Somewhat Secret

"Somewhat Secret" is a hoot, imagine "Rock and Roll High School" set in 1939 and you'll have the right idea: bad schoolgirls who just want to dance are held back by their stuffy, repressed principal! The schoolmarm makes many hilarious melodramatic pronouncements against the evils of swing music and jitterbug, forbidding her schoolgirls to dance, all the while falling in love with the man she believes to be a stuffy chemistry professor -- but who is actually a swing bandleader in hiding. A cute filler well worth seeking out on cable. The final dance number features plenty of down & dirty jitterbug as well some authentic period balboa. Silly movie -- swell dancing.

It's a wonder that June Allyson doesn't turn up in this MGM short at a time when she was doing exactly this sort of thing at Warner Bros. in their Vitaphone musicals.

Instead, we have prim MARY HOWARD as a dedicated basher of swing music who suddenly changes her mind when her sweetheart goes off to Atlantic City where he plays piano in a swing festival. Sharp-eyed moviegoers will recognize PHILIP TERRY as the emcee of the dance festival.

TOM COLLINS is the college professor who harbors a secret passion for swing music while working as a chemistry professor.

Odd little short used a theme later taken and developed into a full-length feature by Warner Bros. when they did MY LOVE CAME BACK (swing music vs. classical) in 1940.

This short film by MGM is set in a girls college. Assistant Dean Emily Godsall is a woman with a huge broom up her backside! She insists that Swing and Jitterbug music is evil and promises to punish anyone caught listening to this devil music. What she doesn't know is that her boyfriend, the chemistry professor, is also a musician who loves this sort of music. How will all this zaniness get worked out by the end of the film?

"Somewhat Secret" is modestly entertaining and fairly well made. While it's not the sort of thing to change your life, it's a decent and enjoyable time-passer.

Somewhat Secret (1939)

*** (out of 4)

Fun spirited MGM short has an uptight Assistant Dean (Mary Howard) at an all girls school refusing to let the students listen to swing music. A gossiping student informs her that the girls have snuck off to a joint in Atlantic City and when the dean goes there she sees her fiancé performing the music. There were quite a few shorts made around this time dealing with swing or jitterbug and this here is without question one of the more entertaining ones. It's always fun to see this uptight teachers get knocked down a few blocks by realizing music isn't going to make people go crazy. In the end this is really a message picture to those against this type of music but it's a lot of fun from start to finish. The real highlight are a couple musical numbers, which will certainly have your leg shaking.

Somewhat Secret stars Mary Howard as an assistant dean at a girl's school who has a real prejudice against swing music feeling it causes moral degeneracy.

Little does she know that the chemistry professor she's been seeing Tom Collins is a former piano player, the famous Barrelhouse Barnes who is incognito because he thought he killed a man.

Two former bandmates tell him that no one died and he goes with them to open at Atlantic City. But Howard hearing some of her charges will be heading their to sample the jive goes to.

I think you can figure out what happens here. This is a bright and amusing short subject that has more than a jolt of jive in it.