Director: Sidney Lanfield
Year:  1936
Rating: 5.0

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Sing Baby Sing feels old-fashioned even for its time. After Busby Berkeley and the Fred Astaire films this kind of lands with a thud. The musical numbers are all stage bound with basic songs and little dancing. It has Alice Faye who wasn't quite the star she would become within a few years with In Old Chicago, Alexander's Ragtime Band and Rose of Washington Square. I have to confess to never really getting her popularity - a pleasant enough voice and her blond cheery looks but no sex appeal at all in song or stature. The All-American Girl,


Co-starring with Alice is the terrific character actor Adolphe Menjou who seems badly miscast in this film. I recall seeing a Bill Maher show in which a guest mentions Menjou and Maher goes "What the hell is an Adolphe Menjou" and I thought he clearly is not a fan of old films. Menjou had about 140 film credits going back to the silent days. Coming on to sing a song later in the film is Tony Martin, a crooner of the period and a year later married to Alice Faye. And this was the film debut for the Ritz Brothers. They had been a vaudeville act for years before this and their act consists of funny faces, funny voices and some funny dancing - none of which I found funny. They were no Marx Brothers.


In the film Faye is a nightclub singer who gets canned and her manager (Gregory Ratoff) tries to find her a job on the radio by falsely linking her romantically with a soused actor (Menjou). Menjou does his best to imitate Barrymore from his film Twentieth Century (and perhaps Barrymore in real life) but he just doesn't have Barrymore's comic timing and much of his comedy falls flat like a man falling off the 30th floor. Two of the songs from Faye are nice enough - the title song and You Turned the Tables on Me. This was produced by Twentieth Century Fox who as far as I recall were not producing musicals the quality of Warner's, MGM and RKO.