Freckles Comes Home

To simply summarize this film is almost impossible, but I'll give it a shot.

A gangster on the lam takes a bus out of town. On the bus he meets Freckles, a young man, returning home to help out a friend. Freckles tells him his home town is a nice quiet place to get away so the man decides to stop there. In the town Freckles friend is in trouble with a machine that finds gold. He used the mortgage payment for the bank to buy a a plot of land because he thought he'd be rich, but machine that doesn't work. How to get enough money to save the hotel?

That's the first five minutes of the movie, which gets more complicated in an often needless way. More gangsters show up, there are murders, music, romance and family feuds, and a good chunk of it never fully gets sorted out, due to this being a one hour long adaptation of a novel.

The film smells of nostalgia. I think the film was probably nostalgic even in 1942, since the world was then at war and this is set in a simpler time.

The film is okay. Its certainly watchable for Mantan Moreland who plays the porter at the hotel, but who is really a just one of the guys. I love Moreland in anything simply because he rarely was anything other than an equal to the leads. Moreland's roles could always be played by someone other than a black man with out any change, or rarely a minimal change.

The trouble with the movie is that it has too much of everything for its brief running time. Too many characters, many of which are cartoons. There is too many plots, gangsters, feud, romance, gold machine, save the hotel, murder...so nothing is fully explored. Its a jumble, pleasant enough, but still a jumble.

If its on, see it, but you don't have to go out of your way for it.