Tralfaz Sunday Theatre: Improve Your Personality

Two big stars in one small film!

Ah, not just any small film. But one made by those teenage behavioural specialists—Coronet.

The company’s best-known social guidance film is likely Dating Dos and Don’ts (1949), where Woody Woodruff, played by John Lindsay, is helped by narrator Ken Nordine on how to have a good time with Anne (pronounced “A-yann”) on a date at the high school teen carnival.

He’s not my favourite Coronet actor. That honour falls on whoever played Nick Baxter in What To Do on a Date (1951). His acting and dialogue delivery are unbelievably stiff. Yet I think he’s trying his best so you can’t fault him for that.

It turns out Lindsay and “Nick” appeared in a Coronet film together—Improve Your Personality (also 1951). You can’t miss “Nick” (unnamed in this one) as he says after a girl walks past him: “Boy, has she got personality!” Either “personality” is a euphemism (and in a Coronet film, double entendres are highly unlikely) or he can tell what someone is like just by walking past him without looking.

But changing someone’s behaviour is the purpose of these Coronet films. In this one, Woody Woodruff learns you can get what you want by kissing up to someone. Sincerity? Ah, you can fake that. Somehow, I don’t think that was the intended message of this film.

Besides the narrating Nordine, Dorothy Day reprises her role as Woody’s mom. In Dating, Woody’s first name was Alan. Here, it’s Bill. They weren’t big on continuity back then (and in a Coronet film, why bother?).

The opening of this print is the victim of a splice, but anyone who knows their Boosey and Hawkes library will recognise the opening music as “Paris Interlude” by Edward White, the same English composer whose “Puffin’ Billy” was heard on Captain Kangaroo. “Paris Interlude” is also used again and again in the Sid Davis epic The Cool Hot Rod (1953).