Once Upon a Time

Released by Columbia Pictures on June 29, 1944, and directed by Alexander Hall, Once Upon a Time was adapted from Norman Corwin's 1940 radio play "My Client Curley," itself drawn from a magazine story by Lucille Fletcher, with a screenplay credited to Lewis Meltzer and Oscar Saul. The production carried several working titles during development, including Curly, My Friend Curly and Yes Sir, That's My Baby, before settling on its final, more sentimental title. Louis F. Edelman produced, Franz Planer photographed the film, and Frederick Hollander composed the score; Grant's co-stars included Janet Blair as the boy's showgirl sister and James Gleason as Flynn's put-upon assistant, "the Moke."

The film came at an unusual moment in Grant's career, sandwiched between the darker Hitchcock thriller Suspicion and his Academy Award-nominated dramatic turn in None but the Lonely Heart the same year, and represented a rare venture into outright whimsy — a story built entirely around a dancing caterpillar that both charms and humiliates Grant's fast-talking, morally compromised showman.

Reviewed gently rather than enthusiastically on release — Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called it a "pleasant fantasy" — Once Upon a Time was a minor entry in Grant's wartime filmography, notable chiefly for demonstrating his willingness to play an unambiguously venal character, a producer prepared to sell a child's beloved pet for profit, and still retain audience sympathy through charm and eventual contrition. It gave Grant an opportunity to work opposite a child actor, Ted Donaldson, in a story explicitly concerned with conscience and redemption, themes that recur throughout his 1940s output as he sought greater dramatic variety beyond comedy and romance.

Once Upon a Time is remembered today as a curiosity in Grant's filmography rather than a major work — a wartime fable whose central conceit, a caterpillar that dances to a popular song, has aged into gentle novelty. Its interest for modern viewers lies less in its plot than in what it reveals about Grant's range and risk tolerance at the height of his stardom: his readiness to play a schemer whose redemption depends entirely on a child's trust, in a film built around a premise few other leading men of his stature would have accepted. Seen alongside the same year's None but the Lonely Heart, it illustrates the deliberate breadth Grant pursued even in pictures of modest ambition.