Powell was only 15 when MGM signed her to a long-term contract in 1944. With her surprisingly mature soprano voice, the studio hoped to turn her into another Deanna Durbin, a child singing star they had released from contract in the '30s only to see her save Universal Pictures from bankruptcy. For years, Powell was the pleasant juvenile star of such minor-league musicals as A Date With Judy (1948) and Nancy Goes to Rio (1950), in which she sang pleasantly but lost the more mature leading men to older actresses. By the time she made the latter film, however, Powell was clearly moving into adulthood, a transition producer Jack Cummings hoped to ease with her role in Two Weeks With Love.
Powell starts the film as a young innocent, only to grow up fast when she develops her first adult romance, with traveling actor Montalban. Initially she poses as a sophisticated woman of the world, only to find he's more attracted to the youthful innocence he rarely finds in theatre actresses. Along the way she sings the romantic ballad "There Are Such Things," the light opera favorite "My Hero" and an original ragtime number, "The Oceana Roll," choreographed by Busby Berkeley. The switch worked with film audiences, and Powell would continue to shine in more mature roles opposite Fred Astaire in Royal Wedding (1951) and Howard Keel in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954).
For Reynolds, Two Weeks With Love provided the kind of showy supporting role every show business hopeful dreams of. She had gotten into the movies after winning the title of Miss Burbank in 1948. After the pageant, rival talent scouts from Warner Bros. and MGM wanted to sign her. They flipped a coin, and Warners won, but all the studio gave her were two small roles and a new first name. Jack Warner turned Mary Frances Reynolds into Debbie Reynolds. But after a year, they dropped her contract.
Still, Reynolds' original talent scouts still had faith in her. The Warners scout called his friend at MGM to announce that she was available and even took her there for an interview. MGM signed her and put her to work with acting, dancing and singing lessons, where she impressed everybody with her hard work and ambition. Producer Jack Cummings thought she had just the right energy for a small part in Three Little Words (1950), the musical biography of songwriters Bert Kalmer and Harry Ruby. He cast Reynolds as "boop-boop-a-doop" singer Helen Kane, who dubbed all of her lines. But even without her voice, Reynolds was enchanting, vamping Carleton Carpenter innocently through Kane's trademark song, "I Wanna Be Loved by You." For the first time, she started to get fan mail.
Quick to capitalize on his new screen team, Cummings cast Reynolds as Powell's sister in Two Weeks With Love, with Carpenter as her love interest. The two dueted spiritedly on the vintage hits "Row, Row, Row" and "Abba Dabba Honeymoon" (the latter was excerpted 24 years later in the original That's Entertainment, 1974). MGM also sent them out on a publicity tour for the film. As her popularity grew, Reynolds was promoted to full star status as Gene Kelly's leading lady in Singin' in the Rain (1952).
Of course, Two Weeks With Love wouldn't have helped anybody's career without the kind of cast and crew that was a matter of course for an MGM production. Providing a solid backdrop to the leading performances were veteran actors Louis Calhern and Ann Harding, who teamed as Powell and Reynolds' parents before starring in the unconventional biopic, The Magnificent Yankee (1950). Harding, the queen of the RKO Studios lot in the early '30s, had come out of retirement at old friend Calhern's urging to play the part. Writer Dorothy Kingsley had made a name for herself coming up with one-liners for Bob Hope and Edgar Bergen on radio. Choreographer Busby Berkeley was busy staging some of swimming star Esther Williams' most impressive water ballets when he took time out to produce the vaudeville-style numbers for this film. And Roy Rowland, who had started his career directing comic shorts for Pete Kelly's MGM production unit, would give the film the same off-beat charm he would bring to his most famous picture, the 1953 Dr. Seuss musical The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. That film starred Powell and Reynolds' younger brother from Two Weeks With Love, Tommy Rettig, just before he found stardom in the family television series Lassie.
Producer: Jack Cummings
Director: Roy Rowland
Screenplay: Dorothy Kingsley, John Larkin Based on a story by Larkin
Cinematography: Alfred Gilks
Art Direction: Cedric Gibbons, Preston Ames
Music: Georgie Stoll
Principal Cast: Jane Powell (Patti Robinson), Ricardo Montalban (Demi Armendez), Louis Calhern (Horatio Robinson), Ann Harding (Katherine Robinson), Phyllis Kirk (Valerie Stressemann), Carleton Carpenter (Billy Finlay), Debbie Reynolds (Melba Robinson), Tommy Rettig (Ricky Robinson).
C-93m. Closed Captioning.
by Frank Miller
