Dick Haymes

There is a moment in State Fair (1945) when Dick Haymes stops being a farm boy at a fair and becomes a singer at a microphone. That's for Me begins, Vivian Blaine takes the first phrases, and when Haymes comes in the voice is warm, unhurried and placed exactly where the note wants it. It is the film's warmest few minutes. Then the song ends, the dialogue resumes, and he goes back to standing. We wrote at the time that he acts like a man waiting for the playback to start, and we found our attention drifting to Blaine, who sings as if she means it, and then to the clock, because Wayne Frake's storyline, the barker and the band singer, is the slack stretch of a slight film.

That is Haymes on screen, more or less. He had come to pictures the long way round: a stuntman and extra in 1930s Hollywood, then a band vocalist in New York from 1937, singing for Harry James, Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey, and twice stepping into a chair Frank Sinatra had just left. He went solo with Decca in 1943 and had his own radio show from 1944 to 1948. Twentieth Century-Fox signed him in 1944 for musical leads: Diamond Horseshoe (1945) with Betty Grable, State Fair the same year, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim (1947) with Grable again, and One Touch of Venus (1948) opposite Ava Gardner. By the end of the decade the film work had faded, and what followed was occasional television and the odd picture.

Fox understood what it had bought. Haymes played pleasant, unassuming romantic leads who sang their own songs, and the studio built the parts around the songs rather than the other way about. That was sensible, because the singing is the whole case for him. He had a big-band man's ear for a ballad, knowing where to lean on a line and where to let it go, and he was at his best with someone to sing to, as he had been with Helen Forrest on the wartime records and as he is with Blaine here. Between the numbers he is stiff; he knew the camera was on him and did not know what to do about it. Walter Lang, who directed State Fair without much curiosity, was not the man to teach him.

He was frank about it later. "I called the shots and I played them the way I saw things at the time," he said in 1965, in a longer answer that blamed nobody but himself. It is a better line than any he was given on screen. Put on State Fair for the two best songs, for the parents, and for the few minutes when Haymes and Blaine sing to each other. When the talking starts again, that is your cue to put the kettle on.