I Dream of Jeannie

Genre: Musical/biography
Released: 1952
Directed by: Allan Dwan
Starring: Ray Middleton, Bill Shirley, Rex Allen
Alfalfa portrays: Freddie, a clerk who works with aspiring songwriter Stephen Foster
Alfalfa's screen time: 1:21
Lines of dialogue spoken by Alfalfa: 9

"I Dream of Jeannie" and images © Madacy Entertainment Group, Inc.



Alfalfa works in a kind of general clerk's office with an up and coming songwriter named Stephen Foster. One afternoon a messenger delivers a package containing some freshly-printed copies of sheet music for a song Foster wrote for a Mr. Christie (of "Christie's Minstrels" fame). The song is called "Oh, Susanna". As Foster excitedly opens the package to reveal the handsomely-printed sheet music, Alfalfa comes over to congratulate him.



Alfalfa: Say, that's dingy. [?] Actually in print!...Let's see where it says you wrote it.

Foster flips the sheet music over and sees his name is not on it.

Foster: Well, I guess it doesn't say...
Alfalfa: Didn't you even get any royalties?...Gee, looks like you oughta get a little somethin' just for thinkin' it up.



Foster explains that all the sheet music copies will sell for a total of five dollars, more than he currently makes in a week.

Alfalfa: Yeah, you'll need that kinda money if you're gonna get that girl a ring...[referring to the woman to whom Foster plans on proposing marriage.]


Maybe Alfalfa could have
used this in "Second Childhood".


Later in the film, we see Alfalfa again briefly, looking out the window of the clerk's office to witness the arrival of a large steamboat.

This bio-pic of Stephen Foster was courtesy of the notoriously low-budget Republic Pictures, which was the studio of record on several of the films in which the grownup Alfalfa appeared. Any musical picture made in the decade of the 1940's or 1950's, set in the ante-bellum south, usually contained a requisite scene of a blackface song and dance number, and "I Dream of Jeannie" is no exception. To be fair, however, Foster is portrayed as having a good relationship with the local black community. He pays the hospital fee for a small black child who has been run over by a horse carriage, and when the boy's grateful mother thanks Foster, he replies by saying it is he who should be thanking her: Everything I know about music, he tells the woman, I learned from "you people".



Opening credits for "I Dream of Jeannie". Note Alfalfa is
billed by his full name of "Carl Dean Switzer" (second from
bottom). Wonder if Richard Simmons brought his
Deal-A-Meal cards to the set.

An interesting casting note in "I Dream of Jeannie" is the uncredited participation of Rex Allen, who serves as narrator of many scenes in the film. This is the same Rex Allen, known as the "Arizona Cowboy", who starred with Alfalfa two years earlier in "Redwood Forest Trail".

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