Freckles Comes Home (1942) User Reviews

A Nostalgic Mess

[dbborroughs · 6/10 · 11 July 2004]

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.

Freckles Comes Home

[jason-m-cook · 4/10 · 13 September 2013]

Freckles Comes Home (Jean Yarbrough, 1942) So I have about three of those multi-disc DVD box sets of dozens of public domain films (one each for comedy, horror, and sci-fi). Every so often I like to dip into them to see if I can find some hidden gems.

Yeah, that really didn't happen this time.

This is one of those films set in a small town where a crime occurs and nobody believes the main character for most of the runtime, even though he's the only one who's talking any kind of sense at all. He also has a would-be girlfriend who misinterprets the fact that he has a question to ask her and thinks he's going to propose, then when he doesn't propose she blows up and declares she doesn't want to see him ever again. He also has a sidekick, and apparently they were big-time troublemakers in the town when they were kids, but nothing about the actual performances suggests they could have been (or that they could have had distinct personalities, for that matter).

There are a few mild (very mild) laughs here and there, but nothing to write home about, as the saying goes. If you have an hour to kill, maybe take a look. At least it helps me appreciate comedy films that are actually good. 4/10

Another Monogram Gem

[joeshoe89 · 5/10 · 4 November 2007]

Monogram Pictures like PRC and other low budget programmers had many short fun movies in the forties. This one like King Of the Zombies and Revenge of the Zombies which just appeared on TCM often had Mantan Moreland Gale Storm John Carradine and other actors and actresses who kept working even if not at the major studios. The copy I watched was 59 minutes long and probably was from the days when these films were often on TV. A gangster who has killed a bank messenger has his buddies get him to a bus where he sits next to Freckles Winslow who tells him about Fairfield Indiana a little town of 500 where of course the gangster figures he'll lay low for a while. Back in Fairfield Jeff who wears a hat that says porter is in trouble along with Danny over a gold finding machine which doesn't find or do anything. Freckles brings Jack Leach (the gangster) to the hotel where he begins to see a chance to fleece the town through a get the highway closer to town scheme. Jack brings in his buddy Nate Quigley who immediately starts leering at Freckles one time girlfriend Jane the daughter of the bank president. Jane thinks Nate is a good guy (which he is not)and fights with Freckles. Nate ends up murdered (by who it's never really made clear and pretty cool knife in the back) and two more gangsters show up posing as FBI and get ready to rob the bank. Freckles and Danny foil the robbers. Freckles ends up getting kissed by the lovely Jane and Jeff ends up having to eat his fake gold machine piece by piece being fed to him by the other black guy a chauffeur. Plenty of fun for everyone who enjoys these kind of movies.

Sloppy Script

[dougdoepke · 20 May 2014]

Plot— a gangster escapes to a small mid-western town where he hopes to hole up. However, he soon gets involved with small town politics and feuding folks who want to invest in an access road.

I tuned in hoping to get some Gale Storm sparkle. Instead, she gets to just stand around and look pretty. I agree with the reviewer who thinks there's too much plot for the slender time frame. Then too, the extended comedy skits with Moreland and Criner don't blend in with the storyline; instead they interrupt it. Then again, maybe it's the other way around. Anyway, the storyline is mainly a mess. It doesn't help that director Yarbrough films in flat pedestrian style, the only bounce coming from Moreland. And get a load of the final scene. That may be the most seriously misjudged final scene of the entire decade. As another reviewer points out, it's more disturbing than funny. All in all, the movie's a mediocre showcase for the highly talented Moreland. Other than that, the 60-minutes is a near total loss.

Better as Part of a Series

[GLuisa88 · 4/10 · 29 April 2010]

This movie would probably have been better had I seen the previous Freckles movies or read the books on which the movies were based. Things such as Freckles relationship with Jane Potter and the family feud between the Potters and Freckles' family, the Winslows, would have made a little more sense. As it was, the movie was entertaining enough, if somewhat forgettable.

