There can never be Too Much Harmony in a Bing Crosby picture, not even in a bucolic backstage musical like this. Crosby plays Eddie Bronson, a big-time singing star stranded in a one-horse town. Refusing to let any grass grow under his feet, Eddie combs through the local talent, discovering comedians Benny Day and Johnny Dixon and aspiring actress Ruth Brown. He brings his new protegees with him to Broadway, where Ruth becomes a huge success in spite of the machinations of prima donna Lucille Watson.
Category: Pre Code
A young dress designer marries an insurance agent. They soon have a daughter, but what the wife doesn’t know is that her husband is actually a criminal, who soon involves her–unwittingly–in a robbery. Sentenced to prison, she gives up her baby for adoption. When she is released 15 years later, she sets out to find her long-lost daughter. A police inspector gets involved in her search and, for reasons of his own, tries to dissuade her from finding her child.
On a cruise to Cuba, Lulu Smith falls in love with Bob Grover. Back home, she breaks off the romance when he tells her he is married. Lulu has a baby, but doesn’t tell Bob, who turns out to be a rising politician. She passes herself off as the baby’s nanny. When Bob learns what is going on, he adopts the little girl, not telling his wife or anyone else where she came from. Lulu gets a job at a newspaper. Things get complicated when the editor gets the dirt on Grover, but also wants to marry Lulu.
A young American man comes to believe that he can will himself back to London in the time of the American Revolution and meet his ancestors, who lived in the house he has just inherited.
A gang of crooks evade the police by moving their operations to a small town. There the gang’s leader, John Madison, encounters a faith healer and uses him to scam the gullible public of funds for a supposed chapel. But when a real healing takes place, a change comes over the gang.
Two sisters, May, older, naive, and June, younger and worldly, arrive in New York straight from the country and settle down in a boarding house. Their search for jobs leads them to find beaus and romantic trouble.
Take a Chance was based on the hit Broadway musical of the same name, though only one of the original songs, Eadie Was a Lady, has been retained. The thinnish plot involves the misadventures of a pair of pickpockets, played on Broadway by Jack Haley and Sid Silvers and on film by James Dunn and Cliff “Ukelele Ike” Edwards. Tired of fleecing the suckers in a travelling carnival, our heroes head to Broadway, where they get mixed up with gangsters.
Jeannette Vaubernier, an impulsive shopgirl en route to deliver a hat, dreams of luxury and position as she saunters through the woods, and attracted by a pool of water, she disrobes and plunges in. Cosse de Brissac, a handsome private in the King’s Guards, comes to her rescue and they become sweethearts. Meanwhile, Jean Du Barry, a shrewd roué, takes note of her at the millinery shop and tricks her into staying at La Gourda’s, where she soon becomes a favorite among the men.