Hello, Frisco, Hello (1943) makes the anxiety of World War II go away by giving us Alice Faye and John Payne in a Technicolor Barbary Coast of yesteryear. Perhaps the most memorable scene in this pastiche, however, is when Alice Faye sings on the telephone a song of long-distance love and longing to which every pair of lovers during the years of World War II could relate. The scene became instantly modern, an incandescent moment forever linked more to the 1940s than to the turn of the 20th century.

Along with Jack Oakie and June Havoc, they make a vaudeville foursome trying to rise above the honky tonks of San Francisco’s Pacific Street. Alice is “dead gone” on John Payne, but he has his ambitious sights on Nob Hill and the carriage trade. John Payne, the brains of the quartet, aspires to greater things, and falls for a wealthy socialite played by Lynn Bari, breaking our Alice Faye’s heart. He acquires several theaters, becoming an impresario and leaving his old gang behind.

The film is notable for Miss Faye’s poignant rendition of “You’ll Never Know” which she croons onstage into a prop telephone to her long-distance lover. The song won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and quickly became a favorite in wartime America among separated sweethearts. Her distinctive contralto singing voice, low and warm, marked her from
other swingy, bouncing, belting songstresses of her day.

You went away, and my heart went with you, the song goes, and it is because of the simple, yet truthful, sentimentality of the song and the film that makes it rise above a standard plot. Alice Faye exuded a sweet vulnerability that contrasted with her earlier Depression-era films where she appeared more hard-boiled and world-weary and streetwise. Even her taking the hand of little Shirley Temple for a brisk, soldierly tap-dance in Poor Little Rich Girl (1936) does little to soften the tough-as-nails working girl of the Depression. It took the war and Technicolor,
perhaps, to show the softer side of an actress who still maintains a certain aloofness, and this perhaps only for self-defense.

In Hello, Frisco, Hello she also gets to twirl a lariat while singing “Ragtime Cowboy Joe,” and shoots off a couple six shooters like percussion instruments. Wisecracking Jack Oakie gets some of the best lines, like “Look at you. You look like the last half of Finnegan’s Wake” to berate June Havoc.

Sly, man-stealing Lynn Bari gets to fire off, “I’ll probably spend the next week snapping whalebone in my corsets trying to do the Grizzly Bear,” in a seductive sort of yesteryear pass to Mr. Payne. June Havoc refers to her as an “enamel-puss society wench.”

Some trick novelty roller skating accompanies “It’s Tulip Time in Holland,” and Miss Faye charms the stereotyped Irish with “Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?” By the time she goes her own way from Payne and the act, she becomes the toast of London with “By the Light of the Silvery Moon.” What a fool Payne is for walking out on her.

But it was Alice Faye who famously walked out on Hollywood only two years later, protesting Fox studio’s head Darryl F. Zanuck for cutting her scenes to ribbons in the movie Fallen Angel in favor of his new starlet, Linda Darnel. She moved on to a hit radio show with her husband, bandleader Phil Harris, in “The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show” where Alice treated listeners of this zany family sitcom to more of her beautiful and distinctive singing voice. She also fired off a few zingers now and then in a running gag about her feud with studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck over Fallen Angel.

Talk about taking lemons and making lemonade.

John Payne, her erstwhile costar in Hello Frisco, Hello even came back to her, and not just in that film, but in the 1970s when they starred on Broadway in the musical Good News. Sadly, Fox’s contract with Faye, as with other performers, would not allow her to make a record of “You’ll Never Know.” Other singers made hit records of it, but the song was still always
Alice’s. She sang it again on radio, and even as late as 1985 on a television special. The internet’s YouTube is a very special audio and video attic for our old favorites. Alice is there, and John Payne, and several renditions of “You’ll Never Know.”

Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star., available online at Amazon, from CreateSpace and the author. Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

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