1h 13min || 6 October 1939
Director: Busby Berkeley
Stars: Franchot Tone, Ann Sothern, Ruth Hussey
Genres: Comedy | Crime | Musical | Mystery
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0031298/
This has no business in the Musical genre. No one sings, dances, twirls a baton, nothing. We do have someone playing piano at a party, oh, and a pageant contestant waves an ankle, but that's not enough.
This is just an attempted comedy with an amateur crime-solving couple. Franchot Tone/Ann Sothern compare favorably with William Powell/Myrna Loy. I'm not saying they're as good, but they could work as a comparable but different couple. Interesting: this is the same studio (MGM) as the Thin Man series. I guess it's like Universal having both Deanna Durbin and Gloria Jean: their existence keeps both behaving well? Plus the studio probably thinks if they know how to create properties for one entity, they can do it for another. But this was the only pairing of Tone & Sothern; other couples starred in the prior 2 Fast and [something] films.
Just an average diversion.
MGM, dir. Berkeley; 6
