Year:  1944
Rating: 7.0

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This was a delightful light as air musical comedy gem that came out of right field. Right field being Producers Releasing Company better known as PRC. PRC was one of the better . . . low budget Poverty Row film studios along with Monogram that could knock out films quickly to be part of a double bill for some of the major companies. So you never go in expecting a lot from their films though you are surprised from time to time because they came up with good scripts at times and the occasional star (Bela Lugosi, Anna May Wong) slumming or past their prime. So I am not sure how they got Martha Tilton for this film. You may ask who is Martha Tilton - I know I did but she was a very popular singer during the Big Band period in the 1930s through the 1940s. At the time this was made during WWII she was still a star having a number of hits on the record charts. She had been a singer for the Benny Goodman Band and at this time was signed to Columbia Records.


She is attractive, charming and effervescent popping out songs and laughs along the way. It is a shame she made so few films as an actress and not just as herself performing. Maybe she was hoping this film would launch her acting career but that didn't happen. She has a great voice in that Big Band style of white female singers - perfect tone, melody, rhythm and pitch but not a torch singer that Big Bands tended to stay away from because it was the orchestra that was the star and whites were the audience.


But besides my sudden infatuation with Tilton, this is a well written script with some very funny fast moving dialogue and good performances from the other actors. Judy (Tilton) is another hard luck young woman hitting the pavements in NYC trying to get a break as a singer with the luck of the people on the Titanic. A new show at the Tropicana is being put on by Benny Jackson who is looking for a female singer. Through a set of confusions they think that a record that Judy cut on the sly is that of a conniving gold-digger named Phoebe whose voice could peel the paint off the Mona Lisa. Judy's friend Marge (Iris Adrian) who takes on the low budget Joan Blondell role here straightens it all out of course with the help of the other off-beat residents of their boarding house. The conniving Phoebe (Betty Brodel) with her overbite that would shame Gene Tierney hits some great comical notes and she went on to nothing much in the business I see. She was part of the Brodel Sisters, a vaudeville group - of which one of the sisters changed her name (and maybe her teeth) and went on to fame as Joan Leslie.


For the fourth or fifth film from this period the telephone juke boxes play a role here. These were like regular juke boxes but instead of just playing a record on the juke box you called in to a hostess and asked for a record to be played. I wonder when those disappeared. We also get to see a song being recorded to vinyl - very primitive in those days as the grooves and the music is being recorded cutting into the vinyl or I guess it is called acetate and the producer has to brush off the acetate scraps as the song is being recorded - sort of like with wood. Kind of cool.