Twenty Million Sweethearts

Pushy talent agent (Pat O'Brien) makes a radio star out of a singing waiter (Dick Powell). Powell's new heartthrob status means he has to remain single in the public eye but he wants to marry Ginger Rogers. So O'Brien schemes to break them up. Pat O'Brien talks so fast in this I'm surprised he was ever able to catch a breath. Dick Powell's singing is good and he has a rootable quality about him. Ginger's likable and fun. Not one of her better roles but okay. This is an amusing musical comedy. Some laughs and nice songs. One of the best parts is singing quartet The Mills Brothers. This may not be a highlight in the careers of the stars but it's an entertaining way to pass the time. Any movie with Allen Jenkins in it can't be bad.

Twenty Million Sweethearts is out of that era of wonderful musical entertainment that Warner Brothers did the very best of in the Thirties. It's a musical about radio during that quarter of a century when it was the most popular entertainment medium. Dick Powell and Ginger Rogers play a pair of young hopefuls eager to break into radio and Pat O'Brien is Powell's discoverer/manager whose machinations get Powell in the door and almost out of the industry before he's started.

O'Brien played this part so often in those years he could have phoned in the performance, but it's what you expect of him. He finds Powell as a singing waiter doing a boffo version of The Man On The Flying Trapeze, a very popular song in 1934 with it getting a prominent place in It Happened One Night.

Pat may be a little too sharp for his own good, but he does know talent and he brings him to radio station owner Grant Mitchell and sponsor Joseph Cawthorn. They've got a girl singer in Ginger Rogers already, but Ginger and Dick hit it off. But there are complications and they make up the rest of this film.

Harry Warren and Al Dubin wrote most of the original score for this film and the best song in the film is one of my personal favorite Dick Powell number, I'll String Along With You. It's sung both solo and as a duet with Rogers. Powell recorded it and Fair and Warmer for Brunswick records and it enjoyed a good sale during the Depression. It was recycled for Doris Day for her film My Dream Is Your's where it's done as a lullaby to her small son. But when you hear Powell do it, you will hear him at his best as a singer. Interestingly enough Doris's film is also about the radio industry. Powell also does a nice scat version with the Mills Brothers of Out For No Good which is also done by Rogers as a solo.

Twenty Million Sweethearts was done by Ginger on loan out from RKO where she had just signed a long term contract. She had just done Flying Down To Rio, her first with Fred Astaire. Previously she had worked with Powell though not opposite him in 42nd Street and Golddiggers of 1933. Jack Warner thought they'd make a good team together and they did make some beautiful music and beautiful box office. But she made even bigger box office with Flying Down To Rio over at RKO with Astaire and RKO wasn't about to give her up. So the screen team of Powell and Rogers never made another film.

Take note of the performance of Allen Jenkins as the grouchy host of a kid's radio program, he's got some very nice lines. When you hear talk of a Hooper rating, back in the day that referred to the barometer of popularity, like the Nielsen is for today's television. I liked hearing the Radio Rogues, only hearing them mind you, at the beginning of the movie where you hear them do their imitations of the current radio stars. They had appeared in Bing Crosby's We're Not Dressing earlier in the year at Paramount and now that they were not in his film, his imitation is added to their repertoire.

Twenty Million Sweethearts is charming and entertaining with a nice cast going through their usual paces on screen. It may not be the best film ever made about radio, but until the day that one comes along, I'll string along with Twenty Million Sweethearts.

This is one of the early Hollywood musicals that retained some of the characteristics of vaudeville and stage shows like the Ziegfeld Follies. It has a plot that is more than the usual thin plots of most such films that just tie the song and dance numbers together. This one has some historical value in its portrayal of radio productions and the era in which radio ruled the waves and the hearts and minds of people everywhere.

