The Candid Kid

Singer Josephine Huston is featured as a member of a Candid Camera Club. The club stages a contest, in which each member is assigned to go out and get some difficult and unusual picture.

Josephine's assignment is to get a picture of herself singing in a gondola. and this isn't easy as NYC has very few gondolas on the streets. The story allows for the introduction of several specialty acts---the Gae Foster Girls, the Anthony Morelli Sextette --- as the contestants visit several night clubs.

Josephine gets her picture and wins first prize when a friend breaks a department store window, that has a gondola on display, and she goes through the window to sit in the gondola. Sings while there. also.

The Candid Kid is a short subject from Warner Brothers that was produced to display the singing talents of Josephine Huston and the comic talents of a brash new comedian to the silver screen, one Phil Silvers. The most starting thing about the film is seeing Phil Silvers with a full head of hair. I tend to think it was a toupee because he was bald in his early feature films.

Phil's brashness is something you have to take in small doses I've always felt, but the Phil Silvers we all know and remember is present here as he draws an assignment to get himself photographed in a padded cell eating a hot tamale.

Josephine and Phil belong to the Candid Camera Club and her assignment is almost as ridiculous, she has to get a picture of herself in a gondola. Outside of Venice they're pretty scarce. Josephine sings a couple of forgettable songs by Saul Chaplin and Sammy Cahn and also sings Rudy Vallee's hit from Italy Vieni Vieni. That this short was included on a DVD with Vallee's Golddiggers Go To Paris was no accident.

The Candid Kid is a pleasant enough musical interlude.