Aside from the director, there's only one fellow in this movie whose name means anything today, and he isn't even in it.
Aside from the director, that is. Busby Berkley directing wasn't as much fun as Busby choreographing. But he could keep a film moving along, and I wonder if he had a hand in the opening credits:
The credits are displayed in nightclub menu format; who could complain?
The "Garden of the Moon" is a nightclub run by the usual hard-headed moke who'll do anything to keep the crowds happy; he's abetted by a great on-the-level gal who runs his PR:
The plot is annoyingly contentious. Rudy Vallee can't play the club because he his band had a bus crash. This is announced by a reedy-voiced radio guy whose character has the name Jimmie Fidler:
Actually, it is Jimmie Fidler. In the fine long tradition of newspaper columnists appearing as themselves in movies and doing all sorts of things that make their credibility look suspect, he has a rather large role in the movie. Not that it hurt: Wiki says he was pulling down a cool quarter-mil a year by 1950.
Most of the convolutions have to do with the manager trying to fire the band, then make them stay, then fire them, then keep them, and so on. No one cared about the plot; it was just a contrivance to provide some verbal and romantic effervescence between the musical numbers. The tunes, alas, aren't top-shelf - but they're directed with Busbyesque angles:
Which brings us to the band. It seems they were a novelty act. Why do I think this?
Oh, I don't know.
The fellow in the middle - wide eyes, big moustache, gap teeth - was Jerry Colona. His comic speciality included fatuous double-talk, which was apparently amusing at the time:
Comedy was also provided in the form of a big galoot who was starring in man-of-the-jungle movies, an obvious Weismuller swipe:
That's Edgar Edwards - made quite a few movies, but they stop in '42, which suggests wartime service.
I said there was one guy in this movie whose name might still be recognizable to people under 30 today. It's not him:
Sidney coined the term "Oscar" for the Academy Award statuettes. Ot so the story goes.
It's this guy:
Four journalists, all of whom lent their names and logos to a fake story in a movie. And no one minded. Why should they? It's Hollywood. It's only a movie.