Modern audiences won't be very taken by what passes as the comedy in "Twenty Million Sweethearts." Most fans from the mid-20th century on didn't care much either for the fast-talking, bombastic personas such as Pat O'Brien sometimes played, as he does here. That was something that apparently enjoyed a short stint of popularity in early sound pictures, but quickly died out within a few years. O'Brien's Rush Blake is as much a cad as he is a good guy, and while his boisterous character is just tolerable, his last tirade toward the end of the film is way overboard. It's not only unnecessary, but it would have improved the film to have left that on the cutting room floor. The only real comedy is in the short scenes with Allen Jenkins who plays Pete, host of a children's afternoon radio show.

But for most of this movie, audiences are in for a treat, seeing the singing that was popular at that time. Dick Powell had a very good tenor voice, and he plays a very likeable Buddy Clayton. And opposite him is a very young Ginger Rogers as Peggy Cornell, who shows that she could sing a nice tune. And, another special reason for seeing and enjoying this film is the Mills Brothers. This was just the second of a dozen films the famous singing foursome would be in. This is in their early years with some of the humorous tunes they sang then. By the 1940s, they would skyrocket on the music charts with many hit tunes over three decades. Performing until the early 1970s, the Mills Brothers would record more than 2,000 songs that sold more than 50 million records.

No other artists or groups could sing their top hits tunes as well, and no others even tried to record some of their best tunes. The lasting talent and quality of the Mills Brothers is proven as some of their top tunes are still heard on radio music programs and in occasional modern films. Once one heard these songs, they'd be remembered forever as sung by the Mills Brothers - "Paper Doll" of 1943, "St. Louis Blues" of 1944, "You Always Hurt the One You Love" of 1944, "Glow-Worm" of 1952, "Memory Lane" of 1956, "Say Si Si" of 1964, "Dream a Little Dream of Me" of 1968, and "Dream" of 1969.

This is a movie to enjoy the old-fashioned type of stage shows, the heyday of radio entertainment, and a look at top and upcoming musical talents of the time.

The best humorous line in the fine was by Pete, when actor Jenkins says, "I hate kids. I think every child should be born at the age of 20. Maybe they'd have some sense."

I found this film to be light hearted and great fun musically. Grant Mitchell almost steals the show as the near apoplectic manager of the radio station. It's always fun to see radio settings in old movies, as it's a form of entertainment (in this manner) long gone. Dick Powell displays the boyish charm that made him a hit in movies. Ginger Rogers, often overlooked as the great film actress that she was, gives her usual excellent performance as does Pat O'Brien. The opening of the film, with The Radio Rogues doing horrible impersonations of then celebrities (some of whom are long forgotten), gets off to a wobbly start, but things manage to pick up with O'Brien's character setting the pace. The Mills Brothers lend a wonderful contribution with their smooth effortless song style. I liked this film and would urge anyone who enjoys the music of the early and mid 1930s to tune in when it's scheduled.

This is a pleasant little romantic musical comedy in the tradition of 1930's Warner Brothers, minus Busby Berkeley and minus some of the rougher precode elements of some of Warner's musicals from 1933 and before.

Dick Powell plays Buddy Clayton, a singing waiter in a beer garden discovered by the slippery fast-talking talent scout Rush Blake (Pat O'Brien). Rush takes Buddy back east where he becomes a radio singing sensation and heartthrob, although it does take awhile and a few odd quirks of fate. In the meantime, Buddy has started up a romance with singer Peggy Cornell (Ginger Rogers) that is leading to the altar, but the sponsor of the radio show on which Buddy sings says that a married heartthrob is no heartthrob at all, and instructs Rush to talk the pair out of marriage. This split is at first amicable and temporary, but then Rush dreams up a publicity stunt that misfires hilariously.

The film features the music and lyrics of Warren and Dubin, the comic support of familiar Warner contract player Allen Jenkins, and the direction of Ray Enright who managed to get this one right - it's funny in all the right places without being inane.

They really put a damper on Ginger Rogers' performance this time. After playing the tough precode chorine in the earlier Berkeley musicals, here they've turned down the volume on her sauciness a couple of notches. Plus, in anticipation of the production code, the romance between Peggy and Buddy is squeaky clean. There is no taking a can opener to metal bathing suits or checking into the Honeymoon Hotel in this musical as there was the previous year.

Highly recommended as a pleasant way to spend 90 well-paced minutes.