Mother Wore Tights

Mother Wore Tights is a 1947 Technicolor musical film starring Betty Grable and Dan Dailey as married vaudeville performers, directed by Walter Lang.[4]

Mother Wore Tights
Theatrical poster
Directed byWalter Lang
Produced byLamar Trotti
Written byLamar Trotti (screenplay)
Based onMother Wore Tights
1944 novel
by Miriam Young
StarringBetty Grable
Dan Dailey
Mona Freeman
Narrated byAnne Baxter
Music byFrank Burt
David Buttolph
CinematographyHarry Jackson
Edited byJ. Watson Webb Jr.
Distributed byTwentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
Release date
August 20, 1947 (1947-08-20)
Running time
107 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Box office$4,150,000 (US/ Canada rentals)[1][2][3]

This was Grable and Dailey's first film together, based on a book of the same name by Miriam Young. It was the highest grossing film of Grable's career up to this time, earning more than $5 million at the box office. It was also 20th Century Fox's most successful film of 1947.

Alfred Newman won the Academy Award for Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture. Josef Myrow (music) and Mack Gordon (lyrics) were nominated for Original Song ("You Do"), while Harry Jackson was nominated for Color Cinematography.

Plot

In turn-of-the-century Oakland, California, the teenaged Myrtle McKinley (Betty Grable) is expected to follow high school by attending a San Francisco business college. Instead, she takes a job performing with a traveling vaudeville troupe, where she meets and falls in love with singer-dancer Frank Burt (Dan Dailey).

Frank proposes they marry and also entertain on stage together as an act, which proves very popular. Myrtle retires from show business after giving birth to daughters Iris (Mona Freeman) and Mikie (Connie Marshall), while her husband goes on tour with another partner.

A few years later, less successful now, Frank persuades his wife to return to the stage. The girls are cared for by their grandmother as their parents leave town for months at a time.

Iris and Mikie are school girls when they are given a trip to Boston to see their parents. Iris meets a well-to-do young man, Bob Clarkman (Robert Arthur), and is permitted to attend an exclusive boarding school there. She is embarrassed by her parents' profession, however, and mortified at what the reaction will be from Bob and all of her new school friends when they learn that her parents are performing nearby.

Myrtle and Frank take matters into their own hands, arranging with the school to have all of the students attend a show. To her great relief, Iris is delighted when her classmates adore her parents' sophisticated act. By the time she's out of school and ready to marry, Iris wants to go into show business herself.

Cast

Accolades

The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists:

References
  1. "All-Time Top Grossers", Variety, 8 January 1964 p 69
  2. "Top Grossers of 1947", Variety, 7 January 1948 p 63
  3. Aubrey Solomon, Twentieth Century-Fox: A Corporate and Financial History Rowman & Littlefield, 2002 p 221
  4. "Mother Wore Tights". FilmAffinity. filmaffinity.com. Retrieved 11 January 2016.
  5. "AFI's Greatest Movie Musicals Nominees" (PDF). Retrieved 2016-08-13.
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