What killed me the most was Freckles' reputation as this wild trouble maker! Perhaps I would have had to have seen the previous movies but honestly, he was so boring I can't imagine him ever being anything other than perhaps a boy scout or choir boy! (That's not a diss on boy scouts by the way!) Not necessarily a movie I would recommend or watch again but by the end I wasn't pulling out my hair or falling asleep so I guess that's a good thing! The best part was definitely the banter between the hotel porter and Roxbury Brown(? I think that is the character I'm thinking of!) Although, the ending scene with the two of them left me seriously disturbed. The porter sells Roxbury a faulty gold finding machine so Roxbury demands his money back but the porter lost it gambling. The ending scene has Roxbury forcing pieces of the machine down the porter's throat... I don't even want to imagine machinery trying to go through the digestive system! Eeek!

Forgettable....at best.

[planktonrules · 2/10 · 14 September 2016]

"Freckles Comes Home" has B-movie written all over it. With a running time of under an hour and starring the likes of Johnny Downs (who?) and Mantan Moreland, it's a quickie from Monogram that is currently posted on YouTube.

When the film begins, there is a robbery. Next you see the personable 'Freckels' riding home from college. On the way, he makes an acquaintance with a mobster who is on the lam...and Freckles has no idea. When they arrive in his small Indiana town, Freckles is shocked to hear that his really stupid friend is in trouble and he decides the way to help the friend is to get a highway built (?). But to do this, he needs to get his father and Mr. Potter to make up because they both are on the highway commission. To help facilitate this, he kisses up to Potter's daughter, Jane (Gale Storm) and...well who cares?

The film crams too much plot into 59 minutes. You've got mobsters, a Romeo and Juliet-like feud, a gold machine and many other story elements jammed into the film...and none of which are really interesting or well developed. Overall, a pretty forgettable film...and that's being charitable.

How to Waste Human Resources

[wes-connors · 2/10 · 4 July 2010]

The small town of Fairfield, Indiana welcomes home college boy Johnny Downs (as "Freckles" Winslow), due to "urgent business" involving his young scallywag pal Marvin Stephens (as Danny Doyle). The bus bringing Mr. Downs to town also heralds some gangsters, who want to fade away with Downs' freckles. Downs gets reacquainted with pretty girl singer Gale Storm (as Jane Potter). Porter Mantan Moreland (as Jeff) serves the white folks, and shares his bed with chauffeur Laurence Criner (as Roxbury B. Brown III). When a dead body is discovered, bumbling constable Irving Bacon (as Caleb Weaver) investigates.

** Freckles Comes Home (1/2/42) Jean Yarbrough ~ Johnny Downs, Mantan Moreland, Gale Storm, Marvin Stephens

Another tale of how small town innocents can sometimes outwit the big city con-man.

[mark.waltz · 5/10 · 29 January 2014]

When you see Bradley Page's name in the credits, you know that the suave, tough-talking city slicker is out to defraud some seemingly simple folk, and here, it's an entire small town where the population reaches a new high of 502 when Page and his bank-robbing crony relocate there in order to hoodwink out the simpletons out of their money while pretending to help them finance a new road to go through the town in hopes of increasing its population and give it a bigger dot on the map. Here, Johnny Downs and Gale Storm (later of "My Little Margie" fame) are the young romantic leads who seem as naive as the typical hickster who moves to the big city, yet have enough sense beneath their seemingly naive natures. Funny black character actor Mantan Moreland once again goes up against Laurence Criner (as he had done in the earlier "The Gangs All Here") pitting the small-town dim-witted African American against the African American big city henchman of the villain. Their comedy is stereotypical but on occasion funny, especially when they gamble over who will get the comfortable bed Moreland usually sleeps in and who will end up on the hard-as-iron floor. A few minor songs interrupt the hokey comedy but the result is still innocuous fun.