RADIO CITY REVELS

US, 1938, 90 minutes, Colour.
Bob Burns, Jack Oakie, Kenny Baker, Ann Miller, Victor Moore, Milton Berle, Helen Broderick, Jane Froman.
Directed by Ben Stoloff.

RKO made a number of small supporting features in the late 1930s, a number of the musicals and comedies. This one is of interest for historical reasons, set in Radio City Music Hall during radio’s heyday, with big audiences in the studios, and lavish productions as well as serious and comic personalities.

The star of the film is Bob Burns, who died in 1956, popular in his day as a musician, inventor of the bazooka, performing on radio – and with a World War II service record. He was from Van Buren, Arkansas, and in this film that is where his character comes from as well, a singer on the showboat, putting words to popular tunes like My Bonnie, coming to New York for music lessons from Jack Oakie who is having a dry period as a composer, working along with his assistant, Milton Berle (aged 30 and some time before he became famous on television as Uncle milky). The key is that the man from Arkansas composes popular songs while asleep, exploited by the composer and his assistant, passing the songs off as his own, trying to break into Radio City Music Hall and provide a career for young dancer, played by Ann Miller.

The long moments in the film, that’s too long, with a composer and his assistant desperately tried to get the man from Arkansas to go to sleep so that they can get some hit songs. Jack Oakie was about to appear as Mussolini in the great dictator, with Chaplin as Hitler.
Ann Miller breaks into dance early in the film but, unfortunately, does not dance again until the end. Watching her in this film and in the previous year’s, New Faces of 1937, the question is why she did not become a star until taken up by MGM in Easter Parade in 1948, after which she shone in 10 MGM musicals. This same year she appeared in the Oscar-winning You Can’t Take it With You.

The popular singer, Jane Froman, sings and this film. She did not have a big career in film, and suffered an accident which crippled her – all of which is seen with Susan Hayward as Jane Froman in With a Song in My Heart (1952).

Kenny Baker was also a popular singer of the time, not with a great film career. Stalwarts, the bumbling Victor Moore, and the Eve Arden-like Harvard-boiled style of Helen Broderick, make welcome appearances.