Radio City Revels

It has been awhile since I started watching old movies. When I started my love of classic Hollywood, there was no TCM buy luckily I had a dinosaur called the video tape recorder. Before TCM entered the airwaves, its sister channel TNT used to show old movies. It was there that I saw a mediocre musical called Radio City Revels.

The movie deals with two out-of-work songwriters in New York City, Harry Miller (Jack Oakie) and Teddy (Milton Berle), who live next door to sisters Billie (Ann Miller) and Gertie (Helen Broderick) Shaw, who used to tour in vaudeville and have been left stranded and income-less by its demise. Miller's and Teddy's only source of income is a correspondence course in songwriting that they've sold to exactly one student, Arkansas hillbilly Lester Robin (played by rustic comedian Bob Burns, who had enough of a reputation in 1938 he's actually given top billing).

Robin is frustrated because while he's awake he can only come up with songs other people already wrote (like an hilariously fractured version of "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean") but when he's asleep he dreams the most beautiful — and original — melodies and lyrics, only to forget them when he wakes up. Miller and Teddy realize this unique talent and start transcribing Lester's nocturnal emissions, peddling them as their own and becoming star songwriters for the company owned by Paul Plummer (Victor Moore, even more annoyingly whiny than usual). The premise is so weird that at least one critic summed it up by saying it seemed as if the film's writers had been asleep when they came up with it.

The draw of the movie for me was the appearance of singer Jane Froman in a minor role. She played the vocalist for Hal Kemp's band. It is unfortunate that she did not have a bigger role, it might have helped the movie. Froman never had much of a movie career, but her voice was wonderful. Kenny Baker was the male vocalist in this opus. Baker got his start as the comic foil for Jack Benny on his radio show, and he left the Benny organization to make his way in film. Like Froman, Baker did not have much of a movie career either.

RKO spent some serious money on this movie — at least two of the numbers, including "There's a New Moon Over the Old Mill," are staged on splendiferous sets (the "Old Mill" number takes place on a beautiful white, stylized art deco mill and features four mill maids desperately waiting for male mates. Great comic actors like Victor Moore and Helen Broderick were features as second bananas in the film, but with no major stars it was hard to see who they would be second banana to.

It is utterly baffling who they thought the audience for it would be, and as it turned out there wasn't one: RKO spent $810,000 making Radio City Revels and lost $300,000 on it. The movie was not great, and it is mostly forgotten today, but the film is worth watching if it is just for the 1930s stars that the movie spotlighted...

A wonderfully camp and extraordinary musical offering! The story - if you can call it that - is about a simple-minded farmboy who writes songs in his sleep. Ann Miller dances well. Recommended to lovers of the genre - but Astaire and Rogers it ain't.

This is a fictional film based on a fictional story about a real place in a real city , with real people playing the roles of some of the fictional characters and using their own name as the character name.

What transpires here has a character named Lester Robin (Bob Burns), a songwriter, and another character named Billie Shaw (Ann Miller), an aspiring dancer, striving to make good at Radio City (played by a sound stage in Hollywood), where a character named Kenny Baker (played by Kenny Baker)is already a star network singer. Also hanging around the premises are Harry Miller (Jack Oakie) and Teddy Jordan (Milton Berle), a Tin Pan Alley song-writing team who write songs for Radio City bosses Paul Plummer (Victor Moore) and Crane (Richard Lane.) Lester, an Arkansas show-boat performer, in his sleep composes songs which are excellent, but he is unconscious of the fact. He heads for New York City to take lessons from Miller and Jordan. Alas, Miller has gone stale but he learns the secret of Lester's sleep-time gift, and proceeds to copy the songs and market them as his own; his object being to finance the career of Miss Shaw, although she is in love with a fictional radio singer, the afore-mentioned Kenny Baker.

But through the success of Lester's songs that have been appropriated by Miller, she gets a dancing engagement, and her sister, Gertie Shaw (Helen Broderick), becomes romantically attached to Lester.

BUT...at a critical moment (a very relative term), Lester develops insomnia, and can't compose anymore since he isn't sleeping. HOWEVER...back in Arkansas, copies of his songs he produced in his sleep are discovered, with no mention of who was writing them down for him in Arkansas. Dancers Squenchy (Buster West) and Lisa (Melissa Mason)carry them to New York where Miller capitalizes upon them in a big way.

But Gertie, bless her, exposes the duplicity of Miller & Jordan, and Miller don't much care anyway as Billie has eloped with the fictional character named Kenny Baker, who just happens to be played by the real singer named Kenny Baker.

A late night fixture in Australia, this delicious B grade RKO musical using recycled Astaire Rogers sets is a very funny musical. The idea could easily be remade into a modern Broadway stage musical like THE PRODUCERS as it centres around a songwriting duo who cheat using a bumpkin music student who creates swing tunes while he is asleep. the couple of dance numbers are very good and 18 year old Ann Miller had a dazzler in the first few minutes. The hayseed number about 20 minutes in also features leggy antics that will draw gasps from viewers 1938-2008. I find it hard to believe it cost $810,000 as more expensive films like "Roberta" and other Astaire Rogers films cost the same amount. This one uses recycled sets and does not lose any points for that at all. It is de-licious and de-lovely even if Cole didn't write the songs. The swing tunes are great.Genuinely. A lot of deco swing fun for 90 mins.

Very silly but very entertaining movie. Great cast. And the dancing...one number, I think, compares very favorably with the big dance number in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. The individual dancers are superb. One female dancer (I don't think it was Ann Miller) does steps I've never seen before and should attract the admiration of skilled orthopedists. Milton Berle and Jack Okie make an interesting pair of con men, and if you remember Uncle Miltie from his television days, you'll see that he was practicing his "schtick" long before TV. It's also interesting to see Jane Froman--beautiful face and beautiful voice--before the accident that crippled her (and led to "With a Song In My Heart" with Susan Hayward.)