In the fifth installment of the series, Donald O'Connor is ordered back into the Army. He discovers he has been assigned to a WAC unit, and that Francis the Talking Mule is there too.
At this point, to get my summary over with quickly and relatively painlessly, I would write "hijinks ensue" or perhaps "hijinks fail to ensue." Here, I'll leave it to noting that stuff happens, that Chill Wills appears in the flesh as a general, that there are some lovely ladies on hand, including Julie Adams, Mamie Van Doren -- who tried to get out of this movie -- Joan Shawlee, Lynn Bari, and Zasu Pitts, and that Dorothy Davenport Reid is credited with "additional dialogue". I will not speculate as to what lines she penned. Also, Molly, which is the name of the animal who starred as Francis. In common with many gender-bending animal stars, Molly was not a mule, which is a male. Molly was a..... well, I am informed that the term for a female mule is a molly.
It's not that this movie is bad. If your idea of a good movie premise is that there's a talking mule who speaks only to Donald O'Connor, then this is a movie for you. Apparently there were large numbers of people for whom that was the case; as I noted above, this was the fifth in the series, there was another, and director Arthur Lubin later was in charge of Mr. Ed. Neither is this as bad as, say the Old Mother Reilly movies. It's simply not engrossing. It is the sort of movie you could put on the TV while you are vacuuming without missing much of interest to anyone whose intellectual age is older than six, which has included me for some time now.
