gave them the best segment of the bunch (also the most musical, with Harry James doing a cameo). Their work was directed by John Huston and George Stevens, not a bad duo. Huston had begun the directing, then Fonda had to do something else and when he returned, Huston was not able to take up the chores, so Stevens stepped in. Neither one took screen credit. Fonda and Stewart were old pals but had never worked with each other before. They waited 22 years before doing it again in THE CHEYENNE SOCIAL CLUB. Whorf, the rotten kid in the Demarest-MacMurray segment, was actor-director Richard Whorf's son, MacMurray and Demarest must have liked working with each other and again teamed on TV's "My Three Sons" for what seemed to be a lifetime. Hollywood enjoyed making these episodic pictures for a while. Sometimes they worked (as in O. HENRY'S FULL HOUSE, TALES OF MANHATTAN) and sometimes they didn't, as in this.