TCM presented this the other day as a forgotten gem from the RKO vaults. Forgotten I'll give you, gem not really.
It could have been a lot better, because there's lots of talent here, all pretty much wasted. I very much enjoy seeing Ann Sothern in musicals. She had a fine voice and was a decent dancer. (See her in Follies bergère with Maurice Chevalier, for example, where she appears with him in the number that inspired the *Singing in the rain* number in the 1950s movie of that name.) Here she has no one to dance with - though Bill Robinson was on the set - and not a single decent song, though Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh had and would produce good songs for other movies.
Just to put things in perspective: rhe same year RKO released this musically-forgettable picture, 1935, they also released Top Hat and Roberta with Astaire and Rodgers, the first with songs by Irving Berlin, the second with songs by Jerome Kern. Both pictures contain standards that remain part of the Great American Song Book.
Sothern's co-star, Gene Reynolds, couldn't dance or sing, evidently, so he is of no help to her. (That hadn't kept RKO from putting him in *Flying Down to Rio* a few years before, where he did no damage to a great movie musical. But there you had Astaire and Rodgers and others for singing and dancing.)
Raymond and Sothern make a nice romantic pair, but that alone can't save this movie.
Then there r the specialty numbers. Bill Robinson was a great dancer, certainly, but he doesn't get very impressive choreography here. His partner, Jeni Le Gon, gets even less. Fats Waller gets even less chance to show off his piano playing.
The other side shows make even less effect. Maria Gambarelli may have gone on to be prima ballerina with the Metropolitan Opera - not as big a deal back then as it is today - but again, like Sothern, she has no one to dance with here. She is limited to an uninteresting series of pirouettes, and so makes no impression. Pert Kelly's number is equally forgettable.
No point in summarizing the plot. It's not interesting, and previous reviewers have covered it.
I wanted to get a lot out of this movie, since it has some real talent who did great stuff elsewhere. But they don't here, so, since the music is instantly forgettable, there's no point in bothering with this.
